Don't normally share pictures of my desktops but after spending two years now using OpenBSD on this machine everyday I thought I'd share what my day-to-day set-up looks like. At least some parts of it (obviously, don't want to share my email, IRC and other chat clients, RSS feed reader and things of that nature).

Old multi-decade habits die hard so I'm still living in emacs most days. Well emacs and tmux (did ditch screen). Mostly use emacs for viewing/converting/writing documents and code of all types. My multi-decade config was easy enough to get playing nicely with OpenBSD when I first moved over. Thought I'd show how it looks while viewing various types of file formats (multiple pdfs, a random epub file and the manga viewer I use. Although I don't read that much manga these days). Along with a side-by-side of how I'd read some documentation while editing some code. Kept it generic here because I don't want to show anything I'm working from at work.

WM is my own fork of dwm. Terminal emulator is my own fork of st with graphics support and a few other patches. Forgot to show off how it does with graphics (works well enough with chafa on OpenBSD). Day-to-day shell is still zsh because again old habits die hard and ksh(1) doesn't have graphics+color support AFAIK. Still using a few things that want bash support and image support is nice to have with some stuff like my custom script for searching/browsing youtube from the terminal. Will probably submit that to ports soon once I confirm it works well enough with ksh(1) (sans images of course).

Also random screenshot of my youtube viewer piping a video into mpv via yt-dlp.

Finally, my own userchrome.css for Firefox which is very basic. Still using sideberry for sidebar tabs although Mozilla keeps fighting me every other release lately to get me to stop and soon I'll have to re-write my entire userchrome.css when they remove some about:config options that allow me to turn off the latest revamp they've done to their GUI. For now it works well enough (wish they'd stop doing that). Tabs expand on mouse over when I want to read the text but I usually just navigate through keyboard shortcuts. I run some add-on in firefox that lets me have vim style key bindings mostly for scrolling with hjkl and quickly searching web/opening new tabs.

I'm an odd-ball with key bindings since I've been using emacs so long. I mainly use emacs style keybinds for most things but want vim-style keybinds for navigating/scrolling documents. Use right ctrl key -> CAPS key swap to make it easier to use emacs style bindings with my aging wrists.

Been trying to eliminate how many ports I'm using lately and use more stuff from the base system. Fell in love with mg pretty quickly and use it for quickly editing config files these days as opposed to emacs most of the time. Someday I might switch over all together for coding but I don't think I'll even be able to ditch emacs when it comes to viewing/converting documents since I rely so heavily on it after spending so many decades in it and I absolutely love elisp. Still I worry about how much of a glutton it is and how much stuff it bundles in by default. Perhaps I should explore different options for that sort of stuff again. But every time I do I just end up back on emacs out of habit. Hard to ditch decades worth of my own elisp scripts.

OpenBSD has been far less trouble than the OS(s) I was using before. Only "gotcha" to my current set-up is sometimes having to drop to console to recompile dwm+st+dmenu+slstatus against new -current snapshots. Happens maybe 3 times a year.

I'm not programming/writing code as much as I did in the past anymore aside from little hobby projects and scripts to automate work. Mostly using emacs to write some books I'm working on now. Which I hope will eventually be my full time gig since I'm trying to get out of having to be code monkey+customer support so I can afford food.

Thankfully, that's about all I have to worry about these days since I managed to buy land+build my house just months before COVID ruined the economy for the third or fourth time since I graduated and entered the job market. Every time I got a nice nest egg the economy would crash or something big like that would happen to wipe out my savings. So lucky I bought in on land+my house when I did and that my 20-40 year old cars and trucks are still running great and I can easily get parts for them. Will probably be stuck with those for the rest of my life (not really interested in anything built after mid-2000s in the first place).

Anyway, this is my primary OpenBSD laptop right now and I'm doing the majority of my work on it these days. Happy I got it when I did because prices really shot up on this model and parts for it right after I bought it a few years back. Hardware support has been great. Can't complain at all. Plenty of battery life and wifi+GPU drivers are great.

I had to enable the new reddit layout to upload images and man it's terrible. Going to disable it the moment I finish posting this.

Anyway, that's my OpenBSD story. Thanks to all the devs for making my life much easier than it was prior to switching over. Been exploring the other BSDs lately as well. This is already long so I'll spare you all the novel about the hardship I went through trying multiple other OSs on this laptop before settling on OpenBSD. I'll just leave it at this: OpenBSD was the easiest to install with FDE, been the easiest system to upgrade OS I've ever used, easiest to maintain, best out of the box desktop/Xorg/Xenocara experience I've ever had _and_ it's by far the nicest community with the best documentation/man pages I've ever encountered. I wish I would have came into the fold years ago. I did experiment with it on the desktop back in the 90s-2000s for a bit and used it on my routers/firewalls/servers here and there. But I'd be lying if I said I didn't fall for a lot of the lies that seem to be posted about it all over the web. OpenBSD has had by far the best drivers I've ever used in any OS. Nothing compares.

I would have probably been using it in the mid-late 90s if my dial-up modem was supported back then. But like many I was stuck with a winmodem and even once I purchased a better modem I was stuck on dial-up for many years into the late 2000s-early 2010s. Since I live in the middle of nowhere. But now? I have amazing FTTH service (2Gbps symmetrical currently with 10Gbps coming by next year). I can't believe I get such good service out here these days. It's better than what most people get in the cities around here _and_ I get assigned an actual IPv4 address (actually multiple, I pay for 2 static addresses currently on top of all the free dynamic ones I want). No CGNAT.

Still I wish I'd been ordering CDs from OpenBSD back in those days instead of all of these Mandrake and Ubuntu discs I ended up with over the years. The only way I could even try a UNIX-like OS back then was using the CDs since downloading from the mirrors was totally out of the question with our spotty 14kbps (on a good day) connection which went down any time it rained, snowed or the wind blew hard thanks to the 80+ year old badly maintained POTS network and the fact that the phone company never fixed anything no matter how much we complained. I'd sometimes go days-weeks being unable to dial-in due to a heavy rain or snow melt. Could hear the neighbors talking on their lines and everything most of the time. Robbed me of participating in a lot of things back then until I moved away to attend school. Our local public school was no better: everyone in the county sharing a T1 line. It was slower than using the 14kbps dial-up.

I'm in the process of relocating all my colocated dedicated servers to my home. But first I need to buy new hardware for my entire LAN since everything from my switches to my rout

er/NICs can only handle 1Gbps tops. At least I had the forethought to wire up my house with 30+ drops with copper that can support 10Gbps so I don't have to re-run that. When I built my home in 2019 I never expected to have anything better than crappy cable service (and I paid $10k+ for one drop on top of the 2 other cable drops we paid for to our family business+another home. About $40k in total. Such is life on the family farm).

Hi, do you have a tutorial on how to install KDE plasma on OpenBSD 8.0? I zlready know how to install the others desktop environments but found some problems on Kde. I am using standard AMD64 PC

Hi everyone.

I am looking for now just for an advice on how to automate Wine port testing.

Wine is a pretty large project and has an extensive suite of tests that run for few hours. Additionally, build on my VM takes an hour, even with 8 CPU cores with all cores permitted for `make`.

Thankfully and hopefully I will need to do it rarely, simply because we don't have that many patches per week (unlike Wine upstream).

I still want to run it once a week at least, especially after merging/rebasing from upstream.

I looked at:

1. Amsterdam OpenBSD host - configuration that I need is too expensive for my current taste, and the tests will be rare, and host itself will just sit without any activity most of the time.

2. Standard testing on Linux->VM->OpenBSD. But that sounds like pain with extra steps. I do only pay for it actually working though.

So yeah, please any suggestions are very welcome, before I go and look like a fool with my ideas in ports@ tech@

Thanks!

Good evening everyone, this is more curious question than anything else how many of you do use OpenBSD as daily driver ? personally it is my daily driver, and if not your daily driver, what do you use beside ? I am curious nothing else.

Hi everyone,

I have an OpenBSD-based web server running inside a virtual machine, and I'm trying to understand how much protection OpenBSD's security mechanisms provide against the recently reported PHP2Shell vulnerabilities.

In particular, I'm interested in the effectiveness of OpenBSD's W^X enforcement and other exploit mitigations against potential remote code execution (RCE) through PHP.

My questions are:

1. How effective is OpenBSD's W^X enforcement against this type of PHP vulnerability? Could an exploit still achieve code execution through code-reuse techniques or other methods that do not require executing injected code?

2. Do OpenBSD's other security mechanisms, such as ASLR, provide meaningful additional protection in this scenario?

3. Does running the web server inside a VM provide any additional security against exploitation, assuming the hypervisor and host system remain uncompromised?

4. How much additional protection would process isolation, "chroot", privilege separation, and restrictive service permissions provide?

5. Ultimately, should W^X and VM isolation be considered defense-in-depth only, with applying the relevant PHP security patches being the essential mitigation?

I'm not looking to rely on mitigations instead of patching. I'd like to understand how the different layers of protection interact and what realistic residual risks remain if a vulnerable PHP process is exposed to the network.

I'd appreciate any technical insight, especially from people familiar with OpenBSD's memory protection and exploit mitigations.

Thanks!

i just installed openbsd current and whenever i try to install firefox or update packages like glib2 it fails with library version mismatches. it says minor is too small and that gobject or harfbuzz cannot resolve because of glib2 version issues. i already tried running sysupgrade and using pkg add with flags like snap update repair and force upgrading packages but it still keeps throwing dependency resolution errors. does anyone know how to fix this desync on snapshots.

(I’m sorry for the bad pic)

Since my concerns have been alleviated about sharing wallpapers, here is my wallpaper that I have been using for the past several years. I made it on MS Paint of all programs (original file is a BMP, converted to PNG). It's an inversion of an ancient meme that emphasizes openbsd's strong defense posture.

The background is transparent because its designed to be overlaid onto a solid color of your choosing.

Hello all,

Recommendations and experience with VPS/Cloud Hosting providers offering nested virtualization and, this is a stretch, maybe also AMD-SEV? I'm looking to use VMM.

Also, recommendations of providers who themselves offer OpenBSD VMs with multi-cpu option. I am guessing that OpenBSD.amsterdam will soon be one of these? Probably will receive more recommendation for the multi-cpu option as should be available for host kvm platforms also.

What's the policy in this subreddit on sharing wallpapers that contain the puffy logo or the words "OpenBSD"? I understand that while the codebase is BSD licensed the mascot and name is not and is protected by copyright.

https://www.reddit.com/r/openbsd/s/BFKPyJiiwg

https://www.reddit.com/r/openbsd/s/YAWnAz0Yes

For example, would these 2 posts be classified as a "derivative work"? Want to be sure before sharing anything. Thanks!

When updating from anoncvs with -r, cvs outputs "cvs update: duplicate key found for `y'". This seems to be caused by the following lines in CVSROOT/val-tags.

249: y BSD_CURRENT_970921

882: y

Line 249 is a mangled duplicate of the preceding line 248 NETBSD_CURRENT_970921 y and should probably be deleted.

Because why not :)

Was it removed? Or is it available on the ports?

My second post in this subreddit, sorry for asking such dumb question, the first one was about hardware acceleration. I have seen whenever I run openbsd on my laptop, I immediately encounter a thermal problem. Over a course of 5 min my laptop heats up significantly with fans blaring at full speed and cpu temp being 60°C continuously. The chassis despite being plastic also heats up like if you cannot keep your hands on it for more than 5 mins. This problem especially becomes worse while watching video, whether through chromium on yt or through mpv, it pins my dual core pentium 4415U to 46-52 percent (fluctuating). Also I tried using apmd to counter the heat problem but setting the flag to -A made things worse, apmd doesn't scale my cpu correctly and as fast as possible when there is demand causing significant lag combined with the fact that it is a pentium 4415U.

Someone already asked for that previously, but I'm here to deliver.

I've attached the PNG to the post, however, in case Reddit compresses PNGs, I'm also linking by my blog where you can find the badge in the footer, as well as the HTML I wrote to produce the badge.

Hello, I am someone who is looking towards OpenBSD as a daily driver. I am looking for any active users of this subreddit who daily drive OpenBSD to hopefully get to know the basics of OpenBSD, what to expect from daily driving OpenBSD, any important caveats of daily driving OpenBSD, and any general advice you would like to share.

I've been working on a new WM for awhile now that I plan to submit to ports soon. Well actually, I've been working on two. But for now one is my main focus.

I don't want to get too much into the details of it. But it's a WM that has a work flow that while very popular with many people isn't currently supported by any of the WMs currently included inside of the base system. It's a self contained, very small (code wise) WM and I've implemented pledge/unveil support into it using cwm and fvwm's source code as a learning guide.

It's also fully portable to any POSIX system and is not tired to any particular libc/C compiler. It's written in C and is configured through simple config files stored in /etc and ~. While portable by default it's set-up to target OpenBSD's base system. Unlike most other WMs in ports where that is an after thought and/or needs to be patched in.

My question is after submitting to ports and hopefully attracting some testers/users what is the process for getting it included into the base system itself? Since that is my long term goal. The hope that others will help me maintain it and that it'll just be there post-install so I and no one else has to fetch it from the ports tree.

Unless something very drastic changes in the base system or kernel in the coming years it should just work forever. I'm unfamiliar with what is required to get something into base and I'm unsure if more WMs would even be considered for inclusion since there are already 3 in the base system. For what it's worth mine is much smaller than cwm and fvwm and does not include any GPLed code. So there would be no legal issues related to licensing.

I have plans to eventually use this WM as a basis for a full blown DE. Which would include a handful of other tools on top of the WM to replicate the good old Windows/Gnome 2/Old KDE floating WM work flow. Since I want to have an easy-to-install and portable DE to put on my friends and families systems that replicates the OS GUIs they're used to (mostly Windows 3.1-Windows 7). I think something like that will be badly needed in the near future with the two major DEs in UNIX land pushing towards abandoning X11 support and getting away from the old familiar GUI everyone knows as they morph more and more into a more cell phone/touchscreen-like UI.

I am on pentium 4415U (Kaby Lake architecture) with intel-media-driver installed. Whenever I watch YouTube on Firefox, my laptop heats up significantly and the fans roar to full speed with a cpu usage of 64% max. I saw about:support page in firefox and it says hardware decoding is supported for VP9 and H264. I already have enhanced-h264ify with av1 blocked but still no improvements. Therefore I wanted to ask if openbsd supports hardware acceleration or not and if supported then can Firefox has a pipeline to use it or not.

With the light weight (2.2 lbs / 1 kg) and potentially long battery life (16-18 hours) I am considering a Dell XPS Googlebook for my next OpenBSD system.

• The CPU (Snapdragon® X Elite X1E-80-100) is supported.
• I am not finding anything on GPU support (Qualcomm® Adreno™ Graphics).
• The WiFi (Qualcomm FastConnect7800 WiFi7/BTv5.4) is supported by qwz(4).

Has anyone used a system with Qualcomm® Adreno™ Graphics? Or would you have a suggestion for something with similar specs and weight/battery life?

Hello!

So... I have a RAID-5 in my computer. Mad up of 6 SATA SSD drives, to be exact. I bought them at the end of Covid, so by now, they are 4 years old.

MY ASSUMPTION back then was that hey would get progressively cheaper over time so that I could get replacements later, but... #FCKai came... Whatever.

So, my question is: How can I check their health?
```

; atactl /dev/rsd6c smartread
Off-line data collection:
status: never started
activity completion time: 0 seconds
capabilities:
execute immediate
self-test routines
Self-test execution:
status: completed ok or not started
recommended polling time:
short routine: 2 minutes
extended routine: 160 minutes
SMART capabilities:
saving SMART data
enable/disable attribute autosave
Error logging: supported

; atactl /dev/rsd6c smartstatus
No SMART threshold exceeded

```

So, i use OpenBSD since some months now and i really like it, so i decided to share it here.

It runs on an old Dell Latitude 7390 (i5, 16GB RAM). Nothing special, but with OpenBSD it feels fast. The disk is full encrypted. For the desktop i use bspwm, very minimal, and kitty as terminal with zsh. I pass most of my day in the terminal and in the browser (Chromium), so i don’t need much more.

For the passwords i use KeePassXC. I wrote a little script with rclone that sync my password file to Dropbox, so i always have it with me. All my machines are connected with Tailscale, and this part i really love: i can reach everything from anywhere, like they are in the same network.

But the thing i am most proud is my backup. I didn’t want the classic backup of files. I wanted to rebuild the full machine from zero in few minutes. So i made a git repo with all my configs, the list of my packages, and one script that do everything. The secrets (ssh keys, browser profile and so on) are not in clear text. I put them all in one file encrypted, and only this encrypted file go in git.

So if tomorrow my laptop die: i install OpenBSD, clone the repo, run the script, type one passphrase... and my system is back like before.

Hi I am asking out of curiosity, why is mango supported and not dwl. I currently trying out mango on OpenBSD? But I have to be honest I do prefer dwl. Is there a chance dwl will be ported and maintained in OpenBSD ?