Holy shit, Microsoft. Whoever made this decision should be fired. Into the Sun.

https://lemmy.world/post/46435614

#infosec #facepalm #clowncar

@libreleah @MaddieM4 Just under an hour on the main workstation. I think I'm ready to go all in on OpenBSD now. Thank you so much!

@libreleah @MaddieM4 Hell yes I'm about to chuck an SSD I found in my desk into my main workstation and start grinding away at it.

@libreleah @MaddieM4 I backed up the package I built for safekeeping since it runs perfectly (actually a little faster than Firefox on the same machine). I tend to run -current so I'll just use your binary once it's merged.

@libreleah @MaddieM4 Success! Damn it feels good to run this browser on this OS. Thank you so much Leah!!

@libreleah @MaddieM4 Okay yeah this 35W CPU is...not fast. This will probably still be building when I go to bed in a couple of hours.

But, this is the furthest I've gotten with it and assuming it builds correctly, tomorrow evening I'm backing up the main workstation and going full Puffy on the 5600GT. It should build in about 30 minutes on that relative beast.

@libreleah @MaddieM4 In other news, all dependencies satisfied on my current iteration, and the librewolf package officially started building at 20:08 local time. It's an HP mini pc with the i5-6600T so probably similar compile time to yours, if not a little slower. Fingers crossed!

@MaddieM4 @libreleah yep I saw that on the mailing list, I feel like that’s a sensible and efficient approach. I know Landry is not a fan of browser forks (reminds me of the Void Linux devs) but hopefully will be willing to work with you on it.

@libreleah @MaddieM4 That would be awesome and much appreciated! I still want to succeed at building it for my own personal achievement, but a pre-built package would be a boon to those of us who have been waiting years for a proper LibreWolf port. I feel like the intersection of OpenBSD enthusiasts and LibreWolf enthusiasts has to be wide and populous.

@libreleah @MaddieM4 Oh it's nothing wrong with your port, I just ran into issues building dependencies so I tried installing them as packages to both speed things up and avoid any compile issues, and that one package was being fiddly (the correct version from ports kept erroring out during compile, and (at the time I tried it the other day) the version in packages wasn't right).

Trying again right now with a fresh install of -current on my most powerful dedicated OpenBSD machine, hopefully this time it's all in place and it builds successfully.

@libreleah @MaddieM4 May is great, happy birthday to me! I've been trying to get your port to compile on my secondary workstation here at the house but I'm still trying to figure out dependency stuff (I am in no way, shape, or form a developer). I think I've managed to tackle every dependency except icu-i18n. If I can't get it to build on my own I'll just use your -current port once it hits the tree since I tend to run -current anyway.

I am slowly coming to understand that the reason some applications crash often on OpenBSD is not the fault of OpenBSD, but the fault of poorly written applications that have tons of vulnerabilities. OpenBSD is designed to be a secure operating system as one of its main goals, and trying to circumvent these safety guardrails by "optimizing OpenBSD for desktop use" -- i.e. tweaking sysctl.conf to the max -- defeats the purpose of having the guardrails in the first place.

If you want an OS where applications are free to roam full of holes and exploits without crashing, use Linux I guess. It will happily continue to allow those poorly written programs to run, giving the user a false sense of stability. Meanwhile, I'm starting to prefer safety and security over "desktop performance at all costs". If a program misbehaves it should die, and OpenBSD will kill it before I even know it misbehaved.

#OpenBSD #ProactiveSecurity

@MaddieM4 I have OpenBSD running on a few devices, but my main desktop is Void Linux. When I finally move it to OpenBSD I won't even bother with a dual boot, I'll just go all the way. And I'm close. Really, really close! Honestly just waiting on the LibreWolf port being worked on by @libreleah to be accepted into ports and I'm there.

@jamesvasile @libreleah I hope whoever told you not to daily drive OpenBSD on a laptop is not still giving out advice, because that's absolutely garbage advice.

OpenBSD is really, really good on Thinkpads, older Intel Macbooks (pre T2 era), and pretty much any standard Intel or AMD PC. Their fork of Xorg (Xenocara) is in the base installation and out of the box the only thing you have to do to get an X desktop is answer "yes" to the question in installation asking if you want one, or if you answered "no" during installation you can (as root) "rcctl enable xenodm" and reboot.

OpenBSD is really good on the desktop because its developers run it as their workstations, i.e. they "dogfood" the OS so that they are able to see what is needed for all use cases and improve the OS accordingly.

If you'd like to follow a guide to setting up an Xfce desktop on OpenBSD, I wrote one a while back: https://www.kaidenshi.com/posts/openbsd-as-a-daily-driver/

...and there are other guides out there as well.

My mind is blown. When I first got this HP hybrid tablet, one of the first things I tried was installing OpenBSD. However, the installer (7.8 amd64) would never boot all the way, rebooting the machine around the time it was detecting the CPU cores. I tried a lot of different Linux distros and other OSes, and eventually settled on Fedora KDE as it had complete support for the device, including the touch screen and digitizer pen, the detachable keyboard and its battery, and so on.

Well today, in a fit of boredom, I flashed a USB drive with the OpenBSD installer and booted it on the tablet, and inexplicably it finished booting and got me to the installer prompt! Of course I immediately blew away the Fedora installation and installed and configured OpenBSD to my usual desktop, Xfce. I'm typing this now on the tablet, everything is working except it doesn't detect the secondary battery or the digitizer pen. I can live without the keyboard's battery gauge as it is always secondary to the tablet's battery anyway, and I never use the pen so that's no loss. No Bluetooth either but that's a given with OpenBSD on any hardware.

Needless to say I am thrilled and amused, and I'm going to keep OpenBSD on this thing out of pure spite.

#OpenBSD

@annika Such an underrated show! I've watched the whole series twice now, and it's one of those rare shows where nearly every episode is top notch, with only a few misses here and there.

My favorite episode is the one with the skydiver, even knowing what happens on the second watch I still felt the pain of that poor woman grow worse with each iteration.

My letter to #Framework about the recent news of their gleeful fascist alignment:

Hello,

I am writing to you as a formerly potential customer of yours. I've followed your company from the beginning, I adore the idea of user-repairable computers and you seemed to truly care about your customer base and any potential new customers.

After seeing your company not only gleefully support the bigoted and fascist-aligned developers behind Omarchy and Hyprland, but to then double down and fully embrace the hatred and racism and sexism espoused by those devleopers rather than even entertain the notion that you may have made a mistake, makes me very uncomfortable and unable to support your company. I had planned to make my first purchase from you, a Framework Desktop mainboard, within the next couple of months to replace my aging AMD 5600GT based mainboard. Now that you have come out as fascist aligned and fully supportive of bigots and racists, I can no longer in good faith spend any money with you.

I will now have to pay more to get a full PC from Minisforum or Geekom or another of your competitors, rather than replace just my mainboard and keep my existing case and power supply. You see, your active support of bigotry and hatred has a knock-on effect of causing more e-waste rather than less, which is against the mission statement you insist you believe in.

Actions have consequences, and your company's actions surrounding this issue speak volumes about who you really are and what you really care about. While I am not directly affected by the words and actions of your new fascist friends, many of my friends and colleagues are BIPOC and/or LGBTQIA+ and/or immigrants, all of whom are targets for the hatred and violence of those you have aligned yourself with.

Shame on you. Be better.

My i5-7500 e-waste* desktop has been in heavy OS rotation since I dragged it out of the closet to test Solaris (spoiler alert: wouldn't boot Solaris). So far I've successfully run OpenBSD, Haiku OS, NetBSD, and AlmaLinux Workstation on it. AlmaLinux is nice and all but not really suited to desktop use, it's definitely more of a server OS.

So fellow OS nerds, what should I try to boot on it next? I'd like to try something I can "live in" for the weekend. Anything non-Linux would be awesome, as I already know it runs pretty much any Linux distro with no issues.

*not Win11 supported so it was free

Incredible thrift store #retrocomputing find on my lunch break today! A fully functional Palm m125 (curiously in a box for a m105) complete with docking station, official Palm folding keyboard and software, a retail copy of ThinkOffice, and a belt case, all for US$10!

This is one of the few Palm models I didn’t own back in the day and I had to have it.

@thomholwerda

Now that I'm living alone for the first time in 11 years, I've come to the conclusion that I have WAY too many computers. I currently have (in a working state) four laptops (Macbook Air, Dell garbage laptop, HP garbage laptop, glorious Lenovo Thinkpad T420 with ALL the upgrades), three desktops (AsRock A300 mini PC, MeLE Quieter 4C, Mac Studio), three thin clients (HP T620, one converted to retro gaming PC, one converted to router, one doing nothing), a Steam Deck, and a Surface Go 2 running OpenBSD. I'm not including a significant number of Raspberry Pi boards all doing various things (and a few sitting in a drawer waiting to be used).

I need help. Serious help. I'm going to sell or give away all of them except the one AMD mini PC, the Macbook, and the Steam Deck. Selling the Mac Studio because it was stupid expensive even used and I want to recover that money. But the rest are up for grabs for any Fedi folks who need a development platform or just need a computer of some sort because theirs died or something. You cover shipping from Atlanta GA USA and you can have it. Priority will go to anyone wanting something for #OpenBSD development/research but I won't discriminate beyond that.

Again, I am serious. Hit me up folks!