OpenBSD 6.4 Released (openbsd.org)

The 45th version of the OpenBSD project has been released, bringing more hardware support (Radeon driver updates, Intel microcode integration, and more), a virtualization tool that supports the disk format qcow2, and a network interface where you can quickly join and switch between different Wi-Fi networks.

Root.cz also notes that audio recording is now disabled by default. If you need to record audio, it can be enabled with the new sysctl variable. An anonymous Slashdot reader first shared the announcement. You can download it from any of the mirrors here.

Comments

Re: Is anyone using OpenBSD?

[DaMattster]

I use it for everything I do. It's my desktop, server, topper, and firewall. If it won't run on OpenBSD, I'm not interested.

Anyone switch from Linux to BSD?

[tgibson]

I can very much understand preferring BSD if that's the environment you cut your teeth on. Is there anyone who didn't have that history who looked at both Linux and BSD and decided the latter better served their needs?

Re:Anyone switch from Linux to BSD?

[SigmundFloyd]

I tried, but hardware support in the BSD world was frankly pathetic. NetBSD doesn't support ACPI suspend-to-disk and needs special kernel configuration just to show readable characters on the framebuffer console, on my old laptop. FreeBSD and NetBSD wouldn't even finish booting on one of my systems -- a run of the mill, 12 year old amd64 desktop PC that never had any problems with Linux.

I haven't tried OpenBSD lately. Although it's really high quality, its upgrade schedule is unacceptably hectic for me. I like stability on my systems; whereas, with OpenBSD, you must reinstall the whole system at least once a year, if you want to keep it secure (and if you don't, I don't see why you're running that particular OS in the first place). What OpenBSD really needs are long-term support releases.

What the BSD world needs is BETTER HARDWARE SUPPORT if they ever want to be serious, viable contenders. I'd love to switch away from Linux, which is getting more and more fragmented and unstable. But the simple fact is that, today, there is no serious alternative in the Unix[-like] world.