“Seriously though, it’s incredible to me that an entire team of developers whose sole purpose is to develop a secure operating system can be so oblivious to the rest of the world.”

• Brad (spender) Spengler (spender, grsecurity developer)

Let’s be honest, my first foray into OpenBSD wasn’t exactly a walk in the park. A year or so ago, I dove headfirst into installing it on my main machine, fueled by a late-night surge of “I can totally do this!” Needless to say, things didn’t go according to plan. Between the cryptic commands and the lack of a familiar graphical interface, I ended up sheepishly reinstalling my previous OS. Same with Nix.

And the video the fueled my curiosity still pops up once in a while on my youtube recommendations page regardless of me watching it multiple times OpenBSD for 1.5 Years: Confessions of a Linux Heretic

Even More OpenBSD keeps popping up on my radar. Security forums praise its rock-solid stability, developers rave about its clean codebase, and even some random tech blogs sing its praises. Even recently an article that read “why openBSD does not use git” and talks about how the lead developer Theo De Raadt has his fair share of opinions on linux and git and the article goes on explaining.

So, here I am again, with a renewed sense of curiosity and a much healthier dose of caution. This time, however, I’m not going kamikaze on my daily driver. Instead, I’m taking a virtual approach – a 30-day experiment with OpenBSD running inside a trusty VM.

I used to love using Gnome Boxes but since it started acting up on Window managers i switched to virtual box, and if anyone is here wondering what OpenBSD is here is a video i found that explains it perfectly The Making of BSD: The ACTUAL World’s First Open-Source Operating System?

Why 30 days? It feels like a good chunk of time to get a feel for an OS. Long enough to explore the core functionalities, wrestle with some configuration, and hopefully, start to understand the philosophy behind OpenBSD. Who knows, maybe I’ll even manage to get a basic web server or firewall set up (fingers crossed!).

As for resources, I’ve got a few things lined up:

The official OpenBSD documentation https://www.openbsdhandbook.com/ seems comprehensive, if a little dry. But hey, that’s part of the OpenBSD charm, right? The OpenBSD Journal https://undeadly.org/ looks like a goldmine of community insights and development updates. And of course, there’s always the wisdom of the OpenBSD subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/openbsd/. If anyone can navigate the intricacies of this OS, it’s those folks.

So, wish me luck! Over the next month, I’ll be chronicling my experiences here – the triumphs, the inevitable frustrations, and hopefully, a newfound appreciation for OpenBSD. Maybe by day 30, I’ll be a full-fledged convert, or maybe I’ll just have a newfound respect for the command line. Either way, it should be an interesting ride.

Stay tuned!

Will keep you all updated on my progress in the community channel on telegram davedumps other than that will post a finalized blog on my take on OpenBSD after 30 days. as always thanks for reading until next time.