I agree with your practicalities. We as IT professionals have to be
careful when thrashing people. You never know who you're impacting and I
personally would love to see OpenBSD take over the dominance of Cisco. I
hate closed source with a vengeance, unfortunately we have to support it
due to the powers of the almighty commercialized entity. I never
indicated that you can't use OpenBSD as a desktop, but rather the design
nature of the OS. It's certainly a personal choice, but large
conglomerate institutions are HELL bent on closed source, especially at
the desktop level.
The Mac OS is the closet thing to Unix we have at the desktop, perhaps a
few RedHat workstations, but that's not Unix. I hate Apple just as much
as Microsoft, because of their evil closed source methodology. They rape
people of the freedom of choice. It's very difficult to convince the
worlds leading Cardiologists that your environment and it's trillions of
medical records would be best computed on an OpenBSD workstation. It's
however a lot easier to convince that your firewalls are best protected
by OpenBSD, because some government entities have already proven it's
security and stability.
Salim...
On 05/14/2013 09:28 AM, Otto Moerbeek wrote:
On Tue, May 14, 2013 at 08:34:27AM -0400, Salim Shaw wrote:
Scott,
I'll be sure not to give up my day job at DUKE Medical Center. We
have over 20,000 employees in this medical institution and we know
what works for desktops and we know what works for enterprise server
environments.
Different use cases, different tools. What works for your environment
might not be suited to others'.
As a developer, I never seen decisions made in the development process
with the rationale: "OpenBSD is only suited/designed for acting as a
firewal/router/server". I use OpenBSD daily on two workstations: a
dual headed tower system and a laptop (which suspends and resumes fine
btw).
A significant amount of work goes into making an OpenBSD desktop work:
X is part of the base system, and tonnes of packages are only suited
for desktop work.
OpenBSD is a general purpose unix-like/posix system. Use it for
whatever suits you.
-Otto
--
Salim A. Shaw
System Administrator
OpenBSD & CentOS / Free Software Advocate
Need stability and security -- Try OpenBSD.
BSD,ISC license all the way: Sell services, don't lease secrets