On Tue, Nov 19, 2013, at 09:37 AM, za...@gmx.com wrote: > Hi > > I am new to OpenBSD. In fact, I am a total newbie here. After reading > many posts on this list, I formed the impression that all or most > OpenBSD users are high-end IT professionals. > I was wondering: are there OpenBSD users who are not so advanced in > terms of IT expertise? That is, who are simple computer *users*, not IT > professionals?
I have a lot of tech knowledge and have no trouble using a CLI, but I'm not an IT professional at least in the sense that I do not get a paycheck from working in IT. > I need to know this because I am starting feeling that, as an average > computer user, I might be out of place here. I was attracted to OpenBSD > by its security-by-default philosophy. Admittedly, I don't know much > about security and I would not be able to set the proper security > settings on my own, so I have decided to adopt OpenBSD and use it for > simple day-to-day tasks, as a desktop OS (as I would any popular Linux > distribution). Does this choice of mine, and its underlying reasoning, > make sense? Taken by itself, the reasoning is solid. It's the same reason I use OpenBSD for a system which is primarily a firewall/router. > Are there any significant drawbacks to my adoption of OpenBSD (such as > OpenBSD being too technical and too difficult, as compared, say, to > Linux distros)? > > Please, give me some advice. If OpenBSD is not for me, I would rather > know it sooner than later. Using OpenBSD as a desktop may be more painful for you than anticipated depending on your exact hardware configuration and exactly what you want to do. For example, thanks to HTML5, at least watching YouTube videos is now possible without having to resort to the computing equivalent of a game of Twister. (Before, one either did without YouTube or used youtube-dl and mplayer.) Some things may be more difficult than necessary if certain boneheads in charge assumed handing out a GNU/Linux binary the same way they hand out Windows and MacOS X binaries is enough (happens way too often). Due to "secure by default" there are a lot of things that would "just work" on a GNU/Linux system that will not work on OpenBSD without twiddling a sysctl or two, or running something as root that wouldn't require it on GNU/Linux. -- Shawn K. Quinn skqu...@rushpost.com
