News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by k310 on Monday October 19, 2026 @10:59PM (#50160842)
I am not on board with the graphic, whatever the heck it is.

https://www.openbsd.org/images/blowfishonbike-s.gif

Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by rektlessness on Monday October 19, 2026 @11:19PM (#50160961)
Forget the artwork and check out the accompanying song and lyrics for the new release. I think it's one of the funnier ones so far. https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#80
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by Bankq on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @12:20AM (#50161306)
“Back in my day we didn't have artificial intelligence, we had real stupidity - and we liked it.”
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by mehmetd46 on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @01:37AM (#50161752)
Real stupidity is still available, you just have to opt in. Yesterday I spent an evening writing Game of Life in Prolog for no good reason, and it gave me 941 live cells instead of 18,885 because my neighbour rule counted diagonals twice. Finding that bug by hand was more fun than anything an agent did for me that day. The pointless tinkering didn't go away, we just have to choose it now.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by JohnKemeny on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @08:43AM (#50165485)
Now implement Prolog in your Game of Life and observe the Universe fold in on itself.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by rustyhancock on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @02:52AM (#50162260)
Is it a pun?

The Simps on AI

The Simpson AI?

And then the 3 eyes fish makes a reference to Blinky

https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/Two_Cars_in_Every_Garage_an...

Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by ChrisRR on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @04:06AM (#50162781)
Just as cringeworthy as the QT4 dance
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by kvuj on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @08:04AM (#50165031)
To me that cringiness is oh so wonderful. Everyone is so weirdly afraid of their image, of how others think of them.

We've become sterile; caricatures of ourselves so that we can adhere to the groupthink. It's refreshing to see people unashamed to be themselves, with all of their weird parts.

Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by torcete on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @05:27AM (#50163435)
It lost one eye, but that's ok, it still has two left.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by DASD on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @07:39AM (#50164767)
Nice! Think there was a gap in release-accompanying songs from 7.4 to 7.8 or I missed them. Seems they are back on track now.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by somat on Monday October 19, 2026 @11:46PM (#50161109)
I suspect it is social commentary on the dangers of letting the machine do all your thinking for you.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by sumnole on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @01:42PM (#50169940)
Or merely a single portrayal of a puffer subject to the socio-technological forces of this generation.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by Guestmodinfo on Monday October 19, 2026 @11:13PM (#50160931)
I really like OpenBSD. I have used it for years. I feel the folks there are very helpful and awesome but I also do not like that graphic.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by somat on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @12:09AM (#50161249)
You are not supposed to, it is intended to represent(and probably is) a machine generated image.

I have not really formalized my thoughts on the matter, but it boils down to. It feels great to get the machine to generate a thing for you but it feels terrible to receive a thing from somebody that is machine generated.

The worse part is the paranoia, Now I am seeing "tells" of machine generated content, and it may or may not be. But I have already lost interest.

The real irony would be that it is a hand drawn image carefully animated to feel machine generated.

Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by sroerick on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @12:11AM (#50161261)
Credit is given to yvaneht nioj and clanker
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by TheAmazingRace on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @03:11AM (#50162397)
Yeah. To me, I feel like Theo de Raadt is being a comedian here, and the joke probably went over some heads.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by account42 on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @06:37AM (#50164109)
If your joke is to smear your face with shit, don't be surprised when people aren't laughing with you.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by sroerick on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @11:21AM (#50167770)
I thought it was hilarious
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by samtheprogram on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @12:03AM (#50161217)
To be fair, I'm reading it as satire of AI. So not liking it is kind of the point.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by GalaxyNova on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @12:24AM (#50161335)
that's the point
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by jart on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @12:27AM (#50161352)
They're just showing humility. Give them a break.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by k310 on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @02:28AM (#50162098)
I mainly don't like the self-destructive aspect. Even if it's a spoof.

Especially when I see all the self-destructive goings-on in the world, based on senselessly divisive beliefs or just the power-seeking that generates them to divide and conquer.

I once met Ken Bering, "The Wheelchair Guy" whose foundation provided wheelchairs for people who could not afford them. The wheels weren't spiked, nor were they like a Seinfeld episode, where George donates a cheap wheelchair with poor brakes that sends its occupant down a steep hill.

Oh well.

Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by dylanz on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @10:48AM (#50167258)
It's satire
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by exhilaration on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @12:22AM (#50161318)
I would just like to say that the Simpsons Already Did It: https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/Blinky
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by zote on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @01:09AM (#50161585)
The theme this time is from The Simpsons, so yeah that is where they got it from. https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by bentley on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @12:31AM (#50161373)
Wow, that’s a weird coincidence.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by GeorgeWBasic on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @12:53AM (#50161496)
It's not a coincidence. The song is called "The Simps on AI". They're definitely referencing Blinky.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by ChrisRR on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @04:08AM (#50162801)
Sometimes I'm genuinely surprised that people can't recognise such obvious sarcasm
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by avadodin on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @05:20AM (#50163372)
Earth was created six thousand years ago and we were running short on souls so we had to borrow a few chips from xAI.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by messe on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @01:07AM (#50161572)
The art is credited to yvaneht nioj, another simpsons reference.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by a96 on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @09:01AM (#50165716)
Which reminds me of the Ralph Wiggum music video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b403GtvwyEc
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by colesantiago on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @12:28AM (#50161355)
And so it begins.

SlopenBSD.

Disappointing OpenBSD is and all of software is descending into slop.

Don't care if it is satire or not.

Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by account42 on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @06:43AM (#50164177)
Agreed. Lowering yourself to the level of the AI drones is the first step to becoming one of them.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by jamal-kumar on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @12:30AM (#50161370)
Puffy's always looked kind of weird. I remember when they gave the damn fish human lips a few times and it always put me off
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by rektlessness on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @12:52AM (#50161494)
"Wireframe Puffy" T-shirt design with the 'human lips' was always my favorite. Hope they bring it back.

https://www.openbsd.org/tshirts.html

Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by sippingabonedry on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @12:31AM (#50161372)
Before they were anti-AI edgelords, they were anti-VM edgelords.

Now they ship their own hypervisor in the base system.

Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by QwenGlazer9000 on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @01:01AM (#50161539)
It's not that they were anti VM, they just didn't think it was a proper security boundary.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by tosti on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @02:13AM (#50161992)
And they've been proven correct. Even the "secure" variety with hardware level encryption turned out to be vulnerable.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by iamnothere on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @08:27AM (#50165330)
Even Xen (VM used by Qubes) periodically has CVEs, although they don’t always affect Qubes due to additional layers of defense and/or limited hardware targets.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by bentley on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @12:43AM (#50161453)
I don’t think the theme is “anti‐AI.” I think what it’s trying to express is something along the lines of “take responsibility for your code,” where one’s code is the code one unleashes upon the world.

But that’s just my interpretation.

Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by Cordiali on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @12:39AM (#50161429)
It's a reference to your basic 'Baton Roue' meme.

I assume it's meant to represent the perspective of pro-AI people, but it's ambiguous.

Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by benrutter on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @01:26AM (#50161686)
This is an amazing image, I am fully on board with whatever it is.

Is the animation comically slow for anyone else?

Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by Perz1val on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @03:39AM (#50162606)
that's the gif loading, it should be fast once it's done
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by 10729287 on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @06:49AM (#50164239)
I love it too. It's nice to be able to enjoy some art with personality when everything out there is inoffensive and bland art.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by jeffrallen on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @01:29AM (#50161706)
It's like a pelican on a bicycle, but with social commentary.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by weitzj on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @01:33AM (#50161734)
I would guess it is the pelican on a bicycle reimagined ;)
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by Cthulhu_ on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @02:40AM (#50162195)
And a reference to a meme of someone sticking a pipe into their own bike and complaining about someone else.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by cavoirom on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @10:24AM (#50166935)
We need to find out which LLM was used to generate this benchmark image, it is the frontier now!
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by st_goliath on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @02:13AM (#50161989)
OpenLSD, bicycle day edition?
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by enriquto on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @02:18AM (#50162029)
> I am not on board with the graphic, whatever the heck it is.

They are purposefully iconoclast with whatever aesthetics are "socially acceptable" for mainstream nerds. For example, their use of comic-sans in official presentations. Here they use ridiculous slop in front of an audience of conservative unix hackers. You can find it funny with the right mindset.

The upgrade mechanism from 7.9 to 8.0 is still gloriously simple, and exactly the same as it has been for many years :

    ssh myopenbsdbox    # log-in to your machine
    doas sysupgrade     # will log you out, go drink some coffee
    ssh myopenbsdbox    # log-in to the upgraded machine

    doas sysmerge       # (optional) solve merge conflicts of your cfg files
    doas pkg_add -u     # (optional) upgrade local packages
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by sidkshatriya on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @02:51AM (#50162252)
> The upgrade mechanism from 7.9 to 8.0 is still gloriously simple, and exactly the same as it has been for many years

The upgrade mechanism on a typical Linux distribution is _even more_ gloriously simple, and exactly the same as it has been for many years.

  # Fedora/RHEL
  $ sudo dnf upgrade -y

  # Debian/Ubuntu
  $ sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

  # Arch Linux
  $ sudo pacman -Syu

The false distinction between the OS packages and user local (/usr/local) packages during upgrade causes much unneeded complexity. FreeBSD is making this go away which is welcome.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by enriquto on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @03:02AM (#50162325)

    # Debian/Ubuntu
    $ sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y
But this is equivalent to syspatch && pkg_add -u , this does not upgrade the computer from one version of the OS to the next.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by sidkshatriya on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @03:56AM (#50162709)
For a rolling release like Arch Linux you just always use pacman -Syu.

But yes you are correct, if you want to upgrade a Ubuntu distribution like 26.04 you do need to issue a command like `sudo apt dist-upgrade` which is admittedly an additional command. But then you could run 26.04 for many years. In OpenBSD anytime the base system/kernel is upgraded for a security fix or point release you need to do a slightly more complex dance.

Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by lproven on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @12:36PM (#50168984)
> a command like `sudo apt dist-upgrade`

That is still wrong.

The correct form is `apt-get dist-upgrade` but that's just the command to update all packages to the latest versions in the same release of the OS. It is the equivalent of `apt full-upgrade` if you have the more modern `apt` command rather than `apt-get`.

So, no, that will not upgrade your distro.

The recommended course of action for Debian is to edit the repository config files, change to the new release names, and then do a full update.

It's a big job.

https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/release-notes/upgradi...

Ubuntu wraps this in simpler tools: `do-release-upgrade` from the shell, or Software Updater for GUI users.

I just upgraded my Ubuntu 24.04 box to 26.04, and my OpenBSD 7.9 box to 8.0. OpenBSD is quicker and easier.

Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by Perz1val on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @03:35AM (#50162567)
I'm pretty sure it takes more to move debian 11 to debian 12 and Arch doesn't even have versions
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by miah_ on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @09:02AM (#50165732)
Arch upgrades are really fun if you don't run pacman for a year or more. It rarely works in your favor to not run pacman on a extremely frequent schedule.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by IslandRebel on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @04:12AM (#50162829)
A typical Debian upgrade process is more involved than that.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by so-cal-schemer on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @05:41AM (#50163536)
Hey, you'd love this one:

  guix pull && guix system reconfigure
To undo, it's:

  guix roll-back
(now, where is guix-bsd?..)

https://guix.gnu.org/manual/1.5.0/en/html_node/Upgrading-Gui...

Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by tylerius on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @05:43AM (#50163553)
And don't forget to cross your fingers so the upgrade does not break your system... like what happened to me when systemd came out.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by nanolith on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @02:23AM (#50162067)
Don't forget: doas syspatch. They tend to find some minor issues rather quickly after release.

Since I maintain my own custom patch set under OpenBSD, this is also usually when I need to vendor in the new release and update all of my patches.

Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by gigatexal on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @04:51AM (#50163146)
Yup. I have heard the siren call. I’ll be putting it on an old fanless sbc router I have that is just sitting around since I upgraded.

What window managers is everyone running? I’m thinking i3 or dwm

Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by nanolith on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @04:56AM (#50163176)
I use a custom dwm.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by grumbling7490 on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @10:29AM (#50167004)
I thought that's just dwm :)
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by nanolith on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @04:18PM (#50172067)
That should be the case, but you'd be surprised how many people just run stock dwm. I don't get it.

All of the "suckless" distributions beg to be patched.

Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by gigatexal on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @04:36PM (#50172317)
Is there a nice place curating the best patches? Or a bespoke distribution of sorts for dwm?
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by nanolith on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @04:43PM (#50172400)
The best place to go for curated patches is here. You can customize these or roll your own once you have a chance to examine the source code. dwm is very simple.

https://dwm.suckless.org/

Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by enriquto on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @09:11AM (#50165862)
> What window managers is everyone running? I’m thinking i3 or dwm

everyone is running different managers... I use evilwm on linux and cwm on openbsd. They are very similar (keyboard-driven, floating windows with no frames) with different default keybindings.

Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by Razengan on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @02:35AM (#50162165)
It's literally in the name
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by vladde on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @02:35AM (#50162166)
similar on the front page https://www.openbsd.org/index.html , "UNDSREA LREER"

it seems very much like social commentary.

Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by j3th9n on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @03:02AM (#50162326)
It is clearly AI generated and that’s the message.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by so-cal-schemer on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @05:28AM (#50163446)

     ACHTUNG!  ALLES LOOKENSPEEPERS!
Alles touristen und non-technischen looken peepers! Das computermachine ist nicht fuer gefingerpoken und mittengrabben. Ist easy schnappen der springenwerk, blowenfusen und poppencorken mit spitzensparken. Ist nicht fuer gewerken bei das dumpkopfen. Das rubbernecken sichtseeren keepen das cotten-pickenen hans in das pockets muss;

relaxen und watchen das blinkenlichten.

Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by BoppreH on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @05:52AM (#50163613)
Man, I love the spirit of the blinkenlights warning, but the "cotten-pickenen hans" bit makes it hard to use the original for anything.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by so-cal-schemer on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @06:06AM (#50163744)
Yeah.. the last line is enough for the reference.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by frumplestlatz on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @12:54PM (#50169260)
I can't see why; it's a goofy 20th-century colloquialism popularized by Bugs Bunny cartoons as a substitute "damn". I sincerely doubt the original author meant anything else.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by BoppreH on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @02:28PM (#50185408)
You can't see how using "cotton-picking hands" as a negative term can cause backlash? If the phrase was something like "don't break anything in this cotton-picking rack", I would understand, but "keep your cotton-picking hands away"?

I'm not a native speaker, so I might have genuinely missed something here. Still, if I had this warning printed on my cubicle I would be fearing for my job everyday.

Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by ant0ni on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @06:13AM (#50163818)
it's a parody of LLM generated images, referencing the pelican benchmark. I suppose the image itself is hand -drawn and stylized for genAI slop
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by larodi on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @06:49AM (#50164243)
Tell me tis not AI, cause it sure as hell looks like one.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by xnorswap on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @06:53AM (#50164287)
I don't like it being 8MB and taking 53 seconds to download from this server!

It's rare to even see a "real" gif rather than webm or other optimised format, I don't know if that choice is part of the commentary or not.

Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by dylanz on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @10:47AM (#50167250)
It's satire
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by zdw on Monday October 19, 2026 @11:42PM (#50161077)
In recent past releases there was a noticeable improvement to SMP related networking bits.

Does anyone have benchmarks between 8.0 and previous releases in that department?

Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by ksec on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @01:41AM (#50161784)
Phoronix do test BSDs from time to time. But for different reasons I think OpenBSd missed twice. I hope to see the performance gap being close enough we can stop thinking it is very slow.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by somat on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @01:58AM (#50161906)
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by ninjin on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @07:06AM (#50164434)
I run -current these days on most desktops. What I can say is that since 7.9, I have experienced smoother audio playback and system load overall on my decade-old laptop. So, it is likely that others will experience similar things when moving to 8.0.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by gucci-on-fleek on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @12:36AM (#50161399)
Does the version number going from v7.X->v8.0 mean that this is a larger update than v7.8->v7.9, or does the numbering just automatically roll over to the next major version when it reaches vX.9?
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by synack on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @12:44AM (#50161461)
No, the major number has no special significance to OpenBSD. 8.0 is just what comes after 7.9.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by himata4113 on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @12:37AM (#50161406)
as linus torvalds puts it: big numbers confuse me, so the next kernel version will be 7.0
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by tosti on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @02:14AM (#50161999)
He ran out of fingers and toes to count on. (Wait, what comes after 19.19, or 20.19, 20.20, then what?)
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by creshal on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @02:56AM (#50162286)
By that point medicine will be sufficiently advanced that we can graft new fingers on him, obviously. That'll also make him more productive, given he's an emacs user.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by JohnKemeny on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @08:46AM (#50165539)
Linux Vice City and then Linux San Andreas.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by Razengan on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @02:43AM (#50162215)
Did they ever have a Linux 6.9?
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by yonatan8070 on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @02:46AM (#50162233)
Yes, all the way up to 6.19 in fact!
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by GJim on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @05:08AM (#50163272)
A sixty-nine interupted by a period?
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by Razengan on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @07:27AM (#50164640)
Oh you
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by MycroftJones on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @12:51AM (#50161489)
When I read the Changelog I had to check if it was April Fools day. Is this a real OpenBSD release? Feels early. Also, many of those changes don't sound like real OpenBSD changes.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by kstrauser on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @12:58AM (#50161523)
They come out approximately every May and October, and have for quite a while: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenBSD#Releases
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by MycroftJones on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @01:46AM (#50161822)
Thank you. Was just wondering because the items in the Changelog look.... LLMish. Not something I'd have expected from OpenBSD. On the other hand, it looks like they've done a bunch of improvements I'd have assumed they'd done years ago. I wouldn't blame them.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by mrweasel on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @08:46AM (#50165538)
Haven't their changelog always looked like this? Both https://www.openbsd.org/50.html and https://www.openbsd.org/60.html looks much the same, shorter perhaps, but otherwise the same.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by jan_m_savage on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @12:57AM (#50161516)
like a virus, slop will infect the techsphere, and it will become a real pain in the bollocks to siftt thru the mountains of semi-slop just to get to the real, reliable and human-made stuff.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by Razengan on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @02:44AM (#50162218)
> Reliable human-made stuff

My guy.......

Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by jan_m_savage on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @04:36AM (#50163011)
Humans make predictable mistakes, AI makes unpredictable mistakes. Hallucination occurs where you least expected for ANY reason. Can you say the same about humans? Unless the human in question is mentally ill.

The loudmouths who think I'm wrong are simply not sophisticated enough to realize how LLMs actually work. It's just pattern-matching and heuristics-based at that. The day AI produces a painting like a famous human painter, I'd be impressed. Until then, it's meh.

Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by Zambyte on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @07:27AM (#50164641)
> The day AI produces a painting like a famous human painter, I'd be impressed.

What does "like" mean to you here?

Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by Razengan on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @06:19AM (#50163886)
> "I'm sophisticated enough to realize how LLMs actually work"

> "AI is unpredictable"

*thumbs up emoji*

Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by reliablehuman on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @01:53AM (#50161867)
Reliable human stuff? Holy shit, I want whatever you are smoking.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by brunorro on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @05:10AM (#50163298)
I'm smoking natural gas to move the turbine that generates electricity so an overpriced GPU filled up with overpriced memory can give an interesting answer to this post :)
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by unsungNovelty on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @06:35AM (#50164077)
Wait... I thought you were one??!!!
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by idatum on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @12:57AM (#50161517)
I have a Lenovo laptop running OpenBSD 8.0.

What I really appreciate about it is I started with OpenBSD 7.6. Using sysupgrade, I went through every release (and syspatch) and just now successfully upgraded to 8.0. It still works great!

Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by kombine on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @04:01AM (#50162739)
Well, I've used Fedora since 2024 on my laptop and it went through four or five major upgrades, never had an issue.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by prmoustache on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @02:22AM (#50162059)
I like OpenBSD, but I don't think this is a specific reason to appreciate it as any decent OS these days has been upgradeable release upon release safely for more than 2 decades, regardless if it is a linux distro, an Open/Net/FreeBSD system, a macOS or Windows system.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by regularfry on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @05:11AM (#50163303)
That's pushing the timelines a bit. I had more than one early Ubuntu completely hose itself on dist-upgrade pre 16.04, despite it being based on Debian for which such things have never been a problem for me. Until 22.04->24.04 my rule was always to reinstall as a result.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by idatum on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @11:03AM (#50167493)
Zero configuration conflicts/issues the whole time?
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by prmoustache on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @11:31AM (#50182721)
I believe my current Fedora install started as a Fedora 26 so rougly 10 years without issues on 2 different laptops with same install?

On servers I have changed providers so it never lasted as long but at work we upgraded ubuntu LTS at least twice on same hardware.

Before Fedora I had similar experience with slackware, freebsd, openbsd and ubuntu on my daily drivers.

The only upgrade that ever broke a system of mine was my own fault by not reading news on archlinux website and upgrading blindly right when they were doing the changes with /bin /usr/bin. But Arch is different, it is opinionated and not expected to be free of human homework.

Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by stackghost on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @04:08AM (#50162803)
>What I really appreciate about it is I started with OpenBSD 7.6. Using sysupgrade, I went through every release (and syspatch) and just now successfully upgraded to 8.0. It still works great!

This is table stakes. Debian has had this since, IIRC, 1999.

Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by asimovDev on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @02:49AM (#50162243)
I agree that it's great but as an anecdote, I have an arch linux laptop i upgrade 1-2 times a year and it still works too, been that way since 2019 so went through major kernel upgrades without a hitch. Only thing that ever broke were nvidia drivers sometimes because it's an shudders OPTIMUS laptop. Last time I updated it, vibe coding wasn't widespread yet so I am wondering if new package versions will finally kill it if I were to upgrade it now
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by somat on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @01:53AM (#50161872)
I have an old(mutters to self don't look at date then I will feel old... Oh god it's from 2012) lenovo laptop that is my daily driver for portable ops. I run openbsd on it and... well it's perfect. sleeps perfectly, radio works well, I understand the OS. I will be very sad when it dies.

I did just re do the heatsink compound, so hopefully it has many years left, but I worry about the fan.

Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by kstrauser on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @01:07AM (#50161571)
Anyone managed to get this running on a 2018 (Intel) Mac Mini? I tried 7.8 or 7.9, I forget which, not long ago and was flummoxed.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by jon128 on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @01:26AM (#50161690)
Have you tried

  http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/using.html

?
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by kstrauser on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @12:07PM (#50168492)
I haven’t. Has that worked for you?
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by nanolith on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @02:20AM (#50162039)
I've used OpenBSD as a laptop daily driver for nearly 20 years. It's small. It remains mostly consistent between updates. In fact, it's so stable that I barely notice changes when I upgrade until I go hunting for them.

The Lenovo laptop I use as my travel laptop and console display is a 2012. It still runs OpenBSD just fine.

Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by abc123abc123 on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @05:28AM (#50163444)
Is it possible to get a modern filesystem with openbsd or are they still stuck in the past? Also, is it possible to run openbsd without jumping through hoops on a laptop from 2025 including suspend, graphics, web browser?

I want this to be the case, because the more Linux petrifies, the more a free BSD option is needed.

Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by tylerius on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @05:52AM (#50163607)
GeFS is in the works. I hope it gets into the tree some day:

https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20260918115729

Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by throwaway270925 on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @04:38PM (#50172350)
Thats great to hear! I also love the title for this talk about it:

GEFS: The File Shredder of the Future. https://events.eurobsdcon.org/2026/talk/NVMSCJ/

Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by nanolith on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @05:54AM (#50163626)
By default, OpenBSD uses FFS / FFS2. There is an effort in place to port GeFS (from 9front) to OpenBSD. It's unlikely that ZFS will be ported to OpenBSD, due to licensing incompatibilities. For the same reason, btrfs is also unlikely. That's why I run FreeBSD on my big server, and OpenBSD on my laptop and other edge devices. I don't really have any issues running FFS on a laptop; it seems overkill to run anything more advanced than that.

I'd recommend taking a look on forums to see what other folks are running. If it's a modern Lenovo with integrated graphics or an AMD GPU, it will be supported before others. OpenBSD folks tend to use Lenovos. My best recommendation is to pick a laptop that a core maintainer is using, unless you feel comfortable making your own patches. They have AMD GPU support via DRM from Linux. Intel graphics typically works alright.

OpenBSD works well with relatively recent versions of Chromium and Firefox. That being said, they are on a six month release cycle. The Chromium port can fall behind if you stick to -stable or releases. Building Chromium or Firefox from source is... well, I have a 2012 laptop, so that's not something I am going to do. Regardless, you'd need to be pretty comfortable with applying OpenBSD specific patches to one of these browsers, which isn't always obvious, especially since they are moving targets.

If you're used to being on a rolling release Linux, this will be a bit disorienting. But, in my opinion, it's significantly more stable and better thought out.

Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by ninjin on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @07:02AM (#50164384)
> OpenBSD works well with relatively recent versions of Chromium and Firefox. That being said, they are on a six month release cycle. The Chromium port can fall behind if you stick to -stable or releases.

Just to clarify here, security patches are backported to -stable. So it is not like you stick to the same browser release for six months.

Personally, I run www/firefox-esr. In part because the ESR moves more slowly in general and in part because it is maintained by someone working for Mozilla.

Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by tylerius on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @09:42AM (#50166317)
Not the case for chromium and ungoogled-chromium... at least I can't find them in packages-stable directory.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by ninjin on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @10:15AM (#50166805)
Thank you, I think you are correct. Compare:

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-ports-cvs&s=ungoogled-chromium

To:

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-ports-cvs&s=firefox-esr

You will see that the Firefox patches are tagged for -release/-stable and the Chromium ones are not.

Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by abc123abc123 on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @09:44AM (#50166338)
Excellent answer. Thank you very much. I will keep this in mind when the next life cycling of my current laptop happens. I will keep an eye on the core teams laptop experiments as well if there's anything about that available. Will search the mailinglists.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by t-3 on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @09:33AM (#50166165)
OpenBSD usually has far fewer hoops than Linux on laptops - IME, either it works or it doesn't. Pretty much any x86 machine that isn't bleeding edge is going to work.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by jmclnx on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @03:27PM (#50171441)
AOL 'me too' here :)

Same here, but 10 years (6.1). The T420 I have is also my travel laptop. pledge(2) and unveil(2), which is in firefox, makes me feel even more secure while away from my home router.

Upgraded to 8.0, started it, made tea during download, ran sysmerge(8) amd pkg_add -u and done.

Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by hollowonepl on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @03:35AM (#50162570)
Good job and much clearer release notes than the ones I was reading about recent Linux release by the way.. much more informative and better organised to understand the impact in practical terms. #BSD_hellyeah
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by robalni on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @04:14AM (#50162841)
I find it quite annoying that I have to have a monitor plugged in for the upgrade to work. Otherwise it reboots into the old version after downloading. Is this a common problem?
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by dontdoxxme on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @08:04AM (#50165030)
I have seen it, upgrades use a cut down kernel (bsd.rd) which doesn’t have the same graphics drivers.

You may find setting the console to serial works around it (set tty com0 in /etc/boot.conf).

Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by efxhoy on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @12:28PM (#50168868)
I have a similar issue, my router won’t reboot without a monitor plugged in to the hdmi port. Displayport worked fine during the installation. It was clever enough to not work with a dummy hdmi dongle either.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by rootnod3 on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @04:17AM (#50162864)
MP support for VMM/VMD is huuuuge.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by elric on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @04:45AM (#50163081)
The release song is a banger, as always.

https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#80

Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by ctolsen on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @05:37AM (#50163511)
I've used OpenBSD the last year or so (as a bastion/jump host for a few systems) after using *BSD systems very little for probably the past decade, and... good lord I love it so much.

Say what you want about the benefits of systemd or the usefulness of other parts of what is now unavoidable with Linux, and I won't argue with many of them, but OpenBSD just feels like a *nix system is supposed to. `ps aux` is like 10 entries at first. `pf` makes so much sense. `man` pages are consistently incredible. The security/cryptography focus, managing services, pledge/unveil... so many things about it is just *chef's kiss*.

It's not and will probably never be a daily driver for me and it may not fit your use case for anything, but I highly recommend playing with it.

Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by bcvvvy on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @06:11AM (#50163791)
I’ve used it on and off since about 1999. It certainly feels more like Unix than anything else.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by pjmlp on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @09:05AM (#50165783)
It is kind of ironic the whole Linus vs Tanenbaum argument, given the amount of processes running on any modern Linux distribution.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by deltarholamda on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @09:32AM (#50166143)
>`man` pages are consistently incredible

I love this part of OpenBSD so much. FreeBSD is very good as well on this front. Sometimes the terseness of the man pages gets to me, but it's all there.

I used OpenBSD as a daily driver way back, somewhere around v3.5, on a somewhat elderly Thinkpad. It was perfectly adequate. I still use it for various systems that I pretty much just set and forget. Extremely reliable, and pf is top tier.

Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by bananamogul on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @10:43AM (#50167206)
OpenBSD man pages are the Sistine Chapel ceiling of man pages. Just glorious.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by so-cal-schemer on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @04:39PM (#50172369)
It is a heck of a system. I love it too.

I have CD distros from 2.1, 2.3, 2.4, and 2.5 in a drawer somewhere. I wish I bought more merch over the years:

https://www.openbsd.org/tshirts.html

This looks down atm; hopefully it will be up again soon:

https://openbsdstore.com/

Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by so-cal-schemer on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @11:11PM (#50175624)
It worked great on a home lab of old salvaged sparc stations, 68k macs, and 32bit PCs.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by grommz on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @06:12AM (#50163809)
>Switched ssh(1) from supercop ed25519 to libsodium

Lol. Casually switching crypto implementation somewhere in the footnotes.

Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by blodorn on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @09:23AM (#50166032)
https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2026/10/06/2

> * All: switch the fallback implementation of the ed25519 signature algorithm used when libcrypto is disabled from SUPERCOP ed25519 to libsodium. The libsodium implementation includes a number of strictness checks over the original reference implementation we have used to this point and a more ergonomic API.

Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by bemtevi on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @09:48AM (#50166407)
It would be cool if we could run this thing on Apple Silicon macs. I'm getting tired of MacOS and would love an alternative to Linux.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by cavoirom on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @11:57AM (#50168333)
OpenBSD support M1 and M2 chips.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by volkadav on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @09:57AM (#50166559)
The upgrade from 7.9 to 8.0 went completely smooth on a bastion host I have running with openbsd; from start to finish it took about ten minutes. Kudos to the team!

https://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade80.html

tl;dr - doas sysupgrade, system updates itself and reboots, doas sysmerge, doas pkg_add -u.

Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by wg0 on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @11:39AM (#50168037)
Has anyone good luck with OpenBSD on Intel Macs?
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by netrikare on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @01:23PM (#50169678)
I was always curious how does (Theo's?) rack in the basement look like nowadays. How it changed? New machines added/removed?
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by SoftTalker on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @01:42PM (#50169937)
I don't know how his basement rack looks but they are continuing slowly eliminating old architectures with almost no surviving hardware or that are unsupported by Clang. Loongson was eliminated in this release.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by somat on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @01:58PM (#50170152)
It is largely if there is someone interested in maintaining the port. My favorite port is the luna88k an obscure Japanese unix workstation/server from the early 90's. I don't know how common they were in Japan, rare is my guess, and non-existent elsewhere, but there is one(only one as far as I can tell) dedicated Japanese developer willing to put the work in to keep it current. and every release a month or two after the official release he announces that the package build is done(it takes that long on the hardware).

I don't know how many users of luna88k there are, I don't frequent anywhere near the same ecosystem they would, but have never seen one, So from my point of view it is one person making releases for himself and I love that dedication. I don't have, nor do I want a luna88k, but it great that it exists.

So as far as I can tell that is all it takes to have a published obsd port, one person willing to put the work in.

Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by paulnpace on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @01:44PM (#50169969)
> Added Lua patterns(7) support for relayd(8) filter rules; improved glob(7) documentation.

> Added ECDSA support to the relayd(8) CA privsep engine.

These are really fantastic.

Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by RetroTechie on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @02:46PM (#50170826)
Noticed that OpenBSD includes some really ancient versions of GCC and Binutils. Found this page (2021) explaining why:

https://www.cambus.net/the-state-of-toolchains-in-openbsd/

Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by anthk on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @07:31PM (#50174133)
Outdated since Clang/LLVM it's in base.
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by br0ceph on Friday October 23, 2026 @09:17PM (#50217502)
best part is, no systemd
Re:OpenBSD 8.0 by naltun on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @08:18PM (#50282784)
OpenBSD 8.0 ships with getexecpath(3) [0], which I just happily added to Pie Lang [1]

[0] https://man.openbsd.org/man3/getexecpath.3

[1] https://github.com/AliAlmutawaJr/Pie (not affiliated with the project, but it's a fun language)