
FreeBSD 11.4 - tosh
https://www.freebsd.org/releases/11.4R/announce.html
======
incanus77
FreeBSD is a tremendous project. I've used it since the 4.x days, first for
work (web/mail/database hosting, at the time) and then for personal projects.

I have a 2000-era desktop PC as a personal server that I had left collect dust
until very recently after switching to Macs for daily work long ago. It was
running 6.1 and I hadn't booted it in a few months shy of _ten years_. I
booted it right up, and in an afternoon proceeded to, in small stages, update
it to the latest 12.1 release, which I am running with great stability now,
including live repartitioning and better use of the available disk space after
going into single-user admin mode. "Recent" improvements that I've been
appreciating have been a smaller/more dense console font, easier wireless
configuration (it has an Atheros-based PCI wifi card), and easier and more
clear package and ports management. AND it still runs fast.

~~~
hpkuarg
An in-place upgrade from 6.1 to 12.1 without major issues? That is indeed
tremendously impressive.

~~~
loeg
I've done the same thing with in-place Fedora upgrades over a similar time-
frame. It is impressive, but not unrivaled in the Linux world. (I'm not
playing favorites with Linux here: I'm a FreeBSD developer.)

~~~
agumonkey
There's also a famous video on youtube where some guy installs every versions
of windows (maybe not 1 and 2) back to back and it kinda works (passing custom
configuration most of the time too)

------
stiray
I will just use this oportunity to thank FreeBSD team (from kernel to ports
maintainers) for their work on project and give my thanks in advance for
anyone who joins it.

It was magnificent server for last 10+ years and I have never trembled before
doing a major upgrade.

If you dont hear this enough: please keep on working your great work, maybe
you are not the most used OS, but you have all my love <3 <3 <3

~~~
waynesonfire
it's comments like this that make we want to take the dive. thanks for not
only supporting the freebsd team but encouraging potential future users.

though with that said, i will say that k8s is taking over the world and bsds
are going to be left in the dust for my use-case, non-(appliance, embedded,
IoT) applications.

~~~
toast0
We've been hearing FreeBSD is dying since before it's been the year of linux
on the desktop.

Is FreeBSD ever going to be hip and trendy? Probably not, it's not 1994
anymore. But, I don't need a hip amd trendy OS, I need an OS that provides a
stable base for me to work upon and supports enough hardware that I can chose
decent parts. As a bonus, I've found it easy enough to muck with the internals
when it has benefited me or my employer.

~~~
waynesonfire
I'm not questioning whether FreeBSD is hip or trendy. Not sure why you're
bringing that up.

I'd pick up FreeBSD in a heartbeat if I knew that the investment in learning
the platform would help me be productive in production. But like you said,
it's not 1994 anymore and modern deployment and maintenance of an application
stack is docker and k8s. A trend where the OS is abstracted away as much as
possible. So why invest in FreeBSD? Okay, so maybe it's a nice OS for
appliances; though so is Linux and I can continue to leverage my knowledge.

At home I run an appliance and thought I'd deploy FreeBSD on it to run my
storage server. I was really excited to deploy ZFS, the BSD killer app. The
justification for this getting more difficult to make since ZFS on Linux is
production ready.

I want to use FreeBSD. I don't care that it's not mainstream. The unfortunate
issue is that it's falling behind in my use-case, by a lot and that's a
bummer.

~~~
stiray
I have submitted multiple bugs for ZoL, from prohibiting boot of zfs as root
(for the sake of boot beeing faster (?) they are not doing zpool import -a(f)
but rather rely on cache file which is... crazy). Also the .zfs/snapshot still
doesnt work. Both are vital issues and still not beeing fixed.

Boot on Linux laptop now looks like:

\- power on

\- wait for recovery shell

\- `zpool import -a`

\- `exit`

In all my years I have never observed this on FreeBSD and... as I have said, I
expect from FreeBSD to be rock solid and it never dissapointed.

ZoL? I wouldn't be running it on my linux servers for a while. The basic
mistakes that they are doing are not something that apriciate from file system
that is meant to be as reliable as possible.

~~~
eqvinox
> they are not doing zpool import -a(f)

That's an initramfs bug; the initramfs scripts are not actually supplied by
the ZoL project. You should file a bug report against your distro's initramfs
package.

~~~
stiray
I am on fedora with added zol repository and fedora 30 doesn't supply any zfs
modules or initramfs scripts. I had to do my scripts to verify that the
modules are included and don't break my boot process. And it worked like a
charm... for a while.

~~~
eqvinox
So... the bug is in your own scripts? I'm now thoroughly confused what your
complaint is :)

------
sedatk
If anyone else is wondering like me who Bruce Evans is:

> Bruce Evans <bde@FreeBSD.org> > Bruce is the Style Police-Meister. When you
> do a commit that could have been done better, Bruce will be there to tell
> you. Be thankful that someone is. Bruce is also very knowledgeable on the
> various standards applicable to FreeBSD.

[https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/committ...](https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/committers-
guide/people.html)

~~~
fipar
Seems he had an approach to reviews worthy of emulation:

"Code reviews from Bruce came in three flavours, "mild", "brucified" and
"brucifiction", but they were never personal: It was always only about the
code, the mistakes, the sloppy thinking, the missing historical context, the
ambiguous standards - and the style(9) transgressions."

Source:
[https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/contrib...](https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/contributors/contrib-
develinmemoriam.html)

~~~
loeg
I wouldn't suggest emulating it. His approach to review was to exhaustively
detail every perceived bug in any particular file when someone touched that
file. Preexisting issues unrelated to the change. Style warts unrelated to the
change. Subjective opinions unrelated to the change. In his emails, every one
of these was a "bug."

There is some value in suggesting adjacent areas for future work, if authors
have time and interest, but BDE went well beyond that.

I think Bruce should be admired for his demonstrated desire to improve
FreeBSD, and for his great attention to detail. But I would not like anyone to
emulate his code review emails.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
If you're reviewing a block of code, you need to review the whole final
version (not just the diff) or you risk missing context and interactions. If
you're doing that, it's simpler to just review the whole thing and not filter
out some parts just because you later notice that it predates the current
patch. Although I would tend to hope that he doesn't treat pre-existing issues
as blockers, I can certainly see why a person would take that approach if the
goal is code quality.

~~~
wejick
Touching other lines that are not related to intended changes will only
obscure the situation.

------
aduitsis
I think the idea of having a long term support release for 5 years was great
[1].

FreeBSD 11 has been around for some years now, getting an update to which
11.3-RELEASE can be upgraded with minimal hassle is a major plus for FreeBSD.

([1] edit: referring to [https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-
announce/2015-Fe...](https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-
announce/2015-February/001624.html))

~~~
cperciva
We've effectively had 5 year support cycles since FreeBSD 6 -- we just never
advertised it as such.

~~~
aduitsis
Quite right, thanks for correcting me. But I've been using FreeBSD since ~2001
and hadn't quite noticed, so the announcement did really help out :)

------
RNCTX
I too used FreeBSD for many things between 4x and 10.x, but have made the
switch to Ubuntu in the past couple of years.

Things I miss:

1) Jails without having to have a hypervisor system, Linux doesn't really have
anything comparably as easy to use particularly with the iocage project
managing the jails.

2) ZFS out of the box supported at at lower level than modules and user tools.
ZoL has come a ways but Linux's political opposition to it is always going to
be a weight around its neck.

FWIW I am using a ZFS pool that has never been wiped/recreated since FreeBSD
8. It was created on that OS and has been migrated between Linux/BSD twice
over a span of 11 to 12 years.

Things I don't miss:

1) The lack of file/directory monitoring libs and third party applications
because, honestly, kqueue sucks.

2) While simple SysV init was simple 15 years ago systemd has come a long way.
I hate to admit it, but systemd is the better way at this point because I like
having my daemons restart themselves without third party monitors.

3) Brain drain is real, it seems the last time I used FreeBSD that port
maintainers are running thin and I don't have a suggestion for how to attract
more of them. For many years FreeBSD's package/port system was the best in the
world (yes, better than the Linux alternatives like apt and rpm too). I think
pkgng's rollout was bungled, though, and while it may be better now it seems
to have a lingering cost in port maintainers.

~~~
xxpor
I didn't think there was any political opposition to ZoL other than the fact
that its licence is incompatible with the GPL, and outside of a complete clean
room rewrite, there's really nothing anyone can do about it. It's not like
you're going to convince Oracle to relicence it.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
> I didn't think there was any political opposition to ZoL other than the fact
> that its licence is incompatible with the GPL, and outside of a complete
> clean room rewrite, there's really nothing anyone can do about it.

I suppose it depends on how you mean that, but I probably disagree; when Greg
KH can say, "My tolerance for ZFS is pretty non-existant" [0], and Torvalds
says, "Don't use ZFS. It's that simple. It was always more of a buzzword than
anything else, I feel... [the] benchmarks I've seen do not make ZFS look all
that great. And as far as I can tell, it has no real maintenance behind it any
more..." [1], we've gone well beyond "they just can't merge it because of
licensing" and into "[political] opposition".

> It's not like you're going to convince Oracle to relicence it.

I've always wondered at this, actually; why _doesn 't_ Oracle relicense it?
BTRFS, AFAIK, was started at Oracle but basically flopped; why on earth do
they not simply bring over the far-superior ZFS codebase to replace it? They
can't possibly be trying to protect Solaris the way Sun did; they've killed
off >90% of the Solaris team [2] and AFAIK have made exactly zero effort to
sell Solaris for years now. Why _wouldn 't they_ get ZFS upstreamed into Linux
and make it a core feature of OEL (or whatever they were using BTRFS for)?

[0] [https://marc.info/?l=linux-
kernel&m=154714516832389&w=2](https://marc.info/?l=linux-
kernel&m=154714516832389&w=2)

[1] [https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/01/linus-torvalds-
zfs-s...](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/01/linus-torvalds-zfs-
statements-arent-right-heres-the-straight-dope/)

[2] [https://fortune.com/2017/09/05/oracle-layoffs-hardware-
solar...](https://fortune.com/2017/09/05/oracle-layoffs-hardware-solaris/)

~~~
xxpor
>I've always wondered at this, actually; why doesn't Oracle relicense it?

Honestly, I would assume because Oracle's response to anything charitable or
nice is "fuck you"

------
12bits
FreeBSD is a delight to run, I use an old AMD build to host Plex, PiHole and
some other services in bhyve VMs. Keep a copy of Absolute FreeBSD around for
physical reference just like the 90s.

------
centimeter
During quarantine I decided to set up some networking equipment with FreeBSD
whereas historically I’d have used Linux. Wow! What an improvement! Everything
is so much cleaner, easier, faster to set up. I don’t have to screw around as
much to make it boot and install on headless hardware. I can boot off a ZFS
root volume. Networking is simple and clear to configure. Documentation is
great. I don’t think I’ll use Linux again in the future when setting up a
server, if I can avoid it.

~~~
efxhoy
What kind of networking equipment? I'm thinking of ditching pfsense and going
bare freebsd or pfsense for my home router box and a few more anecdotes of
similar projects would be nice to hear.

~~~
tofaz
Happy FreeBSD user here. I personally use a Protectli FW1 with FreeBSD 12.1
and PF (Kernel recompiled with ALTQ support for QoS) and it works very well! I
tried to move to OpenBSD to get the latest PF features/syntax but
unfortunately the interfaces are dropping packets and no one on the OpenBSD
mailing list have been able to help me. Unfortunately for me I'm not a
programmer so I'm not able to contribute/fix it myself but I have to rely on
the community/devs. I have reverted back to FreeBSD 12.1 and still being super
happy with it!

------
sidkshatriya

      "FreeBSD 11.4-RELEASE Announcement
      [...]
      Some of the highlights:
     
      The clang, llvm, lld, lldb, and compiler-rt utilities as 
      well as libc++ have been updated to upstream version 
      10.0.0.
      [...]"
    

I found this interesting. Seems like FreeBSD is more pragmatic than OpenBSD.
They are using the latest and greatest llvm/clang series.

For license related reasons OpenBSD is stuck on an older version of gcc. I
understand that OpenBSD has now _also_ become stuck on an older clang/llvm due
to license changes there too.

In the long run, not upgrading the compiler is going to hurt OpenBSD a lot, I
think. A lot of mitigations are now built in the compiler and languages (e.g.
C++) are accumulating features at quite a fast pace.

I was wondering if users of OpenBSD have thoughts on the above. Do you think
its a bit deal? What is the solution? How does OpenBSD not get left behind as
a platform?

Or is this older clang/llvm issue only relevant for the core system and pkgs
would have latest clang/llvm?

P.S. It seems llvm on pkgs is still 8.0.x
[https://github.com/openbsd/ports/tree/master/devel/llvm](https://github.com/openbsd/ports/tree/master/devel/llvm)

~~~
anthk
You seem to not know OpenBSD a lot. They backported and patched a lot of stuff
into GCC 4.2. Clang will get the same threatament.

~~~
sidkshatriya
I’m aware they maintain forks and patches for many packages. However
development resources are always precious! Now openbsd needs to devote them to
backporting from rapidly evolving llvm. Effort that could have been spent
elsewhere.

Also note that backporting may be unfeasible in some cases I’m guessing
because changes to latest llvm/clang may be under the new unacceptable
license. Openbsd might need to make their own modifications.

I’m not making a value judgement whether it was good or not to not accept new
llvm license. Just making an observation that this is going to be a drag on
the project.

------
zokier
This seems like a good place to ask. I saw this comment[1] few weeks back

> This is one of the superior aspects of FreeBSD: no parsing of human-readable
> strings to get back machine-readable information about the process table.
> It's available directly in machine-readable form via sysctl().

And started wondering how deep does that go in (Free)BSD? Is all info
available in neat strucured format programmatically, or are there other places
where you'd need to do Linux-like parsing of special files? Is there some good
reading material of this aspect of the system?

I hope this isn't too inflammatory Linux vs BSD question, I did not intend
value judgement on either approach.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23425867](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23425867)

~~~
toast0
As a long time user, this feels like something that's true but not. The
userland tools to dump kernel information (ps, ifconfig, etc) get back binary
data from the kernel, not human readable strings, so it's true, but other
programs that might need that information would often be expected to call the
same tools and then parse the human readable forms until the recent inclusion
of libxo can provide machine readable outputs. libxo was added in FreeBSD
11.0, and I'm not sure how far it's been implemented; when I was still
managing a large fleet of FreeBSD machines, we had a bunch of 10.x, so it
didn't makes sense to update our scripts to use libxo.

~~~
JdeBP
viraptor was talking about C programs having to parse human-readble strings
from /proc in Linux to get machine-readable data. That the output of the `ps`
command is only human-readable is a complete red herring. That's not what a C
program would use, and not the C API that viraptor was talking about.

------
2trill2spill
After a year of trying Ubuntu as my at home dev machine, I'm going back to
FreeBSD. FreeBSD is much more of a pain during initial setup, but then it just
works. Where as my laptop with Ubuntu has the most finicky Wifi and freezes
way too often, and I didnt have these problems with FreeBSD on the same
hardware.

~~~
na85
Do you actually get working wifi, suspend/resume and acceptable battery life
under BSD?

Last time I tried (open)BSD, none of those things worked acceptably. The
recommended way to connect to wifi was to manually edit wpa_supplicant.conf
and battery life was a solid hour less than under linux.

I feel like BSD is a great "laptop OS" if you're the kind of user that leaves
their thinkpad plugged in all the time, essentially using it as a small-form
factor desktop.

Maybe it's better nowadays.

~~~
0ld
> Last time I tried (open)BSD

Sorry, but OpenBSD and FreeBSD are very different operating systems, it's not
just "different distros" like in the Linux world

Whatever you tried in OpenBSD has most likely no relation to FreeBSD

Speaking of the things you mentioned, I personally would expect suspend/resume
to just work out of the box in the latest OpenBSD, but not necessary in
FreeBSD (it was never a priority for the developers).

You also don't need wpa_supplicant in OpenBSD (unlike FreeBSD), ifconfig
should be enough in most cases.

For the battery life, you certainly gonna need some tuning, as it's not a
config priority by default, but generally (on mainstream hardware) you should
be able to reach at least 80%-sh battery life comparing to Linux in OpenBSD,
and comparable to Linux in FreeBSD

~~~
na85
>For the battery life, you certainly gonna need some tuning, as it's not a
config priority by default, but generally (on mainstream hardware) you should
be able to reach at least 80%-sh battery life comparing to Linux in OpenBSD,
and comparable to Linux in FreeBSD

Yeah, see, that's unacceptable to me in a laptop.

I have a small pcengines apu2 running openbsd but I don't enjoy tinkering with
it. I find it cumbersome and unwieldy. The documentation seems to be mostly
"complete" but it's definitely geared at someone who already has an in-depth
understanding of openbsd, and lots of fundamentals are left unsaid, which
makes it difficult to learn what the "proper" way to do something is. I end up
with a patchwork of hacks and it's very unsatisfying.

It took me quite a long time to figure out how to get wireguard working on
that box, for instance, whereas on linux and mac it "just works" pretty much
out of the box.

~~~
loeg
> Yeah, see, that's unacceptable to me in a laptop.

I think you missed the last clause here:

> > comparable to Linux in FreeBSD

~~~
na85
No, I didn't. Linux battery life is pretty darn close to windows on my
hardware, out of the box.

Getting freebsd to the level of Linux only after significant tinkering just
isn't a good ux. For my personal machine that's unacceptable.

~~~
2trill2spill
You said above you were using OpenBSD not FreeBSD, they are completely
different operating systems. Also getting the battery to last long on FreeBSD
was a super simple config change, that took less than a minute to do.

------
darksaints
I've been mulling over a decision to add a dedicated server for my postgres
usage in my home server cluster. Ideally I'd like something rock solid
stability and that doesn't require a lot of maintenance, and FreeBSD is
definitely a candidate. Low resource usage, fast networking, and native ZFS
are great benefits.

Does anybody here run postgres on FreeBSD? Any gotchas to look out for? Is
performance comparable to linux? Anything to look out for when using NVMe
flash drives?

------
AbacusAvenger
> The KDE desktop environment has been updated to version 5.18.4.1.19.12.3.

Is that... actually the version number? I thought KDE just used a 3-part
version number (major.minor.maintenance or something).

~~~
andimm
I am no expert at all but maybe the desktop environment is a combination of
KDE Plasma 5.18.4 and KDE Applications 19.12

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE_Software_Compilation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE_Software_Compilation)

------
vmsp
It's a shame the popular VPS providers, like Linode and DigitalOcean, don't
support easy installations of FreeBSD (and other BSDs). Does anyone know of
trustworthy hosting solutions that make things easy?

~~~
trasz
How about AWS? Creating FreeBSD instance is trivially easy.

~~~
MaxBarraclough
This seems to be largely due to the efforts of Colin Percival. [0]

Have to know where to find the AMIs though. [1] Amazon doesn't make this as
easy as they might.

[0] [https://www.patreon.com/cperciva](https://www.patreon.com/cperciva)

[1] [https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-
cloud/2019-Febru...](https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-
cloud/2019-February/000200.html)

~~~
cperciva
I'm missing something here. We have lists of AMIs in every release
announcement, and FreeBSD is also in the AWS Marketplace. (Also, for the
automation nerds, there's an SNS notification which goes out every time we
publish new AMIs.)

What would you like to see changed?

~~~
MaxBarraclough
I wasn't very clear: the way the AWS Marketplace wants me to 'buy' the AMI for
$0 is an annoying extra step. You're doing the right thing on your side,
publishing the AMI IDs plainly, the way Ubuntu do. [0] The AMI IDs work fine
in EC2 even without 'buying', if you already know them, so it makes little
sense for Amazon to artificially introduce this $0 payment step, in the name
of it being a 'marketplace'.

While we're here: As I implied, I recently got FreeBSD up and running from one
of your AMIs. (I was just playing around, not doing anything serious, and I
don't know FreeBSD well at all, my experience is with Linux.) Thanks for your
work here. I encountered two issues though:

1\. It took a long time for the instance to boot up and for port 22 to open.
Roughly 14 minutes. This is with a t3a.small instance.

2\. I was unable to confirm the SSH public key of the instance. The EC2 custom
is for it to be written to the system log, which is viewable from within the
EC2 web dashboard, but FreeBSD didn't appear to do this. (This can take a few
minutes on Ubuntu and Amazon Linux 2, for whatever reason, but it works
eventually.)

Also, and perhaps it's just me that trips over this, but I'd find it helpful
if it were made more explicit that the correct username is 'ec2-user'.

I haven't tried out the ARM64 AMIs but it's great you're providing AMIs for
both architectures. Amazon seem pretty serious about their ARM instance-types.

[0] [https://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/locator/ec2/](https://cloud-
images.ubuntu.com/locator/ec2/)

------
blueblob
Hasn't FreeBSD 12 been out for a while now? This is just a LTS release?

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
Correct; FreeBSD 11 has continued having minor versions well after 12 dropped.

------
zepearl
I changed the OS of my NAS a few weeks ago (from "Gentoo Linux" to "Linux
Mint") to FreeBSD (mainly to have a "better ZFS" \- I read only later that
apparently both Linux & BSD ZFS are being merged?) and the installation and
configuration has been very smooth (currently up and stable with e.g. Xfce,
gkrellm => just a simple NAS).

I miss only the "nmon" utility but apparently it's possible to "port" almost
any Linux program automatically to FreeBSD Linux apps => I might have a look
at that.

------
gorgoiler
Recently, a certain unmentionable trend in Linux system software makes me
really want to try FreeBSD again.

What’s the state of the art for unprivileged containers? I’m very keen on
containers that look very similar to the host OS as they make excellent
environments for teaching pupils about the OS, especially if the container
host can fake them into being “root” in their container.

~~~
loeg
Part of the security premise of FreeBSD Jails is that jailed root cannot
escape. So, jails are a lighter-weight container which satisfies that need.
They can (and often do) look very similar to the host OS.

I think the gold standard here is hypervisors, and if you want to go that
route, Bhyve is satisfactory for many workloads. But jails should be somewhat
lighter overhead.

------
zomg
i don't use freebsd regularly these days but i happily donate to the
foundation each year. keep up the great work!

------
colordrops
BSD threads are similar to PHP threads. Most comments are speaking
judgementally about the overall quality of the product rather than the post
itself, though in the case of BSD the judgment is overwhelmingly positive
rather than negative.

~~~
iso-8859-1
PHP? Are you referring to the programming language? What do you mean by "PHP
threads"?

~~~
spijdar
I take it to mean HN discussions, like this one. Not threads as in process
threading, which is what I thought at first.

~~~
colordrops
Yes that is correct.

------
jrumbut
Looks like a nice release. I'd be curious to hear from people who are using
FreeBSD on the server, their stories of how it works out especially vis-a-vis
working with newer developers who may lack depth in their Unix background.

------
huxflux
I love FreeBSD! It's such an amazing project. Just updated from FreeBSD 5.0
all the way up to 11.4 without any issues whatsoever. Tremendous.

------
bromonkey
Rolled up to 11.4 a bit ago, easy and painless as ever. Thanks to all the devs
that put time into this OS.

------
29athrowaway
Sad that it does not ship with Gnome 3.36, one of the best releases of Gnome
ever.

~~~
gen3
OpenBSD is the BSD that supports Gnome

FreeBSD is the BSD that supports KDE

or thats how it's been explained to me. So if you want Gnome you should try
OpenBSD.

~~~
nix23
>or thats how it's been explained to me

FreeBSD supports KDE, Gnome, i3 and and and.... OpenBSD or FreeBSD don't have
a preferred DE, next time check for your self and don't believe in
'explanation's' from some douche-bag.

~~~
gen3
I tried to install KDE onto OpenBSD and was greeted with a wildly out of date
install; while they might not have a DE specifically sponsored on their
website, it’s self evident which DE is preferred by the people that maintain
and use the OS.

Gnome is updated to 3.36.3.1, while KDE is on the stale 3.5.10 in OpenBSD

In FreeBSD Gnome is updated to 3.28.2, while KDE is on 5.19.0.20.04.2

The Gnome on FreeBSD is 2 years stale, and KDE on OpenBSD is about 12.

~~~
anthk
If any, the best DE for OpenBSD is XFCE, and the most liked WM is CWM and FVWM
by inertia.

~~~
smabie
cwm is really amazing, it's unfortunate it's not more powerful. Does
everything a floating WM should do and nothing more.

~~~
anthk
I miss an "always on top" setting, but, beside of that, it's good.

~~~
smabie
I meant 'popular', not 'powerful'

~~~
anthk
But that feature exists since forever. It's a useful one.

