Wine ported to OpenBSD (marc.info)

There is no kms drm or 3D acceleration for nvidia on OpenBSD.

recent only office builds are not quite there, but far superior to office Web.

Subscription-based licensing requires periodic check-ins, but perpetual product key-based licensing is available, though compared to the subscription versions, the release cadence for new features is slow.

The online component of traditional apps like Excel works best as a means for sharing documents, with the web UIs useful for reading and light editing, and the same documents fully editable in the native apps.

Posix is more an art form documenting the far gone past rather than a practical tool

But the only concrete example I can think of is that `cat -n a b`, if `a` doesn't end in a newline, produces something that is obviously not what the user wanted. GNU cat does it right.

I didn't report it to the openbsd people because I didn't want them to yell at me that `-n` is nonstandard anyway with no "right" behavior, so I should STFU. Which would be what I'd expect from having reported problems in the past.

one of the reasons that BSDs are less popular is because of the community advice of "The best supported machine is a ten + year old thinkpad."

so yeah you're right there isn't a finish line, but you do need to keep up with current stuff enough to give a possible fan base a decent selection of hardware to run the thing on.

in other words : if the companies that the BSDs already had a hard time keeping up with hasten development via LLMs the gap will grow ever wider until a critical point is hit and the thing becomes irrelevant.

if linux is the only show in town that supports flashy-hardware-Z then it's going to drive audience migration.

the thing that has allowed openbsd to adopt new things so slowly is a rock-solid set of core competencies; the amount that bsd is entrenched into the internet itself makes irrelevance hard to imagine -- but it's still a facet.

I still hear people bitch that BSDs don't support WiFi, and that hasn't been true in years and years.

Ppl praise the stance of OpenBSD/NetBSD and what-not. That's commendable, but then close the tab, open their spotify and get back to agentic programming for their proprietary company source. But God-forbid if OpenBSD turns anything more than a museum OS, full of purity but with a user-base of five. Because the GPU doesn't work properly, the sound drive is clunjy, wifi might work, etc.

LLMs could port huge amount of drivers to both system with a fraction of the effort. Specs can be implemented easily and properly. Then of course, you need to test and that takes time, but it's technically easier and more ppl could contribute.

I get the feeling, but they're not OpenBSD a favor, if anything else I feel the exact opposite is happening.

In this case, reading the link you're replying under, it's being able to mount a disk formatted with a popular filesystem. The alternative here is waiting for a human to type this relatively "solved" problem, as a procedural requirement, more than anything.

So, it can easily mean "things won't work in this OS". But, that's to be expected with FreeBSD, for legitimately good (from the perspective of FreeBSD) reasons.

Whether you like this new reality or not, it is an objective fact that LLMs are the silver bullet Fred Brooks told us didn't exist—multiplying development speed by 10x or more—and that if you're not using them you are hobbling yourself. This especially goes for a "security-focused" OS like OpenBSD, because AI is more diligent about finding vulnerabilities and can do so without rest. Meaning that if you're serious about security, you are using AI to harden your software... and if not, someone else is using it to hack you.

Theo de Raadt would spin in his grave — after the security implications of this to OpenBSD gives him a fatal aneurysm.

Either that, or he'll surprise-launch OpenLLM, a model bundled in the next OpenBSD release that produces driver code free of security bugs.

Copyright is dead.

"Those that do not learn history" and so forth.

I mean, it's not like the BSDs stagnated and lost ground to Linux because of copyright lawsuits... oh, wait!

https://events.eurobsdcon.org/media/2026/submissions/ZGDXQR/...

Talked to bluhm@ after that talk in Brussels and the general feeling (from what I can remember from the conversation) so far is that there is a large increase in overall reports (good and bad), but that the severity of what is reported has not really increased. This also mirrors my own experience from reading source-changes@. In essence, it seems like we have known how to build secure software for the last thirty or so years, just that most do not seem to have bothered to do so.