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fmajid 4 hours ago

My home router, firewall and VPN gateway is an OpenBSD box, Intel N100 with quad 2.5G Ethernet. To be frank, Linux has better support for fighting bufferbloat with FC-CoDel, but pf is so much saner than Linux firewalls it's not even close.

WiFi is handled separately by a Ubiquiti UniFi system, but I don't trust Ubiquiti not to exfiltrate data after their underhanded attempt to turn telemetry on a few years ago. OpenBSD WiFI is somewhat mediocre, but it has improved in this release with experimental support for WiFi 6 after years of being stuck at 802.11n.

The closest you will get to the OpenBSD experience on Linux is with Alpine Linux.

seniorThrowaway 4 hours ago | parent [-]

>so much saner than Linux firewalls it's not even close.

This is a big one for me. I've run openBSD and Linux custom boxes as SoHo routers and I just cannot stand Linux firewalls, I've never liked them and IPTables is just terrible. Yes I know there are wrappers around it now but it's still the default everywhere and still used by lots of other software like Docker. I'm using OPNSense now which is FreeBSD based instead of completely rolling my own but I love that it is still BSD under the hood.

One differing opinion I will offer is that I find NixOS to be the Linux distro most in the openBSD spirit despite it being very different from a UX and config management perspective. Alpine is interesting, but it has its own security and compatibility issues, especially around MUSL libc which I have had cause many strange downstream issues over the years, I just hit one recently in JVM GC caused by its memory allocation implementation. I've stopped using alpine altogether because of them.