Comment by margalabargala
6 hours ago
What does "behind" actually mean, though?
Think about how far Linux has/hasn't come in the last 10 years. The user experience is nicer, drivers "just work" more, there's more support for more stuff...but at the end of the day, the actual computing experience is mostly the same today as when I installed Debian back in 2016. It's polish, interoperability, etc that's improved.
Maybe VR takes off and takes over the desktop, and then openBSD can't keep up with that, but I don't think that's likely. So what are they trying to "keep up" with?
> What does "behind" actually mean, though?
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.
As one example I can think of, there are a ton of devices that only work on Windows (or Windows and MacOS). The audio interface I have is one example: its "official drivers" are Windows and MacOS only. I know that someone is trying to make Linux drivers for it, using LLMs, because if there's one thing LLMs are very good at, it's RE and figuring out how hardware works. One of my other friends made an accessible equivalent to the Razer app for his Razer headphones because the official app is complete shit.
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Bugfixes, feature implementation, and hardware support will not be able to be added to OpenBSD with the speed that they are added to Linux.
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.