alt Hacker News>in one of the most heavily audited codebases
The idea of "OpenBSD is super duper secure" is mostly a fiction. Their prime claim to fame, "only two remote holes in the default install in a squillion years", is pretty meaningless because the default install doesn't really do anything, so as soon as you install packages to make the system useful you're beyond their security claims.
Classified workstations in National Security contexts? They run Windows.
Red network routers? They're Cisco, Juniper, PAN, etc. It's all COTS stuff. OpenBSD is mostly a LARP.
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The base install includes a firewall, http server, load-balancer/proxy, ldap server, caching DNS resolver, ssh server, nfs server, dhcp server, smtp server, bgp routing daemon, virtual machine subsystem, and a lot of other stuff I'm probably forgetting.
Cisco runs mostly Linux. Juniper uses freebsd and Linux.
OpenBSD was used under NDA's in some really sensitive corpos with Gnome2 setups and some RDP/Citrix clients and even Perl?+GTK2 wireless graphical assisatnt.
https://www.mtier.org/solutions/consulting/
If OpenBSD had a stable GeFS setup as a filesystem -still WIP- (and toad/hotplugd for external FS' mounting) it could get customers in no time, because today except for CUDA the rest can virtually work 100% the same as any Linux distro.
I think there's this cultural bias about the 'boy genius open source coder' that of course isn't true at all. Open source code is at the same quality as corporate written closed source code, in general. There have been studies on this and open vs closed source code isn't very different in terms of defects and exploits.
The problem is the people most willing to buy into this cargo cult mentality are techies, so tech forums are the last place to really have this conversation based on facts. Hence why your comment is barely visible here due to its low karma.
> is pretty meaningless because the default install doesn't really do anything
Which is a good thing. An important thing. The reason you're stuck in a perpetual update cycle for most Linux distros and for Windows is that they ship with an insane number of things that most users have no need for. Yeah, every laptop definitely needs NetBIOS and iSCSI and UPnP turned on by default.
It's true that everything you add on top of the OpenBSD baseline increases your attack surface, but it's a saner approach than shipping with a gigantic attack surface and then forcing you to know about and disable the things you don't need.
> Classified workstations in National Security contexts? They run Windows.
Which is almost certainly a combination of the complexities of govt IT procurement, the needs of non-technical users who may only be familiar with Windows & MS Office, and the enterprise management features of Windows that aren't as good in most other OSes.