On Fri, Jan 22, 2021 at 04:44:31PM -0800, Bryan Wright wrote:
but to set up FDE I had to reference the official FAQ
Referring to the official documentation is a key distinction between successful
OpenBSD use and that of many other systems; the early that gets hammered home
the better, right? It’s practically unGoogleable, if that’s a word.
It can be super frustrating at times, but half blindly following a
guide or entering some unexplained command from Stackoverflow, while
being much easier, has got to be among the most dangerous patterns we
can adopt. Using OpenBSD has been a very humbling experience, but I’ve
learned so, so much by being forced to adopt better practices.
For the record, I started by reading the FAQ from start to finish,
before I installed anything.
Unfortunately it's a little difficult to connect to reality (or even
remember) much of what one reads when one does this.
"Does this obscure technical reference apply to my situation? I don't
know, I haven't worked with anything related to it yet!"
To make matters worse, there are an awful lot of details that are not
realistic to get out of the official documentation... I would have had
to read a significant percentage of all the manpages, and a lot of
mailing list traffic, in order to arrive at the same steps provided in
how-tos like <https://www.c0ffee.net/blog/openbsd-on-a-laptop/>.
Could I have done that? Sure. Would spending 40-80 hours reading
documentation just to get a laptop set up, when I don't know whether I'm
going to use it for more than experimental purposes, have been a good
use of my time? Certainly not.
I have no quarrel with OpenBSD requiring new users to immediately dive
into parts of the system that other operating systems try as hard as
possible to hide... but for practical reasons it does seem necessary to
do a little hand-holding along the way.
I am therefore extremely grateful to Cullum Smith and the other "OpenBSD
on a laptop" howtos for making it feasible to get this far.
