> On Jan 23, 2021, at 09:34, tetrahe...@danwin1210.me wrote:
>
> 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.
Yeah, absolutely. I won’t pretend I didn’t read all the same sources you
mentioned. I hope I didn’t come across as proud or stuffy; I’m a nobody, and I
could use a lot of hand holding myself. I totally hear you.
I don’t speak for the developers, but it’s been stated many times that they
make the system for themselves, and if we can use it, great. Growing the number
of new users would be much easier than multiplying the number of competent,
contributing developers, and it can turn into us feeling like they owe us
things they never signed up for. There is plenty of help, for sure, but hand
holding is not likely to be a priority any time soon. That’s just how it is,
and I can’t fault anyone for it.
Perhaps someone will make some changes to the installer or documentation. But,
I can tell you, a diff, or at least a proposed specific solution, will always
go a lot further than pointing out a potential problem, simply because there
are relatively few developers and they all have things they are busy with.
I’m not sure what the best solution would be, but if you’ve got an idea, you
should definitely submit it.
I hope it all works out for you and that any perceived faults or difficulties
won’t keep you from finding all the advantages of OpenBSD.
