# doas

8 Hacker News commenters recommended doas and 1 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 4 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** People recommend doas as a small sudo alternative with a core of just over 500 lines, originally from OpenBSD, for its simplicity and low footprint.

## Why people recommend it

- Small, simple codebase (3 comments): "Rightly both doas and the *-rs drops ins intend to drop most of those unnecessary features." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46859420)) "Even OpenBSD gave up and implmented their own simplified replacement (doas)." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46859208)) "doas(1) has a core of just over 500 lines" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46252463))
- OpenBSD-style minimal design (2 comments): "Even OpenBSD gave up and implmented their own simplified replacement (doas)." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46859208)) "I like the openbsd approach of small DSL (pf, doas)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48982667))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [sudo](https://hackerapproved.com/p/sudo.md): 34 recommend
- [sudo-rs](https://hackerapproved.com/p/sudo-rs.md): 17 recommend
- [run0 (systemd)](https://hackerapproved.com/p/run0.md): 8 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "doas", https://hackerapproved.com/p/doas/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).