doas
Shares rank 42 of 86 privilege escalation tools by recommenders
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.
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.
9 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 8
- criticize it
- 1
- approval share
- 89%
Recommended in 4 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 8 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 8 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 4 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Small, simple codebase
“Rightly both doas and the *-rs drops ins intend to drop most of those unnecessary features.”
Comment from 2 Feb 2026 in “Todd C. Miller – sudo Maintainer for over 30 years” “Even OpenBSD gave up and implmented their own simplified replacement (doas).”
Comment from 2 Feb 2026 in “Todd C. Miller – sudo Maintainer for over 30 years” “doas(1) has a core of just over 500 lines”
Comment from 13 Dec 2025 in “Capsudo: Rethinking sudo with object capabilities” OpenBSD-style minimal design
“Even OpenBSD gave up and implmented their own simplified replacement (doas).”
Comment from 2 Feb 2026 in “Todd C. Miller – sudo Maintainer for over 30 years” “I like the openbsd approach of small DSL (pf, doas)”
Comment from 20 Jul 2026 in “Hyprland 0.55 announced the switch to Lua for its config files”
Other privilege escalation tools people recommend
The four most recommended other privilege escalation tools, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
See all 86 privilege escalation tools, rankedWhat people said
7 of the 11 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“I like the openbsd approach of small DSL (pf, doas)”
“I use doas for its low footprint on my Linux machine”
“You should look up "doas". It might enlighten you.”
“even doas had too much feature creep”
“Rightly both doas and the *-rs drops ins intend to drop most of those unnecessary features.”
“Even OpenBSD gave up and implmented their own simplified replacement (doas).”
“doas(1) has a core of just over 500 lines”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.