
OpenBSD Is Now My Workstation - sogubsys
https://sogubsys.com/openbsd-is-now-my-workstation-operating-system/
======
lifeisstillgood
For years I lived in FreeBSD world - servers and laptops. I was fighting the
good fight and rationalised that having to only remember one location for
network services was a win.

Then I took a second look. I realised that I was spending waaayy too much time
getting the laptop usable (usually wifi) and not going enough using it

I bailed for ubuntu and I cannot remember where the network confit is and hate
the GUI but I have stopped caring and I just do my work

Sometimes I feel dirty.

~~~
gbmor
I switched from Linux to OpenBSD, then to FreeBSD as my primary OS on my
laptop, which involved a bit more set-up time than I was accustomed to with
Linux, previously. Eventually I grew tired of the manual setup for so many
things and bailed for Debian Sid.

It feels like a nice middle-ground. Most things work out of the box, but I
still get to tinker and scratch that itch.

~~~
munmaek
I went the same route. Arch -> Void -> FreeBSD -> OpenBSD -> Debian Stretch
(no desktop, just xorg + i3).

I love it. No more random updates breaking things like in Arch. I can install
things relatively smoothly and get them running quickly. If I really do need
the latest version of something I can still install from source. Etc.

I just want to work on things, not configure things endlessly and deal with
random bugs :-)

~~~
gbmor
That is _exactly_ how I feel.

------
lone_haxx0r
I hate the fact that Thinkpads are the laptops with the best OpenBSD support.

I dislike Thinkpads for two reasons:

\- They're made by Lenovo. A couple of years ago, Lenovo bundled malware in
the BIOS of their laptops [superfish incident]. For that reason, I won't ever
again buy a single product from them, since I can't trust them.

\- They're ugly. I find most current laptops ugly, so this may be _my_ fault,
and by itself it wouldn't be enough of a reason not to buy one. But still.

~~~
architect64
For what it's worth, the Superfish and LSE BIOS scandals didn't apply to
ThinkPads. I think Lenovo understands that they have too many serious business
and gov clients using ThinkPads to risk doing something silly like that to
their professional-grade ThinkPad brand.

~~~
RaleyField
> For what it's worth

Not much in my book. The problem isn't Superfish, the problem is leadership
that allowed it.

~~~
Stratoscope
ThinkPad is under rather different leadership from Lenovo's consumer division
that had the Superfish debacle on IdeaPads and the like. Sure, they are part
of one corporation at the very top, but you don't have to go very far down the
org chart before they split into separate teams and leadership.

ThinkPad is from the old IBM teams in Raleigh and Yamato. Lenovo made their
own laptops before buying IBM's personal computer division, and that line (and
its management) became IdeaPad.

If you're troubled by leadership that would allow Superfish (as I am), buy a
ThinkPad, not an IdeaPad.

Previous discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20240533](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20240533)

~~~
lone_haxx0r
I shouldn't have to learn about the internal structure of a company in order
to buy a laptop without malware.

Maybe Lenovo should have thought about their internal structure and their
brand reputation before installing malware on their laptops, or maybe not
(because they don't care about clients like me, they care about the 90% of
bosses that buy bulks of Thinkpads and don't know what firmware is). But
anyway, it wasn't a rogue engineer who did it, it was Lenovo, and in my eyes:
Lenovo ships malware.

~~~
Stratoscope
Of course it's up to you to decide what computer to buy or not to buy, based
on whatever criteria you see fit.

But I don't think you're doing yourself a favor by ruling out ThinkPads just
because of a boneheaded decision that Lenovo's consumer division made a few
years ago. ThinkPad and IdeaPad really are two separate organizations under
one corporate umbrella.

Superfish was not something handed down from on high, it was the bright idea
of the consumer group. The ThinkPad team would never go along with something
like that; it's not in their DNA and it would destroy their business. Their
bread and butter isn't you and me, it's large organizations with IT and
security departments who deploy hundreds of ThinkPads at a time and look very
closely at the software on them.

Only offering food for thought, it's cool with me whether you buy ThinkPads or
something else. :-)

~~~
patrick5415
Personally, I agree with the op. If we want to send a message that malware in
our BIOSs is absolutely unacceptable, it makes zero sense to give Lenovo any
business.

~~~
Stratoscope
I don't see how boycotting ThinkPads sends a message that BIOS malware is
unacceptable. ThinkPads never had that, and never would.

Anyway, I don't usually buy or not buy a computer to send a message. I buy one
because it meets my business and personal needs. I've been using ThinkPads for
over 20 years, and they have served me very well.

You may choose differently, and of course that's fine.

~~~
RaleyField
> I don't see how boycotting ThinkPads sends a message that BIOS malware is
> unacceptable

It sends a message to other manufacturers: add malware at your own peril. I
frankly consider it unethical to buy or recommend products from companies,
like Lenovo, who demonstrated anti-consumer behavior because it perpetuates
bad behavior as companies think consumers will forget or forgive them.

> ThinkPads never had that, and never would.

That is speculative. I can't know that whatever harmful and irrational
environment that led to Superfish in IdeaPad won't affect ThinkPads in the
future. Even in the most generous understanding where IdeaPad is a different,
physically separate branch of the company, and Superfish was an act of
incompetence and not outright malice I can't be expected to keep up with the
insider intrigue of the company to notice any changes that could negatively
affect me. More importantly, leadership is still responsible for setting
irrational environment that lead to Superfish, whatever that environment was.
This is a multi-billion dollar company, there is no excuse for such
incompetence.

------
dijit
I like openbsd. I like their attitude (even if many don’t) I like what they’ve
given to the UNIX-likes, and what they strip away due to complexity (removal
of Bluetooth) or lack of decent UX (wpa_supplicant), or just potential issues
(removal of Hyperthreading)

I know it’s probably controversial to mention it; but I’m also glad they
didn’t buy into the code of conduct saga that waved over FreeBSD and
eventually Linux.

I’ve used the OS as a daily driver, it certainly was nice, albeit slow. I
would go back if I could avoid some of the Linux/MacOS stuff I really need. I
still use it on personal servers and I still really love it.

I send them €50/mo but I don’t feel like it’s enough. I wish they had more
resources to bring things like AC Wi-Fi to the fold. Truly impressive work to
all involved.

~~~
wrycoder
I don't think there are many who send €50/mo, kudos to you! Few of their
corporate users give much back at all.

I used OpenBSD as my workstation a decade ago and also ran it on a firewall
box. However, upgrading the system every six months is tedious: basically, you
manually download the files, overwrite the kernel and userland core, and then
do a three way merge of /etc. Plus there's a bit of manual work required to
deleted unused files and account for moved files:

[https://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade65.html](https://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade65.html)

After that, you still have to upgrade the ports tree (which has gotten
easier).

Note that skipping upgrades is not supported.

Security updates between the six month upgrades are handled by monitoring the
security list and downloading and applying patches as instructed.

If you are running a bunch of identical servers professionally, it's not much
of a burden, but it is if you are upgrading one workstation and a firewall
box. I got tight on time and went back to Debian/apt.

Does anyone here know how to do this more efficiently?

(It is a really nice system, and the man pages are superb.)

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
Somewhat like sibling comment, I'd be really tempted to put /home on its own
filesystem, control/configure everything else with Ansible (or Chef or Puppet
or [...]), and just do a fresh install every 6 months. For bonus points,
automate the install part with an autoinstall file. Keep in mind, there's
setup cost here; it's easy for me to say because I'm already controlling my
system with Ansible, but if you're just getting started it's harder.

------
davesmith1983
I've been using OpenBSD since 3.8.

OpenBSD is a great system because it makes sense. If you want to find out how
something works. You go to the manual page. A lot of questions about the
Operating system can be found on the FAQ.

Much like Arch Linux, I don't find myself needing to Google around forums
trying to find a solution. I go to the docs and 99% of the time I will find
the solution.

The reasons for using it aren't really that exciting. It is a basic system
that works well.

------
hdfbdtbcdg
He literally can't do his job on this OS... He runs his critical workloads
(Linux virtual machines) on another laptop with Linux installed.

~~~
4ad
But he can. I have no idea why he dismissed vmd.

~~~
sogubsys
I need to run Windows workstation and server VMs, too. (In the screenshot, I
show Windows).

Additionally, the Linux VM cons with vmd are off-putting, but I'll be getting
them working. I even saw a blog post about running docker containers on linux
on vmd. So, I'm going to try that out soon :D

------
loop0
I tried openbsd in my thinkpad x220. IDK if the processor only make a huge
difference (mine being core i3 2.1ghz), but what I saw was a slow system
experience, opening firefox for the first time (after boot) took a decade. I
would experience slugishness everytime I closed a tab. And I was using cwm
which is supposed to be even more lightweight than xfce4. I'm upgrading my
motherboard to have the same processor as the author, maybe I will give
another shot.

~~~
dmm
Were you using a traditional spinning rust hard drive? OpenBSD is basically
unusable without an SSD because of the filesystem they use.

~~~
edwintorok
I think you need to enable Soft Updates:
[https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq14.html#SoftUpdates](https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq14.html#SoftUpdates)
I don't know why it is not done by default, running without soft updates feels
like using a filesystem without a journal.

~~~
sogubsys
Indeed, it was recommended by several people that I add that and noatime.
That's active on my mount points.

------
akulbe
I have Linux-on-the-Windows-Desktop. WSL, that is. For my use case, it's
fucking amazing. I've come full circle.

I switched from Windows to Linux in 1999. I switched from Linux to Mac in
2003.

I've used Linux natively, it turned into a hack-fest. I spent more time trying
to get things working, than getting ACTUAL work done. Using the Linux platform
for development is fantastic.

It's when you want to do non-dev related productivity stuff that it got
frustrating for me. You had to have workarounds galore. Or you had to have
Wine, or you had to have a full Windows VM (when $APP didn't have a good nix-y
equivalent).

macOS _was_ great when the computer hardware was prioritized. Then at some
point, Apple shifted focus. It _was_ all about a cohesive experience, and
integration galore. Then it shifted. Now it's all about
iOS/iPadOS/watchOS/tvOS. macOS and its hardware have largely taken a back
seat. See the MacBook Pro 2016-.

When Apple releases the 2019 MBP and it _IMMEDIATELY_ goes onto the keyboard
repair program... you know that in spite of all lip service to the contrary,
that Apple gives no fucks about the Apple computer, like they do their gravy
train products.

I needed an environment that'd let me still target Linux development, but
stay-the-eff-out-of-my-way for productivity stuff. Windows it is. I know
that's not what HNer's wanna hear, but the cultural shift at MS and using MS
for a dev platform... it's been surprising, and amazing. Not what I'd expected
in a million years. #flyingpigs #flameon

Anyone else experience a similar evolution?

~~~
moksly
I’ve made the same transitions from win to Linux to Mac and for the same
reasons. I’m going back to Linux though.

I’ve used windows professionally all that time and Windows 10 is the least
productive it’s ever been, for me anyway. It’s just such a horrible experience
and I don’t know exactly why that is. I didn’t even mind CMD and powershell
and it’s not that I dislike Microsoft. I recently traded my personal g-suite
in for a Office365 essentials plan, and I’m rather happy with it, but I just
can’t get on the right food of Windows 10. I wish I could, the Surface Books
are genuinely the modern MacBook Pro, but Ubuntu is just a better experience.

Of course there is still a few quirks, the only one that’s really bothered me
is the lack of a Linux One Drive client, which should frankly tell you how
little Microsoft has really changed. They don’t intend to be good for Linux,
they want Linux to be good for them.

~~~
akulbe
To discount the sweeping changes in the company culture because they haven't
yet worked on what you want them to, don't you think that's a little short-
sighted?

I wanted Microsoft to release a new terminal. It took 2 years. Now that it's
out, I want it to support panes. There's only so much they can do at once.

I wanted a good consistent UI experience for Linux. It's been decades and that
still hasn't happened. The groups maintaining KDE and Gnome can hardly agree
_among themselves_ much less with the userbase.

At this point, I'm more inclined to believe that Microsoft will get things
done faster, than the Linux community will.

I'm not slamming Linux, either. Just being realistic after many years/attempts
of being user. Better to have a stable and consistent base to work from. If
you ask me, that's why so many folks who target Linux for development do it
from a non-Linux platform. It makes for a much less frustrating experience.

~~~
moksly
We’ve worked with Microsoft for decades and I personally really like them as
an enterprise partner, but I’m just not seeing those sweeping cultural changes
you are.

They’ve certainly opened up, they’ve even open sourced .Net with core. It
works with Linux, but it works better if you feed it security through Active
Directoy, monitor it with Application insights and deploy it in Azure. There
is now a CLI, VSC and Visual Studio for Mac, but Visual Studio for Windows is
still light years better. And that’s really the general story. They’ve opened
up, but I see it much more as Microsoft understanding the market again than a
“new” Microsoft. I’m fine with it, it’s certainly nice to have better
products, but I do think it’s the same old story of getting the most out of
your environment if you buy all of it from Microsoft. I’m perfectly fine with
that by the way, they are a company after all, and if they can make better
products than they did before then cool!

I don’t personally think Windows 10 is a better product though. I find it to
be one of the most frustrating OSes I’ve ever had to use, aWd that’s why I’m
not going windows -> Linux -> Mac -> Windows like you are. I think Ubuntu is a
much better experience than Windows 10, but then, I happen to actually really
like gnome.

------
AdmiralAsshat
>Speed is Stellar

>Speed is not a concern for me.

Is he saying that speed isn't a concern for him _in general_? If so, why
mention that the speed is stellar, then? Or is he saying that the system is so
light in general that he doesn't suspect speed will become a problem down the
line?

~~~
sogubsys
You're right, my mistake in communication there.

Speed is not a concern for me because it is fast for everything I use the
laptop for. I didn't hit snags where things were slow.

I'll update the post later for clarity. Thank you for pointing it out.

~~~
blackhaz
Great stuff. Also a big fan of OpenBSD, but what put me off eventually is lack
of VMs, Wine and... speed. On Thinkpad T410 (ancient) it was noticeably slower
than FreeBSD almost on any task, especially video playback in the browser. Not
really related to the file system use. Perhaps, the effect is not as
pronounced on CPUs of these days. Software selection was also a little
claustrophobic.

I'm now using FreeBSD as my main machine for almost a year - really happy with
the outcome, but even there some areas, like neural networks for example, are
difficult. (But Keras and Theano are there!)

In many aspects OpenBSD was amazing. It needed very little tinkering with to
get running properly, configs and ps ax were super-clean. Amazing environment.

~~~
edwintorok
There is some work done about VMs:
[https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq16.html](https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq16.html)

------
stonogo
OpenBSD will download your wifi firmware during first boot (post-install) if
there is a configured internet connection (i.e. ethernet).

~~~
microcolonel
A lot of Linux distros just ship a lot of this firmware, not expecting to be
litigated against for it; and it seems to work out.

~~~
petecox
c.f. Debian, which has a policy to exclude non-free firmware from its
installation media.

The onus is on the user to themselves supply the firmware.

[https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch06s04.html.en](https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch06s04.html.en)

------
cubano
So, you are giving up what seems like your 2 most important apps (Evernote and
VMs) just so you can run X operating system on a laptop?

Excuse me, but this just doesn't make any sense. Applications are the reason
we use computers, not OSs, and to have to make such sacrifices is IMHO just
silly. The whole OS holy-war thing seems so played out to me...its 2019 just
use whatever works..no one care really.

Add to that the apparent political nature of the openbsd "manifesto" and
guidelines and I'll just say that I, personally, am not a fan of mixing
politics and OSs.

~~~
sogubsys
I understand what you're saying but I fear you may be misunderstanding my
intentions and opinions. I feel you may be injecting your own issues with
things into my blog post. Please allow me explain.

The importance of having a secure and correct OS is most important to me (I
feel OpenBSD is most appropriate and interesting here). I feel the value of
OpenBSD outweighs the lose of two applications. I'm not part of an OS war, I
frankly don't care what anyone uses. I just posted about about my experience
on my blog (blogging is a new/rare thing for me and I am proud of the post, it
took hours to do) and frankly didn't expect the post to HN to do anything (I
posted on a whim, a coworker next to me loves the site) :)

I intended to migrate off of Evernote at some point, it is a tough band-aid to
pull off after getting used to it for 10 years. Not having native VirtualBox
on the machine is definitely a dislike, but isn't the end of the world. I only
need it for labs. NetBSD can apparently run in vmm, too, just have to pass a
boot option for the serial console (but I haven't tried it).

For Evernote, I had to ask myself what I'm actually using Evernote for. I'm
solely using it for having minimally rich text and website scrapes stored in
notebooks, and all notes being searchable. And I want it available wherever I
am. I don't use OSR, non-text notes, pro features, related notes, etc. So, I
question why I'm still paying for it, entrusting a vendor with all my data,
and dealing with non-standard clients outside of windows/mac. Doing something
just because I've always done is a terrible pattern. Time to re-evaluate and
fix. That's what I did, and now I have an extremely portable and flexible
solution that doesn't cost me anything but time, which I'm OK with.

I make a living with Linux for high traffic web applications, I use NetBSD and
Linux for my personal servers, and OpenBSD for my workstation. I enjoy
operating systems and I'm comfortable in all of them. Each one has their own
character, their own quirks and pros and cons. One size fits all, for me, is a
fool's game. No matter what you choose, there's some price to be paid for what
you get.

And to be crystal clear: I'm not trying to change hearts and minds, or
influence others, or be part of some cool kids club. Ultimately, I'm selfish
with my hobbies, which this is, and so I do what solely is interesting to me.
If I was able to help others, that's great and I'm happy for that, but I have
no expectations.

Thank you. I hope we can be on the same page now, and I hope I was not too
verbose. Be well.

An update to the article too about VMs: Note that for VMs I'm now using Oracle
(non-distro provided) Virtualbox with their VRDP active, which is RDP for the
VM instance and not the VM OS itself, so can RDP to the VMs on the network
much better than libvirt. So, it is good enough. VirtualBox is mainly for
intensive labs or monkeying with NetBSD kernel development, which 99% of the
time I'd do at home.

~~~
CTOSian
screw the evernote, use org-mode

------
anthony_doan
I bought a used Thinkpad to use OpenBSD.

The default installation is good and the internals are easy to understand.
It's not as complicated as Linux. The security etho is what brought me to
OpenBSD and the simplicity and easy to understand how everything works made me
love it even more.

The only reason why I haven't use it much after a few months is because I
needed RStudio. I wanted to settle for tmux+vim workflow for R but I've been
busy with other stuff.

------
merlincorey
Thanks for sharing this!

I run OpenBSD on my refurbished T430, and have very similar experiences.

Glad you have moved on from Evernote to something local and parse-able!

------
gbrown_
> vmd is cool tech, for sure, but it isn’t that useful to me. It is best if
> you want to run OpenBSD virtual machines or gimped Linux virtual machines.

The use of "gimped" is poor choice of words. It would be better if the author
described specifically what fell short for them.

~~~
sogubsys
From
[https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq16.html](https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq16.html)

The following features are available:

    
    
        serial console access to the virtual machines
        tap(4) interfaces
        per-VM user/group ownership
        privilege separation
        raw, qcow2 and qcow2-derived images
        dumping and restoring of guest system memory
        virtual switch management
        pausing and unpausing VMs 
    

The following features are not available at this time:

    
    
        graphics
        snapshots
        guest SMP support
        hardware passthrough
        live migration across hosts
        live hardware change 
    

Supported guest operating systems are currently limited to OpenBSD and Linux.
As there is no VGA support yet, the guest OS must support serial console.

~~~
yellowapple
One thing I've been meaning to try doing (and probably will indeed try doing
on my "workhorse" laptop at home, which is currently insufficiently used) is
experiment with running X clients from a vmd-managed Linux VM, plus perhaps
figuring out a way to stream audio in/out of the VM (and - as icing on the
cake - video in).

If I can get reasonably decent graphics, sound, and webcam support (in order
of importance), I'd be able to return to running OpenBSD on my work laptop
(I'm currently unable to do so because there are a couple apps I use daily for
work that don't run on OpenBSD).

------
rasengan
> Update: The core dumps are due to buggy programs. OpenBSD malloc is not as
> forgiving to blatant programming errors as other implementations of malloc
> available on other Operating Systems.

What is the difference/error?

~~~
yellowapple
OpenBSD's malloc is much more strict for security reasons. A crash sucks, but
it's infinitely preferable to an undetected bug that leaks data.

Heartbleed was famously possible even when using OpenSSL on OpenBSD because
OpenSSL (if I understand right) used its own custom allocator instead of the
system malloc, thus bypassing the various attack mitigations OpenBSD's malloc
provides (and that would have prevented Heartbleed from affecting OpenBSD
systems). This (among other instances of similar behavior) is what prompted
the OpenBSD folks to fork OpenSSL into libressl.

------
fluffything
There are trade-offs involved in choosing OpenBSD for a "Work"station, and the
post covers some: lack of packages/no proper package manager (requires
recompiling with patches from source), no Docker/VMs/VirtualBox/Wine, etc.
Other are lack of drivers, etc. None of these issues are incompatible with an
Operating System design (or not really), they mostly just need extra work.

However, the blog post mentions that "for them" performance isn't an issue.
This should not be interpreted as performance being good. OpenBSD performance
can only be described with data:
[https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=8-linux-...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=8-linux-
bsd)

Even for something that the OpenBSD devs themselves are doing all the time,
compiling stuff, OpenBSD is ~20x slower than Linux. 2x slower would be
horrible. I really have no words to describe 20x slower performance. If you
are a dev working with a compiled language, imagine a 20x perf hit on compile-
times. Imagine having to patch LLVM/Clang on OpenBSD by recompiling it from
source. "Apocalyptically horrible", "worst in class", do not even make justice
for how slow OpenBSD is.

~~~
vbezhenar
> requires recompiling with patches from source

I don't think that's true. There's pkg_add and syspatch and those are
preferred methods for upgrading your system. You can recompile things from
source and I think that it's an awesome feature for hacker, who wants to
tinker with sources of some package, but that's not the only way.

~~~
fluffything
Between distro releases, if you want to apply security patches, you need to
recompile from source, because there are no binary releases.

------
user00012-ab
This article is what is wrong with bsd/linux. You have to write an article
about all the things you did to get your desktop to just work like any normal
desktop works out of the box.

In a normal world, the article should read "I installed bsd, and just used my
computer to do something useful."

~~~
sogubsys
There's more to it. It isn't a "Use OpenBSD, everything else sucks", it was
simply "I used OpenBSD on a Thinkpad T420 and let me tell you about it".

I also posted about that I tried Linux (Ubuntu), FreeBSD, and OpenBSD on the
laptop before deciding on OpenBSD. It wasn't made out of stubbornness.

It was simply the right choice for me for that laptop. And I shared my
experience getting it up to a state I was used to with my previous Linux
workstation (that this laptop replaced).

~~~
azinman2
But given the amount of steps I do think repeatedly stating how simple and
easy things were makes me think your bar is quite low. Compare installation to
macOS, it’s a million time so more complicated. If you need a FAQ to configure
your system and get wifi working, you’re doing it wrong.

(I also have installed OpenBSD before and found the whole process actually
quite complicated and documentation insufficient. YMMV)

~~~
sogubsys
That may be true, my bar may be low. I started with early BSD and Linux in
1996, and have been happy with minimal, cheap, and command line ever since.

My experience or expectations others may not share. I didn't truly consider
that when writing the blog post.

The stuff I complain about is probably less than 5% of the entire experience.
So, almost all the time OpenBSD is out of my way and I go about doing what I
did with a Linux workstation.

It is mostly web browser and terminals for me, with random apps here and there
like gimp or something.

I'm learning kernel and assembly programming and penetration testing, so my
use case probably differs from the average user experience, I'd guess.

I'm just a geek enjoying geeking out :)

------
auraham
I am attached to Ubuntu because of apt, my development stack (python, numpy,
scipy, matplotlib, and so on), and i3 as window manager. I would like to give
it a try, but I am not sure if these applications are available in OpenBSD.

~~~
basscomm
Apt isn't available for OpenBSD, but the rest of the apps you listed are:
[https://cdn.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/6.5/packages/amd64/](https://cdn.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/6.5/packages/amd64/)

------
peter_d_sherman
Excerpt:

"Speed is Stellar

The speed of the system is stellar. I feel like it is faster than the Linux
and FreeBSD installations, but I don’t have proof of it. I suspect there is
less bloat to weight things down and the hardware support for Thinkpads is
super in OpenBSD."

One of the hallmarks of a good Operating System...

------
lacampbell
Less 'mainstream' OS's seem more viable to me right now, because pretty much
every bit of software I use these days runs in either a terminal or a browser.
With termux I feel like I could use just an android phone if I had to.

------
sogubsys
Thanks to everyone for sharing their opinions, feedback, and help! I truly
appreciate it and was not expecting my blog post to explode like it did.

I am grateful for your kindness and hope you have a great time hacking away :)

------
waynesonfire
BSD OS's are very appealing to me given the infiltration of systemd on linux.
I'm very excited to be deploying FreeBSD on my homelab network.

------
stabbles
Does anyone know the status of Bluetooth on OpenBSD? I believe it does not
ship Bluez by default?

~~~
gbrown_
It was removed [1] and there aren't plans to bring it back as far as I'm
aware. Though you may be surprised in that you can get away without Bluetooth
support for some things, e.g. [2].

[1] [https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-
cvs&m=140511572108715&w=2](https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-
cvs&m=140511572108715&w=2)

[2] [https://xosc.org/bluetooth.html](https://xosc.org/bluetooth.html)

------
vasili111
I wish BSD systems had better support for hardware.

------
markhahn
surely "my workstation is now openbsd".

fwiw, didn't mention anything at all that would make me budge from linux...

~~~
sogubsys
That's OK, I was posting about my experience without intentions to change
hearts and minds of others.

I'm just a geek playing around, ya know.

