I'm a bit surprised he uses it for his desktop. I was always under the impression that BSD is great for servers and the like but not so great for normal use.
Is BSD a suitable alternative to Linux to use for my development laptop?
Does OpenBSD have any "certified" laptops where everything is more-or-less guaranteed to work out of the box? Something like that would go a long way towards increasing adoption.
Essentially that's 'thinkpad' & anything else from lenovo coming as second. I also saw a large uptick of Dell laptops (the latitude series). Now, the thing with laptops is - they all lie.
One model can ship with 5 different wifi chips and they are never provided on the spec sheet - same for other components. So you have the highest chance with specific models but it still depends on the guts that were shipped with your specific device.
If you don't depend on anything that Windows or Linux-specific, it is :-). Modern standards for portability are a bit... relaxed, to use an elegant word.
But yeah, OpenBSD makes a very good desktop OS.
OpenBSD also has a pretty good "eat your own food" policy, which is why (unlike in the case of other COUGHFREECOUGH BSDs) you won't see OpenBSD developers running OS X.
Sure they do. I personally know a few who use OS X, and I even saw someone using Windows!
Whether the scope of this phenomena differs between FreeBSD and OpenBSD, I can't say. Speaking for myself, I run OpenBSD as a desktop on ThinkPads and I am very happy with it. In fact, I am so happy with OpenBSD, I will even tolerate poorer battery life on laptops to use it and to avoid Linux.
It was somewhat tongue-in-cheek -- you're right, I should have made that clear. I was referencing a tweet in which one of you was (jokingly) remarking how many FreeBSD developers seem to run something else on their laptop.
> In fact, I am so happy with OpenBSD, I will even tolerate poorer battery life on laptops to use it and to avoid Linux.
This is exactly why OpenBSD, in my opinion, is currently failing at their stated goal of "Provide the best development platform possible." (as 'stsp stated).
If you get poorer battery life on a platform and still use it, you are doing something very contrary to like 99% of all laptop users, including developers. Now I'm fine if OpenBSD says "We don't care about that, we're a server OS", but there should be some big red stickers saying "We have terrible battery life on laptops" on the BSD websites.
It's not terrible, just worse. On an X240, it was about 60-70% of what I could get from optimized Linux. Before you say that's terrible I will say that stock Ubuntu only got 70%-80% of optimized Linux too. So OpenBSD was only slightly worse than Ubuntu in this regard.
Sure, Linux in general can be optimized much further than stock Ubuntu, but that's work I'd prefer not to do. If it's important to you, sure, go ahead and do it!
Battery life is important to me, but even more important to me is having more reliable networking, and network tools I can actually understand and use. Ever tried to set a GRE tunnel in NetworkManager?
And sure, I can chose not use to NetworkManager and Ubuntu and do everything "the old fashioned way" in Linux too. I can install Gentoo and make it work without all that, but that's work I prefer not to do. OpenBSD does what I want from it from the default install. Nothing else to tinker with.
> Battery life is important to me, but even more important to me is having more reliable networking, and network tools I can actually understand and use. Ever tried to set a GRE tunnel in NetworkManager?
I have no doubt that doing advanced network stuff is easier in OpenBSD than Linux -- but remember I was talking about average users. How often does your average desktop or laptoo user need to set up a GRE tunnel?
Overall, I see your viewpoint, and I think you see mine too. OpenBSD is a more reliable OS for servers and in general headless stuff. That being said, given your optimism, I will try out OpenBSD again on a laptop.
It's not true that openbsd devs don't care about battery life.
Check the recent C-state work by guenther@.
apmd and cpu freq scaling has recently been fixed for multiprocessor system.
But these things can take time to work on new machines. Unlike Linux and Windows, we don't get device drivers written for us by Intel employees in time for their product launch.
Well my wife uses the OpenBSD laptop probably much more than me now. Main things I hear?
- it doesn't break random stuff on upgrades
- just works, if something worked yesterday it works today
Yeah, and that's on OpenBSD -current upgraded about once a week - that has the perception of being more stable than Ubuntu, Archlinux & Debian.
I didn't notice battery live degradation but I never ran Linux on that laptop. I do notice performance decrease on Firefox but at this point it's hard to pin point if it's the OS & SMP support (which the developers actively point out as an active area of focus) or Firefox itself (also being actively worked on by upstream).
All in all, my wife is using the OpenBSD laptop daily and I don't hear here complaining that much.
Actually OpenBSD is really great for a desktop especially on laptops - the only downside is almost non existent nvidia support, though you will be fine with intel & most radeons.
The interviewee is involved with the xfce4 ports/packages and by amazing coincidence I'm using that DE under OpenBSD 5.8 now on my old Thinkpad. All works fine and I forget which free system I'm actually using sometimes.
Some desktop differences from Linux: no graphical wifi manager that I'm aware of, there are various scripts floating about, or you just use ifconfig from a terminal as root. NTFS not writeable (can read fine). On the upside, sound just works as does suspend &c.
The biggest obstacle I found when I started to try OpenBSD on my Desktop recently was that it does not seem to share support for any disk encryption method and so I can't share an LUKS encrypted hard drive between Linux and OpenBSD. Thats not too bad. video, wifi, suspend etc all worked out of the box on my thinkpad t440p.
He is a FreeBSD developer. It wouldn't make sense to use another OS as a desktop, bare specific situations (e.g. in his day job he works as .NET developer).
> if the hardware is compatible, you'll never go back to linux. seriously.
I can confirm. I found OpenBSD around 2005, after many years on Linux. I only use Linux when I need KVM on my laptop (on server I just run SmartOS for KVM). I'm really looking forward into OpenBSD entering the virtualisation space.
Assuming that the server survives the hn death hug ;)