6 ms·
OpenBSD on the Desktop (Part I)
- whalesalad 6y agoMissing the unixporn screenshots!
- ianai 6y agoYes! Always need screenshots even if it’s just a wm with an xterm.
- microcolonel 6y agoMy WM has no bars or decorations, it's always funny to send a screen-sized black or root weave PNG when somebody says "show me your desktop".
- smabie 6y agoThat weave Xorg background is absolutely terrible. I get why they chose it, but still. Code up a gradient or something.
- upofadown 6y agoI love the weave. Great for focusing the projector.
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y agoThere are testbilder for that. https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffsb&q=Testbild&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffsb&q=Testbild&iax=images&ia=imag... No need to have that uglyness in your face all the time.
- microcolonel 6y agoIt's also good for if you have a VGA LCD, automatic clock tuning works really well with the root weave.
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y agoHm. Didn't think of that. Didn't touch VGA for so long...
- jim-jim-jim 6y agoGood stuff. I installed OpenBSD 6.0 and dwm on a netbook years ago and haven't had to change anything since. It's a lovely distraction-free easel where I do all my audio programming. I also wanted to use st, but I found its handling of CJK input less than ideal at the time.
- smabie 6y agoIf anyone hasn't tried cwm, you should give it a shot. It comes by default on OpenBSD and there's a port for Linux. A really terrific and high quality window manager by the OpenBSD team.
- charlesdaniels 6y agoI have really enjoyed CWM, and still use it even after switching from OpenBSD to Linux (I really liked OpenBSD, but need some programs that only run on Linux). One of the features I find most useful is that you can have a window focused without raising it. So if you have some reference material open in a browser over top of part of your terminal, you can switch focus to and even click in the terminal without raising it (in my setup, I alt-click to raise). Admittedly, I'm not sure if this is the default behavior, as many of my settings are non-default. I also really like the ability to search through window titles. I have alt+/ set to open the window search menu, then I can type a substring of the window title I want to raise, press return, and it's automatically raised and focused. CWM is really, really nice, and every other WM I've tried before or since has disappointed me by comparison.
- pjmlp 6y agoFocus follows mouse is pretty old X11 feature. That there are window managers that don't expose it, that is another matter. Even Windows used to have a powertoy to enable it on Win32.
- charlesdaniels 6y agoOh for sure, focus-follows-mouse is widely available. But with CWM, it is easy to configure the WM so that a window being focused doesn't also cause it to be raised.
- pjmlp 6y agoYeah but that is how it is supposed to work. Exactly how I used fvwm (the original one) and twm back in the 1994 onwards. To be raised one needs to additionally click on it.
- implements 6y agoHe’s starting X using startx, but from https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq11.html https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq11.html “The recommended way to run X is with the xenodm(1) display manager. It offers some important security benefits over the traditional startx(1) command.“ I think startx now only works if you’re root or have given users additional permissions - xenodm doesn’t require that.
- johnr2 6y ago> I think startx now only works if you’re root or have given users additional permissions That was the case for a while but in OpenBSD 6.7 startx works again out of the box, as long as you have certain graphics hardware, eg. radeon.
- lmedinas 6y agoOpenBSD is somehow easy to setup, mainly due to the KISS philosophy and excellent documentation. Besides that they aim to be a very secure OS. But my experience to make it work as a Desktop OS is very poor. Some reasons: The overall performance is way worse than Linux, the ports are not always up-to-date, other OS simulation is also outdated which means running commercial apps will be a challenge, upgrade process from version X to Y can be quiet painful, the lack of support for certain HW and Battery usage on laptops. I could never find anything that i could not do better and more efficient on Linux. On the positive side: CWM and their Artwork are really cool.
- bollu 6y agoDoes anyone have any insight on why performance on OpenBSD is so much poorer? I'm really curious. I would have predicted the opposite: that OpenBSD is faster on account of its leaner.
- iddan 6y agoProbably utilisation of hardware
- iuguy 6y agoLots of different reasons, but common ones include: 1. No binary blobs, so hardware acceleration can be missed. 2. There have been issues with specific apps e.g. Firefox that seem optimised for things that OpenBSD doesn't do. 3. Historically SMP/Hyperthreading support hasn't been as performant as it is on other platforms. In some cases this is due to prioritising security over performance - e.g. speculative cache execution bugs.
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y agoIn single-core/early dualcore times on then contemporary PC-hardware, I had the opportunity to compare OpenBSD vs. NetBSD vs. FreeBSD. Though I didn't use them 'shrink-wrapped', but rather like one would do 'Linux from Scratch', or at least a very riced Gentoo :) Anyways, my hardware was supported perfectly on all of them, so no problems there. This way FreeBSD was only slightly faster than NetBSD, and i could have 132x60 textmode on its console, which didn't work at the time for NetBSD, and many, many ports of software. But I didn't need them all, and it felt a little more bloated. Since my goal was full desktop with KDE3 I didn't care much about textmode and went with NetBSD. It flew, rock-solid, unkaputtbar! While OpenBSD, at the times with the parts of KDE3 which were available for it had unexplainable periodic hiccups, not only during load, but light desktop use when no swap was in use at all! That felt very weird, and after a few months I discarded it, since other users and developers/contributors of it which I've spoken to in person(sometimes looking at me like I'd be an alien from outer space for using it as desktop) didn't have more to offer than right tool for the job, yadda yadda... Since then I'm following its progress from afar, only mildly interested. PF and ACKPRI were nice, but at least ACKPRI could be had by other means elsewhere, or some appliance. So... right tool for the job, I guess? edit: the hiccups didn't only happen while in X/KDE. Also when no Xserver at all was running, just doing things on the console, also while no swap was in use. 2nd edit: I pivoted to Arch from there, which in direct comparison to the riced NetBSD flew hypersonic, but wasn't as unkaputtbar (though only slightly less so), but saved much compile time :)
- pojntfx 6y agoNote that the author does not respect gender identity/pronouns: https://paedubucher.ch/articles/2020-09-27-gendersprache-schlechte-sprache.html https://paedubucher.ch/articles/2020-09-27-gendersprache-sch...
- johnr2 6y ago> Note that the author does not respect gender identity/pronouns The article is written in the first person throughout and doesn't use any gender specific pronouns that I could see. How is that disrespectful? (My knowledge of German isn't good enough to read the article you linked).
- RealStickman_ 6y agoThe article he linked basically argues that some words can be used to describe both genders, although the article used with that word has one certain gender. I'll try to show an example below. First, in German there is a certain way to write words that appear gendered to include both genders. Benutzerinnen -> male and female users. Apparently there's even Userinnen, as "User" is also getting more common in german. The author of the article argues that that second part, (*innen), is unnecessary. Here's the first example he gives and a translation. > Der Benutzer ist jemand, der eine Anwendung benutzt. The user (male article) is somebody who uses an application. > Der Benutzer ist eine Person, die eine Anwendung benutzt. The user (male article) is a person (female article) who uses an application. The author now argues that the subject in the sentence above would be both male and female, therefor user ("Benutzer") is not a gendered word. In the following sentences the author replaces the user ("Benutzer") with names. Pay close attention to the articles. (der, die, das) They do not depend on the gender of the person, but instead on the second noun in the sentence. (Person, Mensch, Individuum) > Maria ist eine Person, die eine Anwendung benutzt. > Martin ist eine Person, die eine Anwendung benutzt. <name> is a person who uses an application. > Maria ist ein Mensch, der eine Anwendung benutzt. > Martin ist ein Mensch, der eine Anwendung benutzt. <name> is a human who uses an application. > Maria ist ein Individuum, das eine Anwendung benutzt. > Martin ist ein Individuum, das eine Anwendung benutzt. <name> is an individual who uses an application.
- 6y ago
- brobdingnagians 6y agoI run OpenBSD with dwm and st and love it. I triple boot, so I mainly use OpenBSD for things that it works well with, then use Linux or Windows for their strengths. I think it is a case of use the right tool for the job. I use OpenBSD on most of my servers, so it is nice having the same environment for development. Lots of things don't work on it, but I love the things that do. Pf, httpd, relayd are wonderful. Upgrades are super simple, and I don't need bleeding edge packages to make good software. As a side note, I feel like my workflow has improved in productivity, because I've been forced to think about how I do things, and change, which leads to insight and improvement. I discovered a lot of command line utilities that are more productive than what I was doing on Linux when I used them because they're "pretty".
- FandangoRanger 6y agoInteresting to read the same canned anti-OpenBSD fud being posted here that you can find on Reddit, Slashdot, Usenet, and yes, even 4chan. Fascinating, really, as if there is some campaign against it being waged across the information battle space. It assures me I’ve made the right choice by choosing OpenBSD.
- zbuf 6y agoThe OpenBSD developers should be congratulated for the performance on this hardware. I installed OpenBSD on an X270 laptop and everything worked incredibly smoothly and cohesively out of the box. Everything from power management to a sensibly-spec'd console font, without hundreds of helper daemons and dbus. The breadth of software in a Linux distribution means it will never be as cohesive as this. Performance was not as good as Linux. I suspect OpenBSD is just not as heavily optimised in a multi-threaded environment, which is fine and expected. However I did start to feel OpenBSD losing its way a little. I hoped such a slim system would be good for an automated install which could be used as VMs to run its smtpd, httpd etc. in the same cohesive environment. But I found myself working against the installer's prompt-driven approach; really I just wanted some shell functions I could run to un-pack a system after partitioning it. In the process I also discovered the whole "relink the kernel on every boot for security"; actually a blunt approach of shell scripts to rerun the final stage of compilation after booting and copy it into place for next time. 372Mb of disk space is used just for this and removing it requires modification of the OS. Not saying this is wrong, just not right for me at this time and it seemed a missed opportunity in a world of Alpine Linux and the like.
- tupputuppu 6y agoOh man. Just reading the headline I thought it was some sort of a parody. Why would anyone install OpenBSD on a laptop? Sometimes HN goes a bit too far. Is this technology as a tool to make life easier or better for someone or is this just playing around with esoteric technology with little practically purpose? > Installing a basic GUI with Suckless software was a rather smooth experience on OpenBSD Says the person who had to write C code to get a gui working to his liking