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OpenBSD Desktop
- haunter 2y agoJust use GhostBSD if you want an out-of-box desktop BSD (and it has a Live CD too) https://ghostbsd.org/ https://ghostbsd.org/
- bruh2 2y agoWhat's the deal with the seemingly-spam links at the bottom of this page? Does it contribute to SEO somehow?
- moosemess 2y ago[flagged]
- hedora 2y agoWhat sort of battery life do you get? Online reviews say to expect under two hours from the x395 running zoom in windows. I assume stuff like suspend/resume, webcam and audio work, since it’s a daily-driver. (My only other question is whether I can have vs code yet, but that’s not related to the laptop.)
- DiggyJohnson 2y agoIs there an issue with electron apps on BSD?
- rjsw 2y agoWhy wouldn't there be an issue? Any electron app will be using a Linux build of the Chromium browser, whether this will run on a BSD variant will depend on how well any Linux emulation layer works, OpenBSD has removed their Linux emulation layer.
- DiggyJohnson 2y agoYes, wasn't sure if someone had taken the effort to port over Chromium. Thanks for the info.
- bee_rider 2y agoZoom is a shockingly CPU consuming program. I know people have to use it, that’s been the case for me too, but it was easier to make sure I had a plug handy when using Zoom than trying to make it run well. I think a review that use based around Zoom battery life is about as useful as one based around short circuiting the battery terminals.
- spockz 2y agoTeams hogs power as well. I get about 4h on my 16” MBP M1 Pro. When in a teams call it also significantly impact single core benchmark results of the app I’m working on. So maybe power drain is inherent in conferencing tooling? Is teams even utilising the hardware decode/encoding paths? When in a call Teams consistently consumes a full single core.
- nrabulinski 2y agoWhile videoconferencing does take some resources, the fact of the matter is both zoom and teams are poorly written web apps packaged into “desktop applications” and that’s where most of the utilization is coming from
- grumpyprole 2y agoI do wonder whether these apps are using any of the hardware acceleration available in our hardware. These days PCs are second class to mobile phones.
- bee_rider 2y agoYeah, I wonder about this. I don’t know Teams, but Zoom has to do some image processing (it has some face cleanup tech which is weird because everybody knows a programmer’s power-level is directly correlated to how disheveled and tired they look), and also some audio filtering (need to filter out keyboards). But, I mean, Discord manages to do the latter for pretty cheap, and the former is stupid optional vanity stuff anyway. The conclusion I come to is that Zoom is a badly written program that would never have seen the light of day if we weren’t suddenly launched into WFH around 2020. That program is like the third worst thing that happened that year.
- yabones 2y agoI have an old X201 with OpenBSD. My setup on that machine is deliberately "gimped" with all ads and most JS blocked to make webpages load acceptably fast, and with the `apmd` enabled and hw.setperf at 10-20. With a 3rd party 9-cell battery, I can easily get 4.5-5 hours runtime like this. I think the biggest power draw at this point is the display, since it's an older and less energy efficient panel. Granted, most of my usage is either SSH'ing into another machine or X11 forwarding apps from another machine. I think with hw.setperf dialed up, SMT enabled, and the blockers turned off I'd be lucky to get 45 minutes of runtime... Either way, not bad for a "museum" computer :)
- accrual 2y agoVery nice! It's impressive how much can be squeezed out of these Thinkpads. I daily drove an X230 until earlier this year, it's only a bit faster than the X201 and I basically used it in the same capacity - a jump box to other machines. The keyboards and form factors of these laptops are top tier though.
- sach1 2y agoI've switched to Alpine Linux for anything with a battery. OpenBSD ran very well on my X220, X230, and T430 but there's a 2-3 hour difference in battery life during normal usage that's hard to pass up. If you've never played around with Alpine, check it out! You'll find the installer... very familiar!
- VK538FY 2y agoX201 i5? I installed OpenBSD latest on mine and was impressed by the battery life contre toute attente. Fvwm with some essential tray apps and we're good! If Jupyter Lab ran on this setup, I'd be a total convert. In terms of hardware, I installed coreboot and replaced the wlan with something modern from China. I plan to upgrade from 2 GB to 8 GB but hard to find compatible SO-DIMM these days. It would be bloody awesome to upgrade the display to FHD but that looks... complicated, we'll see. But I love working with an OS where I understand everything.
- kuon 2y agoI trimmed down my linux machine more and more, but I still need linux for some usages (I stream and use OBS for one). But I use OpenBSD on a dozen of servers I manage, it is rock solid for many (not all) usages. I really like those simple desktop environment where you have a good understanding of the machine you are using. I do use ranger as file manager, it is heavier than walk, but it is very capable and scriptable while staying quite simple.
- SoftTalker 2y agoI've never felt that file managers bring much to the table. I use the shell.
- skydhash 2y agoIt's Vim vs Ed. The shell is all powerful but sometimes it's easier to yyhpl (select the file for copying, then paste a symbolic link in the parent directory) than typing the commands to do so even with shell completion. Sometimes having visual feedback is good. But a GUI FM doesn't bring that much. I spend as much time with Ranger as Finder on macOS.
- accrual 2y agoAre there any good lightweight file managers if one did want to use a GUI? Using the shell is second nature to me but sometimes it's nice to browse with a mouse.
- _mlbt 2y agoMidnight Commander is a good TUI file manager. https://midnight-commander.org/ https://midnight-commander.org/
- squarefoot 2y agoTake a look at double commander: https://doublecmd.sourceforge.io/ https://doublecmd.sourceforge.io/ However, if you use a desktop manager such as Xfce, the file manager (Thunar in this case) is built in and can be configured with traditional double window arrangement.
- tiffanyh 2y ago> I am a minimalist I have to laugh when I read blog posts about how people go to great strides to run a "minimal" and lean OS, to then only come to find out that 95% of what they do is in a web browser. At that point, the OS doesn't even matter any more if it's all web/cloud-services.
- medo-bear 2y agoI have to laugh when security conscious people think their browser is secure. I use TTY almost exclusively. But for a minimal desktop one should really look into stumpwm
- nolist_policy 2y agoThe browser is the most secure piece of software that everyday users come in contact with.
- medo-bear 2y agoAre you trolling? Just googling 'browser vulnerabilities' will get you interesting results. Here is one from few hours ago: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/update-your-chrome-browser-asap-google-has-confirmed-a-zero-day-exploited-in-the-wild/ar-BB1maSz3 https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/update-your-chrome...
- nolist_policy 2y agoDetails are sparse but I bet $100 that this vulnerability too is confined within the sandbox. Like most vulnerabilities before it and after.
- medo-bear 2y agoOut of bounds memory access in V8 in Google Chrome prior to 120.0.6099.224 allowed a remote attacker to potentially exploit heap corruption via a crafted HTML page. (Chromium security severity: High) Rest easy
- matrix12 2y agoWe use it for our nfs servers. Very secure, but the file cache is still nerfed.
- znpy 2y ago> We use it for our nfs servers. Very secure, but the file cache is still nerfed. Why not FreeBSD or Linux for that use case? Chances are you'd get better "file cache" (and hence better latency/throughput)
- ahnick 2y agoAnyone made the jump from Linux to OpenBSD on a laptop as their daily driver? If so, any tips or suggestions for making such a change? What did you find the biggest benefit to be?
- binkHN 2y agoI love OpenBSD, but can't do it; there is too much in Linux that allows for better battery life, especially on more modern hardware.
- apgwoz 2y agoThere's a userspace frequency scaler (https://tildegit.org/solene/obsdfreqd https://tildegit.org/solene/obsdfreqd) that increases my battery life to well beyond what I actually need. I easily get 6-8 hours on my Thinkpad X1 Nano (previous generation). This is not even close to the M series Macbook battery lifes, but works well enough for me. I do not run heavyweight stuff though, but that's with WiFi, cwm/dwm, Emacs, compilers (go, cc) and Chrome. I've had a bit of trouble with Firefox performance, so having to use Chrome has been my biggest hurdle.
- anthk 2y agoI´d assume you use chromium, then: git clone git://bitreich.org/privacy-haters doas cp privacy-haters/chromium/default /etc/profile.d/chromium.sh doas chmod +x /etc/profile.d/chromium.sh Logout and login again. Of course, run UBlock Origin under Chromium. Go to the settings and enable most ad blocking subscriptions, but don´t use AdGuard and Easylist at the same time, they often use the same ban lists.
- perihelions 2y agoI made a deliberate effort to, and realized I was making an expensive mistake and cut my losses. The (user-interactive) performance difference between modern Linux and minimalist, "correct" OpenBSD, on normal x86 laptop hardware, is night and day. No reasonable of amount of system tuning could work-around that. It was the wrong tool for me, with the wrong tradeoffs. My suggestion is don't—or at least think deliberately and dispassionately about tradeoffs. UX latency really sucks. (The painful thing is that almost none of it seems to be OpenBSD's fault—it's all the desktop applications that demand 10x more hardware resources than they legitimately need, and then degrade unacceptably when layers that actually should be less optimized, like OS things that have a safety & correctness tradeoff, do make that valid tradeoff...)
- binkHN 2y ago> net.inet.ip.forwarding=1 Why is this a normal change? I thought it was only needed for routers?
- accrual 2y agoIP forwarding shouldn't be needed for end-user machines. I only ever set it on machines that need to route traffic.
- anthk 2y agoOr virtualisation with simulated networks.
- rnhmjoj 2y agoI'm guessing, but I would say it has something to do with the fact they're using a VPN: you may want to route packets between your physical and virtual interface.
- accrual 2y agoI recently started using OpenBSD on my circa 2001 Pentium 3 rig for fun. It has 384MB of RAM and no SSE2. I use i3wm for the desktop (1024×768×80Hz on a CRT), urxvt for terminal, netsurf for browsing (no JS), leafpad for GUI editing, and VLC for streaming music. For coding the CPU supports the latest versions of Go and Python3, but Node/TypeScript no longer works since it now requires SSE2. It's surprisingly snappy and fun to use, I can even post to hn from here. :) Screenshots: https://i.imgur.com/shozUbO.png https://i.imgur.com/shozUbO.png https://i.imgur.com/F22p3Z8.png https://i.imgur.com/F22p3Z8.png
- skydhash 2y agoI'm running a Debian VM on my M1 Mac (it's a mess to cleanup dependencies and tooling after a project on macOS). I also use i3wm and before launching Firefox, the whole OS consumed only 300 MB of ram. In the past I use Arch with i3wm to have enough free ram (on a 8GB laptop) for Android Studio and Firefox. Some people are angry with Apple for their 8GB offering, but it would be great to imagine what can be done with less and the operating system being just an operating system, not an application suite.
- detourdog 2y agoI have always found MacPorts as the best way to manage tooling. All packages and dependencies are installed under /opt/. The consistent pathing is the only sane way to manage tooling.
- AlexeyBrin 2y agoHomebrew also installs everything under /opt/ on aarch64. Pretty convenient when you want to nuke it and start fresh.
- detourdog 2y agoI had thought Homebrew's purpose was to leverage Apple's bundled what not. I haven't looked at Homebrew in over a decade.
- rydgel 2y agoAnyone knows where to find that Blade Runner wallpaper?
- mjhay 2y agocwm is very nice and usable. I used it for a long time before I switched to Mac (for the hardware, not software).
- Aaronstotle 2y agoI tried running OpenBSD on my desktop but kept running into issues where my display would freeze after 10-15 minutes. I assume it was because of my nvidia-gpu
- binkHN 2y agoI think Theo might actually hate Nvidia more than Linus does.
- 0x37 2y agoI'm really torn. A while ago I made the decision to abandon linux and use a BSD as my daily OS. In almost every way I prefer FreeBSD over OpenBSD, except when it comes to the source code. The clarity of OpenBSD source seems unmatched, and for me that's really important as I have picked up interest in contributing to the kernel of the BSD I choose. Also in some naive way it gives me a warm feeling knowing that the code of my operating system is in tip top shape.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- simonblack 2y agoHaving problems with my AlderLake 4K video.
- rbc 2y agoI've recently switched to OpenBSD as a workstation desktop using Xfce. Chromium and Firefox (ESR) are the browsers. Emacs is used for many things (authoring, calendaring, contacts, email, IRC, task tracking, etc.). LibreOffice gets used for the balance. That covers most workstation activities. All the web sites that I care about work. The performance is good enough. With OpenBSD, there's some assembly required. I don't mind that. The right way to approach OpenBSD and its ports collection is as a toolkit. You have to use the tools provided, to make the solution you want. I'm already running OpenBSD servers. It was just easier to use OpenBSD for the destktop as well.
- DEADMINCE 2y agoThe only people who should be using OpenBSD as a desktop are the developers. For anyone else I think the choice to do so would be a result of being contrarian and little else.
- cenamus 2y agoI guess there are a lot of contrarians like me in the bsd community then
- hggh 2y agoDerek Sivers comes to mind: https://sive.rs/openbsd https://sive.rs/openbsd
- DEADMINCE 2y agoSo yeah, that's probably a good example. That guy is a technical enough user that he knows his needs well and can solve issues he may have that non-technical users would be unable to. But most of the reasoning behind what he lists as advantages or for using it can apply to Linux also. Let's look at the points: > It’s uncompromising. It’s not a people-pleaser or vendor-pleaser. Linux is in everything from Android phones to massive supercomputers, so has to include features for all of them. The OpenBSD developers say no to most things. Instead of trying to make it do more, they keep it focused on doing what it does with more security and reliability. It’s uncompromising. It’s not a people-pleaser or vendor-pleaser. Linux is in everything from Android phones to massive supercomputers, so has to include features for all of them. The OpenBSD developers say no to most things. Instead of trying to make it do more, they keep it focused on doing what it does with more security and reliability. The Linux kernel can be compiled with everything disabled aside from what is strictly needed, and there are plenty of uncompromising distros. Saying "Linux has more choice and supports more things" isn't really a point against it, and therefore not a reason to use OpenBSD. > They review and remove code as often as they add. If something is unused, unmaintained, or unnecessary, they’ll axe it. If it’s unwieldy, they’ll make a small simple replacement. For examples, see doas, OpenSMTPD, httpd, and LibreSSL. This is great for security, too. The more code, the more chance of a bug that could compromise your entire computer. The less code, the better. Each new release seems to be getting leaner by removing old cruft. No other operating system does that. No other OS removes old cruft? I'm not even sure listing doas an example of a 'small simple replacement', when it was a hobby project of an OBSD developer to fix some personal issues. And actually modern Sudo was pretty much developed by a different OBSD developer. So an OBSD developer writing a replacement for a different OBSD developer's tool because it was too unwieldy isn't that great a point IMO. > Great documentation is a top priority. The built-in man pages are amazing. So if you’re stuck on anything, searching the man pages on your own computer is going to give you a better answer than searching Google. (This makes it nicer to work offline, too.) Plenty of other distros or projects have fantastic documentation to, just not in man pages. On some linux systems documentation will be in info pages rather than man pages, but these days I mostly read what I need in a browser. And I've never really run into an issue with a lack of documentation either when without internet or any of the distros I use. Specifically here Sivers is basically arguing that the man pages in particular are better, and well, many developers and systems have moved on from man pages. > The installers are amazing. The initial installation takes like five minutes. Hit [Enter] to the defaults, make your username and password, and it’s ready to go. Then the software installer is ideal, too. Just pkg_info to search for something and pkg_add to install it in seconds. (Which also installs all of its documentation, too.) I mean, it's just a basic installer, no different from NetBSD, Slackware or Alpines. > Everything is rock-solid and just works. Hardware I couldn’t get working in Linux just works on a first try with OpenBSD. And because they don’t stay cutting-edge, keeping a cautious pace, it keeps working and doesn’t break. The whole system is carefully planned and consistent, instead of a hodge-podge of bits and pieces. There are plenty of distros and if you like kernel forks that the exact same is true for. > It’s all free and run by helpful volunteers. If you searched ports, but some application you need is missing or out of date, just contact the maintainer and offer some assistance or money to help get it updated or added. I’ve donated $3850 to the developers to help improve the OpenBSD port of Node.js, Elixir, Erlang, Anki, Ledger, and Qutebrowser. And this is true for any FOSS OS. Look, I like operating systems like OBSD....Slackware was my daily driver for many years, now I use alpine. I value lack of nonsense, lack of clutter and the ability to pretty much know every file on my system, every process, and know what it's doing - no obfuscation or bs. I get all of that, but none of the alleged strengths particular to OBSD that Sivers mentions are really convincing points. He could easily be running a similar OS and be just as happy, or happier since he would have much better performance.