4 ms·

Is OpenBSD suitable for daily use on a laptop? Does anyone have such experience? Is it ok?

hoppp 2y ago
Yes but depends on the laptop.
myaccountonhn 2y ago
It works quite well. The OOB experience is very complete and hardware gets picked up without issue. However you’re limited in the amount of apps and it’s also incredibly slow, so you’ll need to really use minimal, fast cli apps. I left it ultimately because it had way worse battery life than Linux on my T480s and I also wanted to play some games with steam.
- eru 2y ago
  You could probably get close to the same experience by running your BSD in a VM when you need it?
- tasuki 2y ago
  > it’s also incredibly slow I never used OpenBSD. Why is it incredibly slow?
  - daneel_w 2y ago
    Disk I/O is notably slower than e.g. Linux or Windows and executional performance is generally a tiny bit slower, but nothing about it is "incredibly slow".
    - dijit 2y ago
      browsers are exceptionally slow in my experience.
      - daneel_w 2y ago
        You will want to enable GPU-accelerated rendering for Firefox and Chromium to get a smoother experience when scrolling pages and for certain video playback, because that's disabled by default. Besides that they load and parse pages and act on input pretty much as fast as they do on Linux.
  - amatecha 2y ago
    well, SMT/hyper-threading is disabled by default[0] , not sure if there are other reasons though. It's not that bad, but yeah OpenBSD is probably not your optimal gaming OS :P [0] https://www.mail-archive.com/source-changes@openbsd.org/msg99141.html https://www.mail-archive.com/source-changes@openbsd.org/msg9...
    - daneel_w 2y ago
      SMT being disabled is not a reason for anything to be incredibly slow, or even tangibly slower, unless the CPU has a single core.
dbtc 2y ago
https://jcs.org/openbsd-laptops https://jcs.org/openbsd-laptops
LeoPanthera 2y ago
The developers often use ThinkPads, and so consequently it works quite well on ThinkPads. Your experience will be a lot more variable on any other laptop. Worth remembering that OpenBSD has no support for bluetooth, which many users often require on a laptop.
- chicom_malware 2y ago
  Worth mentioning lack of Bluetooth is only because they felt the existing BT stack was not up their standards and ripped it out rather than let it rot like most software.
  - porridgeraisin 2y ago
    There are a grand total of zero valid reasons for not including bluetooth in a desktop OS.
    - toast0 2y ago
      It's pretty easy to avoid Bluetooth, and it'a a complex stack and having code quality standards means sometimes you have to remove features because the code quality isn't there, and nobody had time/interest/motivation to do the work to make an implementation with the proper amount of quality. If you have a 'must have' device for your desktop environment that's bluetooth, then yes, it makes OpenBSD unviable for you; but OpenBSD isn't viable for every use case.
      - porridgeraisin 2y ago
        > isn't viable for every use case Yes, and desktop, especially laptop, is an example.
        dijit 2y ago
        I’d prefer not to have something than to have a bad something. Yeah, it was annoying when I tried to pair my mouse- but you know… a wired mouse isn’t that big of a deal. One thing that brings me the most displeasure about internet discourse about operating systems is this idea that they all have to do all the same things. Thats homogeny by another name; the point of different operating systems is different trade-offs.
RachelF 2y ago
Get a Mac laptop. OS X is based on BSD.
- daneel_w 2y ago
  Common misconception. It is not. The kernel is XNU, and the OS base is Darwin which has some BSD parts in it, and some of the userland came directly from FreeBSD (though heavily modified).
  - hnlmorg 2y ago
    You’re not actually disagreeing with the OPs statement though. And they’re technically right too. The problem is that all the user facing stuff in macOS isn’t BSD. It’s Apples proprietary APIs. So while macOS was originally and technically based on BSD, almost none of that is exposed to their users. So they’re technically correct that macOS / Next was based on BSD. But also completely wrong to recommend macOS as a comparison to OpenBSD.
    - mattl 2y ago
      macOS was originally based on OPENSTEP. OPENSTEP was based on NeXTSTEP which was based on 4.3 and later 4.4. BSD stuff has a complicated history due to the lawsuits in the 1990s. NetBSD and FreeBSD were based on 386BSD. OpenBSD was a fork of NetBSD by one of the NetBSD founders (Theo deRaadt)...
      - hnlmorg 2y ago
        It’s not even as clear cut as that because there’s FreeBSD and NetBSD code in XNU too. Also OpenStep is an API rather than an OS. So macOS contains both NextStep and OpenStep code.
        mattl 2y ago
        OPENSTEP is the OS, OpenStep is the framework. After NeXTSTEP 3.3 there was OPENSTEP 4.0. OPENSTEP 4.2 is the last operating system release prior to Rhapsody. Yes it’s confusing.
brynet 2y ago
It depends on what you need for your daily use, OpenBSD has ports of common desktop environments, KDE Plasma, GNOME. In fact, thanks to KDE and GNOME port maintainers, Rafael Sadowski, and Antoine Jacoutot, respectively, OpenBSD 7.6 -current has the latest versions of both (KDE Plasma Desktop 6.3.1, GNOME 47). I recently checked out KDE 6 for the first time last year, it really is as easy running as 'pkg_add kde kde-plasma kde-plasma-extras' and then reading through the local pkg-readme file, that said if you're not familiar with OpenBSD it won't be like other systems where it comes preinstalled and preconfigured. https://brynet.ca/article-l13gen2.html https://brynet.ca/article-l13gen2.html There's many popular window mangers and applications you can install using the package tools, as you'd expect, including Chromium and Firefox, but you can quickly search here: https://openbsd.app/ https://openbsd.app/
matteotom 2y ago
It was a few years ago, but I ran OpenBSD for about a year in college (on a Thinkpad). It worked because I rarely needed anything more than Firefox, code editors, and a shell with ssh. Most of my time was spent reading, writing papers, writing emails, and writing code.
LAC-Tech 2y ago
my big issue when I looked into it was the default filesystem was quite an antiquated design that would lose or corrupt data in a powercut or unexpected shutdown. Last I checked many of the devs have fairly elaborate uninterruptable power supplies to deal with this. A lot to like about openBSD; doas is my daily driver on linux, openbsd man changes are incredible, but I'm not going to mess about recovering disks just because I forgot to plug my laptop in.
kovac 2y ago
I use OpenBSD. You must check the hardware support. If it works, it works far better than Linux from my experience. Somethings to take note: 1. Power management may not be as good as with Linux 2. No HDMI sound support 3. No bluetooth 4. You need to be comfortable with config files and man pages. 5. Probably fewer applications in the ports tree (I have all I need). If you are fine with the above, OpenBSD is the finest OS I've used so far. I've never run into random issues like wifi connectivity, audio issues like with Linux.
puffybuf 2y ago
I use it, and even run wayland (sway) on my dell laptop. No bluetooth support. Encrypted disk. Takes a lot of time to setup. Generally similar to linux, but less hardware support.

Yes but depends on the laptop.

It works quite well. The OOB experience is very complete and hardware gets picked up without issue. However you’re limited in the amount of apps and it’s also incredibly slow, so you’ll need to really use minimal, fast cli apps. I left it ultimately because it had way worse battery life than Linux on my T480s and I also wanted to play some games with steam.

eru 2y ago
You could probably get close to the same experience by running your BSD in a VM when you need it?
tasuki 2y ago
> it’s also incredibly slow I never used OpenBSD. Why is it incredibly slow?
- daneel_w 2y ago
  Disk I/O is notably slower than e.g. Linux or Windows and executional performance is generally a tiny bit slower, but nothing about it is "incredibly slow".
  - dijit 2y ago
    browsers are exceptionally slow in my experience.
    - daneel_w 2y ago
      You will want to enable GPU-accelerated rendering for Firefox and Chromium to get a smoother experience when scrolling pages and for certain video playback, because that's disabled by default. Besides that they load and parse pages and act on input pretty much as fast as they do on Linux.
- amatecha 2y ago
  well, SMT/hyper-threading is disabled by default[0] , not sure if there are other reasons though. It's not that bad, but yeah OpenBSD is probably not your optimal gaming OS :P [0] https://www.mail-archive.com/source-changes@openbsd.org/msg99141.html https://www.mail-archive.com/source-changes@openbsd.org/msg9...
  - daneel_w 2y ago
    SMT being disabled is not a reason for anything to be incredibly slow, or even tangibly slower, unless the CPU has a single core.

dbtc 2y ago

https://jcs.org/openbsd-laptops https://jcs.org/openbsd-laptops

LeoPanthera 2y ago

The developers often use ThinkPads, and so consequently it works quite well on ThinkPads. Your experience will be a lot more variable on any other laptop. Worth remembering that OpenBSD has no support for bluetooth, which many users often require on a laptop.

chicom_malware 2y ago
Worth mentioning lack of Bluetooth is only because they felt the existing BT stack was not up their standards and ripped it out rather than let it rot like most software.
- porridgeraisin 2y ago
  There are a grand total of zero valid reasons for not including bluetooth in a desktop OS.
  - toast0 2y ago
    It's pretty easy to avoid Bluetooth, and it'a a complex stack and having code quality standards means sometimes you have to remove features because the code quality isn't there, and nobody had time/interest/motivation to do the work to make an implementation with the proper amount of quality. If you have a 'must have' device for your desktop environment that's bluetooth, then yes, it makes OpenBSD unviable for you; but OpenBSD isn't viable for every use case.
    - porridgeraisin 2y ago
      > isn't viable for every use case Yes, and desktop, especially laptop, is an example.
      - dijit 2y ago
        I’d prefer not to have something than to have a bad something. Yeah, it was annoying when I tried to pair my mouse- but you know… a wired mouse isn’t that big of a deal. One thing that brings me the most displeasure about internet discourse about operating systems is this idea that they all have to do all the same things. Thats homogeny by another name; the point of different operating systems is different trade-offs.

RachelF 2y ago

Get a Mac laptop. OS X is based on BSD.

daneel_w 2y ago
Common misconception. It is not. The kernel is XNU, and the OS base is Darwin which has some BSD parts in it, and some of the userland came directly from FreeBSD (though heavily modified).
- hnlmorg 2y ago
  You’re not actually disagreeing with the OPs statement though. And they’re technically right too. The problem is that all the user facing stuff in macOS isn’t BSD. It’s Apples proprietary APIs. So while macOS was originally and technically based on BSD, almost none of that is exposed to their users. So they’re technically correct that macOS / Next was based on BSD. But also completely wrong to recommend macOS as a comparison to OpenBSD.
  - mattl 2y ago
    macOS was originally based on OPENSTEP. OPENSTEP was based on NeXTSTEP which was based on 4.3 and later 4.4. BSD stuff has a complicated history due to the lawsuits in the 1990s. NetBSD and FreeBSD were based on 386BSD. OpenBSD was a fork of NetBSD by one of the NetBSD founders (Theo deRaadt)...
    - hnlmorg 2y ago
      It’s not even as clear cut as that because there’s FreeBSD and NetBSD code in XNU too. Also OpenStep is an API rather than an OS. So macOS contains both NextStep and OpenStep code.
      - mattl 2y ago
        OPENSTEP is the OS, OpenStep is the framework. After NeXTSTEP 3.3 there was OPENSTEP 4.0. OPENSTEP 4.2 is the last operating system release prior to Rhapsody. Yes it’s confusing.

brynet 2y ago

It depends on what you need for your daily use, OpenBSD has ports of common desktop environments, KDE Plasma, GNOME. In fact, thanks to KDE and GNOME port maintainers, Rafael Sadowski, and Antoine Jacoutot, respectively, OpenBSD 7.6 -current has the latest versions of both (KDE Plasma Desktop 6.3.1, GNOME 47). I recently checked out KDE 6 for the first time last year, it really is as easy running as 'pkg_add kde kde-plasma kde-plasma-extras' and then reading through the local pkg-readme file, that said if you're not familiar with OpenBSD it won't be like other systems where it comes preinstalled and preconfigured. https://brynet.ca/article-l13gen2.html https://brynet.ca/article-l13gen2.html There's many popular window mangers and applications you can install using the package tools, as you'd expect, including Chromium and Firefox, but you can quickly search here: https://openbsd.app/ https://openbsd.app/

matteotom 2y ago

It was a few years ago, but I ran OpenBSD for about a year in college (on a Thinkpad). It worked because I rarely needed anything more than Firefox, code editors, and a shell with ssh. Most of my time was spent reading, writing papers, writing emails, and writing code.

LAC-Tech 2y ago

my big issue when I looked into it was the default filesystem was quite an antiquated design that would lose or corrupt data in a powercut or unexpected shutdown. Last I checked many of the devs have fairly elaborate uninterruptable power supplies to deal with this. A lot to like about openBSD; doas is my daily driver on linux, openbsd man changes are incredible, but I'm not going to mess about recovering disks just because I forgot to plug my laptop in.

kovac 2y ago

I use OpenBSD. You must check the hardware support. If it works, it works far better than Linux from my experience. Somethings to take note: 1. Power management may not be as good as with Linux 2. No HDMI sound support 3. No bluetooth 4. You need to be comfortable with config files and man pages. 5. Probably fewer applications in the ports tree (I have all I need). If you are fine with the above, OpenBSD is the finest OS I've used so far. I've never run into random issues like wifi connectivity, audio issues like with Linux.

puffybuf 2y ago

I use it, and even run wayland (sway) on my dell laptop. No bluetooth support. Encrypted disk. Takes a lot of time to setup. Generally similar to linux, but less hardware support.