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Peter N. M. Hansteen walks through use of OpenBSD on a modern laptop in his latest blog post. While OpenBSD has a good reputation for servers and routers, many do not realize how well it works on laptops with supported hardware. He's been running it as the only OS on his laptops for well over a decade at this point and shares his experience with recent hardware. OpenBSD is clean, organized, and predictable. It does what you configure it to do, and only that, with no backtalk or second-guessing — like from other systems. Its documentation is second to none.
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I don't want a pickle,
I just wanna ride on my motorsickle.
And I don't want to die,
I just want to ride on my motorcy.
Cle.
-- Arlo Guthrie
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Pino P on Tuesday July 11 2017, @02:20PM (3 children)
"many do not realize how well it works on laptops with supported hardware."
Probably because "supported hardware" isn't marked as such in the showrooms of major North American electronics chains. Or because other free *n?x distributions with Xfce with broader "supported hardware" are easy to find, such as Xubuntu.
In particular, the article states: "for some reason the OpenBSD project has not been granted permission to distribute the Intel firmware files", which restricts "supported hardware" to laptops with a wired Ethernet interface. This interface has lately become a casualty of the mass market's fight for thin and light, with many compact laptops and detachable tablets having shed it in favor of all wireless all the time.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday July 11 2017, @04:49PM
Exactly.
Supported hardware doesn't always include things you will LIKELY find in 10 year old laptops. It will probably include every important feature.
While there's no weight savings in dropping Cat5 ports, you'd be unlikely to choose one of those newer machines as your Intel BSD platform anyway.
The i386 support seems safe for the moment. Probably one of the last refuges for those old machines, as even most linux distros are dropping support of them.
You'd think this would be an idle OS for older tablets. You'd be wrong. Although they are working on a Raspberry Pi 3, its still something of a kludge.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday July 11 2017, @05:01PM
Distribute the Intel firmware files can be done with a makefile that have updated links to where they are to be downloaded. And as a backup some bay of ships with black flags..
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday July 11 2017, @08:03PM
I'm not sure that is the exact situation here.
OpenBSD has a pretty strict requirement about closed source binary blobs in general.
They may just choose not to distribute it, and would rather the end-user fetch it themselves.
They won't allow NDAs [openbsd.org] of any kind.
They won't allow any American developers [openbsd.org] work on any Cryptography related issues. (Theo still pissed at DARPA).
They are probably very wary of Intel Active Management Technology. (And rightly so).
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.