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posted by martyb on Tuesday July 11 2017, @12:50PM   Printer-friendly
from the open-sesame dept.

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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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Tuesday July 11 2017, @04:22PM (2 children)

    by frojack (1554) on Tuesday July 11 2017, @04:22PM (#537646) Journal

    A regular user has little to no chance of installing Windows correctly,

    But OpenBSD, or any BSD, the regular user (for some values of "regular") has little chance of ever getting it installed.

    OpenBSD only begrudgingly acknowledges the existence of graphical user interfaces, (via ports). The manual/installation guide walks you through setting up a couple of choices of GUI, but certainly not many.

    I don't know if 15 years of Linux experience helped or got in the way of setting up by OpenBSD laptop the first time.
    Its certainly not as polished a as the most new-born Linux distro.

    As far as I can tell the principal reason to run OpenBSD has nothing to do with a GUI Its great as a server or firewall. But running it as your daily driver on a laptop, while certainly possible, is probably only useful for developing/maintaining BSD, because, like it or not, keeping it current will take some dev skills. And I don't care what the article says, don't use a new laptop unless you are willing to let half of its features sit idle for a couple years waiting for drivers.

    Then there is the fact that the principal developer, who has been turffed from every project he has ever worked on, started OpenBSD to to have a place he couldn't be asked to leave. He makes Poettering look like the Pope. You can over look that, but be very careful before asking any question on the support mailing list because one never knows when his rage will kick in.

    Mi Ledlow simply has to realize that that not every OS was intended for HIM.

    --
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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by tekk on Tuesday July 11 2017, @04:36PM (1 child)

    by tekk (5704) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday July 11 2017, @04:36PM (#537658)

    >OpenBSD only begrudgingly acknowledges the existence of graphical user interfaces, (via ports).

    You're thinking FreeBSD, which doesn't have X in the base install. OpenBSD has Xenocara (their Xorg patchset), a window manager (cwm, their own), and xdm enabled by default if you don't tell it no in the installer.

    • (Score: 2) by t-3 on Tuesday July 11 2017, @08:42PM

      by t-3 (4907) on Tuesday July 11 2017, @08:42PM (#537785)

      There's also TrueOS, the easy-setup (or easier-setup, because the FreeBSD installer isn't really at all complicated) version of FreeBSD that comes with X and pre-configured desktop and GUI package manager.