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.
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Tuesday July 11 2017, @05:02PM
It's hard for me to judge the difficult of an installation, because I've installed both a zillion times. The main things that strike me, though, is the software installation. I'm not working in any sort of enterprise environment, but typically for some microbusiness with a couple of computers. So, when installing a replacement system, I will have a long list of programs that need to be installed.
- On Linux, using mostly OSS, this means calling up Synaptic, clicking a bunch of boxes, and going to lunch. It "just works". Of course, there may be some special programs, like maybe an ERP client, but all the standards stuff is there, done.
- On Windows...it's awful. You have to find and install each individual program. Which version of Office do they have? Where are the damned language packs? Where's the damned license key? Creative Suite, right. Sometimes a program is on a DVD, sometimes the license key can't be found. Sometimes there are unexpected dependencies that the installer didn't bring with it (just today I had a windows installer abort with a cryptic message about the "wrong" version of DirectX - I don't yet know WTF it actually expects). There's nothing difficult about any individual step, but the whole thing typically turns into a day long slog that leaves me wanting to murder someone.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.