This is an OS which has everything. It’s clean, it’s simple, it has a helpful community, stable code, and even pretty good package counts to support nearly any desktop/workstation activity.
And yet, I feel like there are nagging issues which ultimately affect all non-mainstream1 OSes. Display driver complications, janky system upgrades, a lack of groupware clients. I’m not picking on OpenBSD, I love the distro and I think it should succeed in this particular area (the desktop/workstation) where other open source alternatives have failed, but why hasn’t anybody managed to make it happen yet?
For a while, there was a similar hope around DragonflyBSD in the FreeBSD community, but I don’t know where that ended up… I do know I see nobody really using it.
What’s it going to take?
1Obviously, I mean MacOS and Windows, since Linux is at least as hampered on the desktop, perhaps moreso on account of the poor community and scattered vision.
OpenBSD is a great desktop. If you can’t live without some proprietary shit, you’re going to have a bad time.
I prefer doing most of my work on OpenBSD. I have a windows machine I can use for some garbage I am forced to use and the occasional game. Mostly I will VNC in from the OpenBSD machine.
I think we should normalize using a system that does 80% of computing tasks very well and delegating non-optional stuff to a secondary device. I don’t think there’s a 100% one-stop shopping solution to a problem as diverse as “desktop utilization patterns”.
The ship has sailed for anything other than Windows or Mac as a mainstream, popular desktop. And it’s sailing away from Windows and Mac too, towards phones and tablets. Mobile devices are “computers” for a profitably large number of people, and I don’t see that changing.
That said, for this (literally) graybeard old UNIX admin, OpenBSD makes a great desktop. I like that it feels very much like my old SunOS, Solaris, and historic Linux machines, and I like administering my systems by editing simple text files instead of dealing with systemd/dbus/etc.* That said, I do still have an iPhone, and use it for the things it’s better at.
* systemd is fine, dbus is fine, they do what people want them to do. This isn’t a rant about those things. I’ve learned to deal with them in my professional life. For my own stuff, though, I want something that I consider simpler and easier to understand. I do enough fighting systems at work; I don’t need it at home, too.
A long time ago I really enjoyed the pf firewall in openbsd - it was so much easier than iptables and chains, which I somehow still don’t fully understand. How is the obsd experience to do NAT and manage a firewall ruleset these days?
I’ve been digging through the most specific edge cases of pf recently, and while I don’t know how it was 10 years ago, I’d say that nowadays it’s fantastic.
The syntax is simple, clean, and very powerful. And with anchors you can easily add/remove rules on the fly with a single command.
janky system upgrades
Curious what upgrade methods you used… sysupgrade is pretty painless.
I’ve found sysupgrade to be pretty good at the core OS, but I have definitely had issues with drivers (particularly audio and display) and third party packages installed through pkg_add. Upgrading seems to be a mixed bag in terms of continuity of function when you’re running a richer system, as a workstation often is. On a server, with minimal package surface area, things are just fine.
I’ve been using OpenBSD-current as a desktop for over a decade now and only very rarely (like once in a blue moon, and fixed in the next snap) experienced the issues you mention.
I tried it but had two major pain points:
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X just isn’t great with high DPI, multiple monitor setups, hot plugging monitors, and especially combinations thereof.
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A bunch of things are configured at boot-time rather than on-demand, e.g. networking (wlan), video/font settings, mounts, etc. For all its faults, the modern systemd/event bus Linux desktop better about these things.
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I recently used it as a desktop for over a decade.
But at some point, I found that more and more of my family’s needs had to be handled on an iPad Pro with keyboard, or iPhone. But I always thought it was cool that I was still “technically” using output from the OpenBSD project since my iOS ran pf and LibreSSL and other stuff developed by the OpenBSD devs.
At some point, I got tired of Apple, switched to Android, and then brought my computers over to Linux. It’s better integrated than what I had going on before with things like Dropbox and Proton Mail and Spotify and Signal and my bluetooth trackball working natively.
So while I had been using OpenBSD and enjoying its simplicity (nothing beats a custom cwm and a couple of xterm sessions with terminus), it was not meeting my needs.
At this point, I would need at least Signal to work, and a working dropbox client, to consider going back. And even then it would be limiting as I would still be doing a majority of things in a Chrome browser.
You bring up another good point that I haven’t considered - signal! Man, why isn’t there a signal client? I almost want to make this a side project now.
There is the official signal for desktop, or signald for integration with other messaging programs (like matterbridge or matrix).
After years of frustrated distro hopping on Linux, and with an increasingly risky internet thanks to half the world being in conflict with each other, I’m really close to give OpenBSD a shot on my desktop. I’d love to use it on my notebooks as well, but honestly, I can’t be arsed to deal with the wifi over there. I tried it, it was incredibly slow for some reason and I just don’t feel like fixing that or dealing with it. But on the PC, with ethernet, that is no issue. I’ll still keep a linux distro in dual boot for gaming and some occasional shiny app that isn’t available on OpenBSD though. I think since every OS has its shortcomings, the best approach is to use multiple OS’s and machines to have all the benefits.
About FreeBSD… I recently wanted to give FreeBSD a shot on my ThinkPad. But aside from the rough idea that BSD should have some more unified and better coding standards than Linux and a few less bugs, already the damn installer bugged out on me. I think that ZFS is a RAM hog, and wanted to try installing it with UFS. I got stuck in the selection between the different partitioning schemes and had to hard reset. I tried again, this time the installation seemed to run through, the system rebooted and no changes were written to the SSD at all, the previous OS I had on there just booted. It simply wasn’t installed, despite showing the entire procedure and progress as if it was… o.O To me, FreeBSD is just as messy as Linux, but with fewer and worse drivers and less modern and comfortable. It doesn’t seem to be any more secure than modern Linux either, so it’s kinda pointless to me. I really wish it was different and it would offer better quality and security, but it seems it doesn’t. At least OpenBSD seems to deliver a fairly more secure OS to make up for its shortcomings like the very limited selection of ported / available software.
I love the distro
WTF? Which distro? What does this have to do with OpenBSD, it has only one distribution?..
but why hasn’t anybody managed to make it happen yet?
They didn’t have you. Now get at it.
