[terminalcommand]

I've used FreeBSD on my laptop (lenovo x201) for a long time, I've also installed OpenBSD from time to time. The rumors on the internet was that OpenBSD had better hardware support. I remember someone claiming that whereas FreeBSD developers use VMs to develop, OpenBSD devs used native machines (mostly laptops). I faintly remember that installing OpenBSD was harder than FreeBSD. FreeBSD came with a terminal graphical installer, partioning etc. happened automatically.

The problem I had with BSDs was that they were slower than Linux. Especially when it came to boot times, Linux booted up in seconds due to parallel starting of system services. On FreeBSD the same machine with an SSD took nearly half a minute to boot. Some people here on HN had advised me to use a parallel system initializer, or never completely shutdown my laptop. Always keeping the laptop at sleep did not work for me, because I was (and am) very paranoid when it comes to computers, I can't sleep if my computer is not shutdown and has an ethernet cable plugged into it. Using a parallel system initializer did not work, because I was too lazy to set one up.

Battery consumption was another issue. Although FreeBSD provided decent battery life, utilities like powertop did not exist for BSD platforms.

What I liked about FreeBSD was that it was a pure OS. When I opened htop, I could see only a handful of processes running, and I knew what each process did.

On the other hand, everything required manual configuration. I basically lived in the terminal to operate my laptop. But that is probably due to my lazyness to automate and write scripts.

I'd also be interested in the differences in day-to-day life between FreeBSD and OpenBSD.

[dbolgheroni]

I don't get why people put so much emphasis on the boot time nowadays. I have a 5 years old laptop which takes less than 30 seconds to boot, with Xorg already.

Even if you power cycle every day. If you ACPI sleep (and it works great), you I'll have to boot your machine once every 6 months, when there is a new OpenBSD release.

I would much rather "spend 30 seconds" every 6 months to boot the OS I want to run for 12 hours/day than to "save some seconds" in months to run an OS that I don't for the same amount of time.

I'm not sure people realize how much complexity you have to add to make a system boot even a couple of seconds faster. If you somehow have to diagnose a problem in a system like this, all the seconds you saved in a lifetime will be spent on a single debugging session.

[fao_]

> every 6 months

Most people don't want or can't afford to have their computer running 24/7. Especially if they're not using it for more than 11 hours of that day. And if you use more than one OS on one computer, fast startup can save you a lot of time switching between those.

> I'm not sure people realize how much complexity you have to add to make a system boot even a couple of seconds faster.

Not true. I shaved 20 seconds off my boot time recently, by digging around in config files and disabling services that were never used, by backgrounding non-essential services that took a long time to start up, and by reducing the grub bootloader time. Everything I did was trivial, yet it cumulatively brought a large reduction in startup time, it's gone from one minute to ~30ish seconds now.

[wahern]

  Most people don't want or can't afford to have their
  computer running 24/7

I guess I shouldn't make too many assumptions. I'm sure plenty of people are still using Windows on 10-year-old towers attached to CRTs. But my Macbook Air goes several months without a reboot, as did my previous one, and the one before it, going back at least 10 years. I don't even think about it. My servers are rebooted much more often, simply because of kernel patches and upgrades. Fortunately startup is usually quick for both OpenBSD and Linux as, ironically, there are far fewer services and the hardware is less complex than typical consumer machines.

[xorcist]

> Most people don't want or can't afford to have their computer running 24/7

I think the various power save modes have replaced shutdown for most personal computers. Even on my desktop (yes, I still have one of those at home) I just suspend it and only reboot on certain upgrades.

[milcron]

> Most people don't want or can't afford to have their computer running 24/7.

I'm always telling my family and friends to reboot their damn computers every now and then. In my experience most people never turn their PCs off.

[JdeBP]

If you want GUI configuration tools for FreeBSD, then look to TrueOS (formerly known as PC-BSD).