[mkirschner]

I started playing with OpenBSD 6.3 as a desktop (actually laptop) OS a couple of months ago. Installation was very straightforward. In my case I used the whole disk, no dual boot.

Here's a tribute/introduction written by Derek Sivers:

https://sivers.org/openbsd

As for my own experience, I don't know if I'm ready to give up Debian as my primary desktop OS, but I really like OpenBSD on my coding-or-surfing-on-the-couch laptop.

On the server side, I also use both (as VPS) for personal projects.

[keithpeter]

I've just improvised my way through a netBSD install on an old thinkpad X60 with 1Gb ram and a mechanical hard drive, whole disk, defaults mostly. Seems generally quite similar to OpenBSD (which makes sense given OpenBSD is a fork from netBSD).

$PKG_PATH is set up but commented out in the .profile for root. I'm going for a light window manager and Seamonkey and a few bits and pieces to see how the land lies.

[nucleardog]

> (which makes sense given OpenBSD is a fork from netBSD)

... Over 20 years ago. Over almost the exact same time period NeXTSTEP became OSX. Any similarities are probably more coincidental or due to on-going borrowing from each other than to do with the fact that one is forked from the other.

[keithpeter]

Alas, can't install many packages, dependency errors. Example below for texlive-collection-all

     fmtutil [INFO]: Not selected formats: 29
     fmtutil [INFO]: Total formats: 29
     fmtutil [INFO]: exiting with status 0
     pkg_add: no pkg found for 'tex-pgf-[0-9]*', sorry.
     pkg_add: Can't install dependency tex-pgf-[0-9]*
     pkg_add: Can't install dependency tex-pgfplots-[0-9]*
     pkg_add: Can't install dependency tex-milog-[0-9]*
     pkg_add: Can't install dependency texlive-collection-langgerman-[0-9]*
     pkg_add: 1 package addition failed

This could just be mirror flakiness, $PKG_PATH is resolving to

     http://cdn.NetBSD.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/i386/8.0/All

There appears to be no native binary for LibreOffice. Investigating.

[rjsw]

Building packages can't start until the final release build of the base Operating System has been done, things like LibreOffice depend on a lot of other things. Maybe check again in a couple of days.

[keithpeter]

Cool, will try again in a bit. Looking very interesting so far.