[pimeys]

Been running 6.5 snapshots in my travel laptop for some weeks and everything just works. The laptop is a ThinkPad X200 which is a bit slow for my needs, but upgrading it to ThinkPad X230 later this week should help.

I really enjoy how simple the system is after all these years with Linux. I will always continue using Linux in my main computers, but for surfing, some hobby programming and as a travel OS OpenBSD definitely won me over.

And I guess it runs quite nicely in the X250 and T450 tier already, maybe even newer ThinkPads. And when I say runs, I mean runs much nicer than many Linux distributions with their default installation.

[mikece]

>I really enjoy how simple the system is after all these years with Linux.

I still shake my head when I think back to the 90s and how Linux managed to overtake the BSDs. Good to see they are still very much alive and moving forward.

[btilly]

Yeah, a good lawsuit at the wrong time will do that to you.

For those who don't know what I am talking about, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc..... For what this has to do with Linux adoption, read http://www.softpanorama.org/People/Torvalds/Finland_period/a... about how the uncertainty around all of the BSD distributions lead to people jumping onto the Linux bandwagon. This got Linux ahead and it never looked back.

[zokula]

The lawsuit myth needs to die!

Remember when SCO was trying to sue everybody over Linux? Why didn't the *BSDs become more popular then?

Linux being more popular then the BSDs had nothing to do with anything Legal outside of Linux being GPL.

[btilly]

On what basis are you saying that it is a myth?

During the BSD lawsuit, free software was not widely understood, the company doing the suing (AT&T) was one of the biggest in the world, and the one being sued (BSDI) was a nobody by comparison. It was clear that AT&T had grounds for a real case. Everyone I know that was there says that there was real fear of the outcome. And I've known a lot who were there.

By contrast when the SCO lawsuit happened, open source was far better understood, it was a small company (SCO) doing the suing, and the companies being sued were the biggest in the world (starting with IBM). This threat was far less credible, and if it failed, everyone assumed that they would get lost in the shuffle.

It didn't hurt for the latter case that groklaw stepped up and there were endless well-informed people who said that the case was groundless. And no, I don't just mean nerds who read slashdot. But also most of the tech media, various interested lawyers, and so on.

[asveikau]

The weird thing, though, is that 90s Linux felt a little more like the BSDs than Linux usually does today. I mean, the BSDs were always a bit more coherent, but the default install of a typical Linux distro felt a lot less "heavy" in the past. You can switch from Linux to one of the *BSDs and feel like you are bringing back the glory days.

Maybe this is a complaint about Ubuntu, or gnome, or systemd.

[smhenderson]

I tend to agree. I started with Slackware when I first used Linux and it is heavily inspired by BSD. It remains so today so I've switched back to using it for day to day work and on a few servers I manage.

All other servers are using OpenBSD so it looks like I've got some upgrades to get to!

[ColanR]

I just switched from ubuntu to OpenBSD, realized that it's not optimized for desktop usage, and have been happy with Void for a while now.

[asveikau]

I would disagree. In my experience OpenBSD is pretty good on a desktop or laptop. I've had fewer driver issues with it than FreeBSD for example (mostly wifi and graphics).

But "optimized for desktop usage" is a very vague term with different meanings for everybody. My tastes are geared towards a light X workstation that doesn't add any extra whistles unless you ask for them. In the Linux world the closest I've seen to this is Arch. I also used debian for a long time (starting with netinst and no GUI, and adding things only as I need them).

[ColanR]

Sorry I was vague. I don't know the reasons for the difference, but on my X230 OpenBSD seemed to have higher latencies in starting programs, and ran big programs like chromium slower than ubuntu and void did.

Driver support is great, I agree. And the network management is far simpler. It just felt slow.

[rnd0]

>Maybe this is a complaint about Ubuntu, or gnome, or systemd.

In the 90's Linux was pretty well aimed at the techy crowd. you were expected to know or learn administration (including the location of and editing of etc files) and not be afraid of './configure && make && make install'

Then the focus changed and while your Gentoos and Arches never went away, a larger portion of the focus was on either being user friendly and/or providing an enterprise desktop experience.

This is something the BSDs (with the exception of TrueOS) never did -and certainly not OpenBSD.

It's worth pointing out (and folks in this thread already have) that if you want the hacker's experience, it's still out there. It just has almost nothing to do with mainstream Linux (which is a shame).

[CameronNemo]

You may like a distro such as Void or Alpine.

[nine_k]

> about Ubuntu, or gnome, or systemd

Looks like it. I'm running Void Linux without all these, and it feels simple and lightweight. Also fast.

(OTOH when I have to work with BSD userland utilities that are part of macOS, I often miss the GNU extensions, e.g. to `date` or to `awk`.)

[blandflakes]

If you're using some kind of window manager or desktop environment, do you mind me asking which one?

[nine_k]

Xfce, with its WM.

[yellowapple]

Not coincidentally, the oldest extant distro (Slackware) is also the one most often praised for being the most "BSD-like".

[makz]

I’m curious about what you consider a “travel OS” and how is that different from regular OS.

[pimeys]

Travel OS, so I basically browse the Internet, watch some videos, listen to some music and do some hobby projects. Also it's nice to have a not so expensive laptop for travels, so it's not such a big deal if it gets stolen. And of course the travel machine uses full disk encryption. Size is important here: I prefer 12" for travels and 14" for work, when I want to view multiple files at the same time.

OpenBSD has hard time using even 4 gigabytes of RAM with Firefox having multiple tabs open. My Arch installations easily take over 8 gigabytes, if I'm not compiling anything.

If I need a backup machine for work, I kind of want a Linux with all the Docker, Spotify, Signal etc. easily available.

[ivanbakel]

That sounds like a hefty OS. My Arch install is currently using 4Gb, and this is a full desktop.

[fmajid]

I love the simplicity of OpenBSD as well, but not all Linuxes are bloated, Alpine for instance is quite reasonable. The main benefits of Linux are ZFS and Docker, as well as wider hardware support.

[fapjacks]

You have listed ZFS as a benefit of Linux in contrast to BSD, but BSD has better support of ZFS than Linux, so I'm curious why you listed ZFS in this way?

[sdfsdfsdfsdf3]

Odd that you put this on a the travel laptop and not the desktop, I imagine most OS polygot its the inverse for things like battery life, touchpad drivers, webcam driver. Am curious why not make the switch on desktop? Same semantics? Same dotfiles?

Do you use the same window manager across both linux and openbsd?

Also what's the "much nicer" you refer to.. Please sell me

[dijit]

I am a huge OS polyglot, I run Windows at work (heavily), Debian, Fedora+CentOS, FreeBSD (also at work on servers and for a long time on my work desktop) and was using openbsd as my only homeOS for 2 years. Now I'm on Arch and MacOS.. So I can weigh in.

>I imagine [..] its the inverse for things like battery life, touchpad drivers, webcam driver.

Battery life is as good as linux, much better than FreeBSD. FreeBSD was idling hard on my laptop (load average of 1.00, 2hrs of battery when OpenBSD was giving me 4. Windows gave me 2.5) Touchpad is "fine" but I was using an X201s mainly which has a teeny tiny touchpad. Webcam... I don't use webcams.. you'd understand if you saw me :p

> Am curious why not make the switch on desktop? Same semantics? Same dotfiles?

I can't answer the OP, but openbsd is actually super slick on laptops, it's good on a desktop too, but compared to FreeBSD (and wpasupplicant to connect to shit ++ bad battery life, and a bad security record) or Linux (where connecting to wifi basically requires use of a GUI) I think it's an acceptable choice. As for dotfiles, you'd be surprised how little changes to third party software there are.. I was running the same dots on my archlinux machine as I was on my FreeBSD and OpenBSD machines (with relatively minor tweaking of which programs control the up/down volume keys for i3)

> Do you use the same window manager across both linux and openbsd?

Yeah, i3.

> Also what's the "much nicer" you refer to.. Please sell me

No pulseaudio (the mixer in openbsd is kinda good, not as many features but that's not needed imo), no wpasupplicant - WPA is built in to ifconfig, really, astonishingly clear man pages. (for the first time in my life I was reading about how the OS was even built through man pages).

Oh and I don't want to start a fight, but I didn't miss systemd (even though I generally think the concept fits a desktop use-case quite well).

I mean, you have to try openbsd to understand really. Although, personally, the input latency and sluggish feeling really got me down, especially when web browsing.

[pimeys]

Oh, I need Docker a lot. And our target platforms are Linux and OSX, so I just want to have some kind of standard OS on Desktop.

Also stuff like Signal, Spotify etc. I still haven't been able to get running on OpenBSD, maybe some day...

Nicer in a way that setting up the wifi, suspend et. al. just works. And is very easy.

[fstephany]

I don't know how adventurous that may be but you can try to run Docker in a Linux VMM ;)

[fulafel]

All the OS X users seem to be content running Docker in a Linux VM. It's more secure that way too, fitting with OpenBSD mentality :)

Doesn't help with the desktop OS part though.

[pimeys]

OpenBSD does not yet have kvm support, so you can run qemu, but it'll be very slow.

[gbrown_]

OpenBSD has its own hypervisor these days https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq16.html

[infiniteseeker]

Do you know how VMM performance compares to something like KVM2?

[gsruff]

Not sure if this helps, but OpenBSD does have vmm/vmd. Some have reported success running Docker within a Linux guest. https://medium.com/@dave_voutila/docker-on-openbsd-6-1-curre...

[pimeys]

Something to try next weekend, thanks for the link.

[sdfsdfsdfsdf3]

Ah okay, Docker would be a sticking point for me too. Thanks for sharing

[snazz]

Battery life is about double Windows and equivalent to Linux on my X220. Touchpad works out of the box on all my laptops including gestures, but I use the TrackPoint. Even without a big bloated DE installed, brightness and volume hotkeys Just Work[tm].

Try it on an old laptop and maybe you’ll like it.

[yellowapple]

OpenBSD's a notable exception for ThinkPads specifically, primarily because most (if not all) of the OpenBSD devs do their development from within OpenBSD itself (i.e. using OpenBSD either as their primary system or otherwise with significant regularity), and said devs tend to reach for ThinkPads. So, naturally, ThinkPads ended up being the de facto "preferred" devices for (i386/amd64) OpenBSD.

[MuffinFlavored]

> but for surfing, some hobby programming and as a travel OS OpenBSD definitely won me over.

Mac OS X has won me (and many others) over when it comes to these topics. I'm curious why BSD would be your choice. It sounds painful?

[busterarm]

Mac OS X only works for this due to herculean community efforts. The base system is fundamentally unusable for this purpose without Homebrew, Macports (oh hey, BSD ports!), or pkgsrc (oh hey, BSD ports again!).

The base packages get upgraded on a timescale approaching lolnever. They should be ashamed of themselves for shipping machines with Bash 3 still and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

OpenBSD is so simple for me and it takes me a fraction of the time to configure a new OpenBSD system than a new Mac.

[riffraff]

AFAIR, the reason for bash3 is that Apple refuses to use more recent packages due to GPLv3.

[intertextuality]

> Mac OS X only works for this due to herculean community efforts.

For programming, yes, although I don't know if brew would be called "herculean". For battery life and ease of use, no.

I've setup BSD on linux on personally modded thinkpads (putting in faster cpus, new wifi cards, etc), and you have got to be joking when you say it's simpler or faster than turning on a new mac and installing brew. It's infinitely more customizable for sure, but it's not simpler or easier. Especially when it comes to tuning battery life.

And for highly used programs like adobe photoshop, illustrator/affinity design, premiere, etc, forget it. Even Sketch isn't available on linux.

And this doesn't account for physical clunkiness either. My t430 was so bulky. The x220 was nice but the display wasn't that good, nor the cpu.

[emgee_1]

Highly used programs: emacs, vi, Tex , latex, R, python, lisp’s, awk, sed.

Yes No multimedia programs, cause I am a mathematician and for pdf I use pdftools; so no Adobe also; started with Slackware in 2007 after an abysmal windows period from 1991 till 2007; now I use openbsd and emacs simply rocks and is rock solid on openbsd.

[busterarm]

I think the parent poster has unreasonable expectations for what linux/bsds can do as far as laptop battery life and is talking about an entirely different use case than the parent I was originally responding to.

I also think they're vastly underestimating the amount of stuff that needs to be configured on a new mac host.

My office workstation (Arch Linux) and home desktops/servers (all OpenBSD) can be installed and configured repeatably in ~5 minutes flat.

I literally have an ansible playbook that pulls in my dotfiles and installs a list of the packages that I want. That's a hundred times simpler than setting up my work laptop (Mac) for development, where not only do I have to install xcode dev tools and homebrew and the packages that I want, but most of the packages that I install need additional configuration applied to work correctly.

[anthony_doan]

I have openbsd on an old thinkpad been sitting and gathering dust. Rstudio isn't on OpenBSD and it'll take a bit of the down time to emulate it with tmux and vim... so I never got around doing it... too busy trying to finish my thesis.

How is your R setup in OpenBSD? Like what software do you use in tandem when coding R?

[taborj]

> I've setup BSD on linux on personally modded thinkpads (putting in faster cpus, new wifi cards, etc), and you have got to be joking when you say it's simpler or faster than turning on a new mac and installing brew. It's infinitely more customizable for sure, but it's not simpler or easier. Especially when it comes to tuning battery life.

This is not an apples-to-apples comparison. You're comparing highly modified laptops with questionably supported mods to a stock Mac. Of course the highly modified laptop isn't going to install BSD smoothly. It's unlikely to install anything smoothly, at least compared to a Mac where the hardware configuration is locked down.

[ris]

> without Homebrew, Macports (oh hey, BSD ports!), or pkgsrc (oh hey, BSD ports again!)

The only thing that makes macos at all usable for me is Nix.

[pjmlp]

It might seem surprising, but OS X is pretty fine for programming without dealing with Homebrew, Macports or whatever.

That is not what matters to developers invested into Apple's ecosystem.

[Accacin]

I use MacOS at work, and I just can't get used to it. I love how fast I can navigate in i3 and how fast everything feels. I do like MacOS but I hate how the only shortcut keys to switch Windows are from cmd 1 - 5, I hate that I can't easily move windows without something like spectacle (that feels clunky - 4 buttons to move a window to another screen?) and I really can never get used to the cmd key placement :D

I've tried using Amethyst or whatever the tiling window manager is, but I found it crashed a lot and the keybindings weren't great.

Overall I think MacOS is a great OS, I just feel like I need a real tiling manager that I can't get without Linux.

[wtetzner]

> and I really can never get used to the cmd key placement :D

The first thing I do when setting up a new Mac is swap the option and command keys.

[pimeys]

I like simplicity. I use i3, Firefox with enough privacy extensions, Emacs and terminal. And I love to be able to have a great keyboard, where sadly the ThinkPads are the only choice nowadays.

Using Mac OS X or Windows will give me a headache. I just don't like their user interface. And I've used both of them a lot; I had my G4 iMac with 10.0.0 back in the days, and kind of liked 10.3.0 until Linux won me over again.

[pimeys]

(P.S. why every OS thread in HN always turns into discussion about Apple?)

[snazz]

People are very change-resistant when it comes to OS and text editor choice and don’t understand how the other side lives without $feature_of_choice.

[MuffinFlavored]

I'm just amazed that you are calling an interface you need to set up yourself / configure / tweak a bunch of things to get working is "simple" in your eyes compared to Mac OS X, which is simple to lots of people (which would explain why they sell so many MacBooks, in my eyes?)

[pimeys]

I'm just a different crowd! I live in UNIX and for me editing a few text files is much simpler than having a bloated OS.

And why I said the thing about Apple originally is that it seems to be almost a meme that every single thread about Linux or *BSD gets a discussion about Apple products. It's so weird :)