[_x5tx]

I tried openbsd in my thinkpad x220. IDK if the processor only make a huge difference (mine being core i3 2.1ghz), but what I saw was a slow system experience, opening firefox for the first time (after boot) took a decade. I would experience slugishness everytime I closed a tab. And I was using cwm which is supposed to be even more lightweight than xfce4. I'm upgrading my motherboard to have the same processor as the author, maybe I will give another shot.

[sogubsys]

I wish I knew more about the specifics of the hardware differences. Thinkpads are new to me. I just discovered the Thinkpad subreddit several days ago, so accidental sub-community of old Thinkpad folks, but haven't dove into the details of hardware upgrades (like IPS screen!).

I was looking for a cheap replacement to my Samsung R580, and found that T420 laptop online on eBay. It had good specs and was priced well (I had to order a new battery that came in today). Originally, I was thinking if it didn't work out, it would hold me over until I decided what higher end would work better (like Matebook or Dell XPS), but the T420 seems to be alright for me. The keyboard is incredible.

Firefox does get sluggish with like 20+ tabs open though. I did start making modifications to it based off https://www.privacytools.io/browsers/ so may that helps (disabling canvas, webrtc, tracking, etc)

I didn't notice anymore delay than normal on other machines, browsers take a bit to start up, but I didn't time it. It is just a perceived speed.

The speed isn't insane or what may be called super fast, but for $200, nothing is slow for me. I mostly live in terminals and browser, and now with Zim.

[_x5tx]

These thinkpads are pretty good, and very easy to upgrade. I already changed my wifi card to support ac and I’m planning to flash coreboot bios. Last item in my checklist is to upgrade the display to full hd.

[sogubsys]

Oh cool! I didn't know you could flash a coreboot bios and I would love to have an upgraded display! Though mostly I run apps full screen so it isn't terribly important, it would just be nice.

[oil25]

OpenBSD disables Intel Hyperthreading by default. If you don't mind the security risk, you can enable it with a kernel flag. The other comment about using apm to adjust performance is spot on, too.

[_delirium]

Firefox in particular has historically had some issues. When did you try it? This is a post from 2016 mentioning a few of the performance issues at the time: https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/firefox-vs-rthreads

Some have since been fixed, though no doubt others have arisen, since Firefox is something of a moving target.

[dmm]

Were you using a traditional spinning rust hard drive? OpenBSD is basically unusable without an SSD because of the filesystem they use.

[edwintorok]

I think you need to enable Soft Updates: https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq14.html#SoftUpdates I don't know why it is not done by default, running without soft updates feels like using a filesystem without a journal.

[sogubsys]

Indeed, it was recommended by several people that I add that and noatime. That's active on my mount points.

[jamesmp98]

I'm not overly familiar with OpenBSD (although I do want to try and play with it sometime soon) What filesystem does it use?

[mikehotel]

FFS (Fast File System) or FFS2 (Enhanced Fast File System)

https://man.openbsd.org/newfs.8#O

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_File_System

[unop]

The irony!

[meruru]

There's nothing I want more out of my computing environment than being able to run OpenBSD with ZFS.

[_x5tx]

I was using an Intel 80gb ssd msata

[16]

Try enabling processor scaling with `apm -A` and see if it makes a difference. My x220 running openbsd will default to low performance if I don't run the apm daemon.