[cubano]

So, you are giving up what seems like your 2 most important apps (Evernote and VMs) just so you can run X operating system on a laptop?

Excuse me, but this just doesn't make any sense. Applications are the reason we use computers, not OSs, and to have to make such sacrifices is IMHO just silly. The whole OS holy-war thing seems so played out to me...its 2019 just use whatever works..no one care really.

Add to that the apparent political nature of the openbsd "manifesto" and guidelines and I'll just say that I, personally, am not a fan of mixing politics and OSs.

[effie]

It's a user vs. enthusiast things. Some enthusiast people deal with computers because they like the technology or the ideas.

[danans]

Adding to what others have pointed out about it being an enthusiast thing, technologies often have a political and identity dimension.

Some people love repairing old cars of a particular type and build a community around that interest. Likewise with OSes.

There are similar movements around energy tech, camera tech, cooking tech, and more.

For such a mindset, the joy of understanding the mechanism itself is the reward, not the practical end result.

[davesmith1983]

Well you can speak for yourself. I am an operating system enthusiast :D

[sogubsys]

I understand what you're saying but I fear you may be misunderstanding my intentions and opinions. I feel you may be injecting your own issues with things into my blog post. Please allow me explain.

The importance of having a secure and correct OS is most important to me (I feel OpenBSD is most appropriate and interesting here). I feel the value of OpenBSD outweighs the lose of two applications. I'm not part of an OS war, I frankly don't care what anyone uses. I just posted about about my experience on my blog (blogging is a new/rare thing for me and I am proud of the post, it took hours to do) and frankly didn't expect the post to HN to do anything (I posted on a whim, a coworker next to me loves the site) :)

I intended to migrate off of Evernote at some point, it is a tough band-aid to pull off after getting used to it for 10 years. Not having native VirtualBox on the machine is definitely a dislike, but isn't the end of the world. I only need it for labs. NetBSD can apparently run in vmm, too, just have to pass a boot option for the serial console (but I haven't tried it).

For Evernote, I had to ask myself what I'm actually using Evernote for. I'm solely using it for having minimally rich text and website scrapes stored in notebooks, and all notes being searchable. And I want it available wherever I am. I don't use OSR, non-text notes, pro features, related notes, etc. So, I question why I'm still paying for it, entrusting a vendor with all my data, and dealing with non-standard clients outside of windows/mac. Doing something just because I've always done is a terrible pattern. Time to re-evaluate and fix. That's what I did, and now I have an extremely portable and flexible solution that doesn't cost me anything but time, which I'm OK with.

I make a living with Linux for high traffic web applications, I use NetBSD and Linux for my personal servers, and OpenBSD for my workstation. I enjoy operating systems and I'm comfortable in all of them. Each one has their own character, their own quirks and pros and cons. One size fits all, for me, is a fool's game. No matter what you choose, there's some price to be paid for what you get.

And to be crystal clear: I'm not trying to change hearts and minds, or influence others, or be part of some cool kids club. Ultimately, I'm selfish with my hobbies, which this is, and so I do what solely is interesting to me. If I was able to help others, that's great and I'm happy for that, but I have no expectations.

Thank you. I hope we can be on the same page now, and I hope I was not too verbose. Be well.

An update to the article too about VMs: Note that for VMs I'm now using Oracle (non-distro provided) Virtualbox with their VRDP active, which is RDP for the VM instance and not the VM OS itself, so can RDP to the VMs on the network much better than libvirt. So, it is good enough. VirtualBox is mainly for intensive labs or monkeying with NetBSD kernel development, which 99% of the time I'd do at home.

[CTOSian]

screw the evernote, use org-mode

[h1d]

I get it. I run macOS for daily driver so I only need to care what I should care but wanted to keep an OpenBSD around on a hobby server but then again since I couldn't figure out how to make the identical environment compared to my other Linux servers, I just gave up and switched to FreeBSD, where things just worked.

Too bad but I also get the enthusiasm bit as I like OpenBSD's philosophy.

[blablabla123]

To be fair, in 2019 (on my Mac) the applications I almost exclusively use are Terminal, Browser, Editor, File manager. That's more or less since years, although recently I started using more local apps.