[rollcat]

There are plenty of good alternatives for calendar/contact sync servers, but I haven't seen any good, native clients that work on modern BSD (or Linux) desktops. Both Evolution and Thunderbird tend to be slow, clunky, glitchy, generally doing pretty poorly when put side-by-side with e.g. the built-in macOS counterparts.

I'm trying to use an OpenBSD laptop in parallel with a macOS desktop, and while it's perfect for coding and OK for web browsing, the rest of the desktop experience is just... not there.

[pseudostem]

I went all in ~1 month ago after using on servers since late 2000s. My findings:

1) can't have something like a /var mounted on iscsi. The Rd kernel doesn't support it. 2) help for DEs is patchy. In my example XFCE behaves differently on major linux distributions than mine. Intellij too is slightly different. 3) there are some bugs in upstream software which as an OpenBSD user are simply unacceptable to me. I had to disable compositing. 4) things like Bluetooth for some people (not me) may be a deal breaker. Bluetooth sound works perfectly. 5) if you want to use myfavsoftware X, you may have it in ports. But the reason you want to use it relies on mynotfavsoftware Y which may not be available on OpenBSD. 6) if you use OpenBSD you will become a cynic because of bad documentation most places elsewhere. I mean this seriously, I view rest of the world as moving on to just getting things done without giving thought to underlying correctness. Maybe it's a good thing, maybe not.

That said: 1) it is the easiest thing to operate. Like really easy. You know which file is doing what, when. 2) there are no gotchas. This is a very predictable and consistent system. 3) if it's not there in documentation, you don't have to ask "how to x", be rest assured if it's not there in the docs, it is not available, else it'd have been there. 4) contrary to public opinion, very very helpful community.

I think I am a fanboy. Previously have used (rev chronological order) - pop!os, enso OS, windows 10, snow leopard (another brilliant one), freebsd for a month, Ubuntu, redhat 5, XP, 2000, NT 4, 3.11. By far OpenBSD is something I have loved the most.

[rollcat]

> if you use OpenBSD you will become a cynic because of bad documentation most places elsewhere.

I found it the other way around, I feel inspired to write better documentation.

> things like Bluetooth for some people (not me) may be a deal breaker.

I'm spoiled by Apple. It must either work really well, or otherwise indeed I won't mind it not being there.

> Bluetooth sound works perfectly.

What do you mean? The whole BT subsystem got rm -rf'd years ago. Or are you using some sort of a 2.4GHz dongle that just shows up as an audio interface?

> contrary to public opinion, very very helpful community.

Indeed, you just need to show you've done basic research before asking questions. Which goes a very long way in any case.

> I think I am a fanboy.

Oh me too. I've been using OpenBSD for 6-7 years, on & off, as my backup / "code in peace" machine. I absolutely love the base system and I think it does what it's supposed to do extremely well.

I have very mixed feelings about the state of the free desktop environments though, again, spoiled by Apple. So I tend to stick to minimalist solutions such as dwm. I could probably switch to OpenBSD full time any time, except I have plenty of non-free software I need or want to run. Between macOS and Windows, at least Macs are decent BSDs.

[pseudostem]

>Or are you using some sort of a 2.4GHz dongle that just shows up as an audio interface?

Yeah, stupid me never ever thought of that;-)

>So I tend to stick to minimalist solutions such as dwm.

I tried my hand at tiling WMs with pop!OS, I just couldn't wrap my hand around it (pun intended). I really admire people who work through all the keyboard shortcuts. It's just not for my capabilities.

[rollcat]

> I tried my hand at tiling WMs with pop!OS, I just couldn't wrap my hand around it (pun intended). I really admire people who work through all the keyboard shortcuts. It's just not for my capabilities.

I think Windows actually did a great job of making tiling more mainstream - the way windows automatically snap to the left/right half of the screen. macOS could use something like that - I've hacked something similar using Hammerspoon[1] but I think Windows does it better: it's very discoverable for regular users, and has a very intuitive shortcut for the power users (win+left/right/up).

The world of minimalist tiling WMs suffers from the elitism factor. It's a shame that you can't get the right dose of minimalism, without making this huge leap. I think people making most of these WMs misunderstand good UX design: it's not about accommodating non-power users, it's about lowering the barrier for everyone, hackers included.

[1]: https://github.com/rollcat/dotfiles/blob/master/.hammerspoon...

[kingofpandora]

Kontact for Plasma/KDE has worked perfectly with Baïkal for me.

[rollcat]

I will give it a try, however I personally dislike KDE, it feels pretty much like a kitchen sink of options and preferences, yet I somehow still can't configure it to feel "right".