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Comment by ebcode | Hacker News Reader

Just installed OpenBSD 6.1 on an old Lenovo Thinkpad T500, and everything works. Suspend/Resume when closed/opened, Intel wireless card, wired ethernet port, sound, trackpad, function keys for adjusting screen brightness, all work. Well, the fingerprint reader won't work, actually, but that's about it.

Would definitely recommend this setup for folks not needing anything fancy (not for gaming/3d apps), but for your average web developer, it'll do the trick.

The caveat is that a T500 isn't exactly "modern" (c. 2006), but it's got a Core 2 Duo @ 2Ghz and 8G of ram, which is plenty for my admittedly modest needs.

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Thinkpads are a nice fit for OpenBSD if they are not too recent.

Somehow, OpenBSD on a 2012 x220 has all the energy saving features, suspend abilities, media buttons actions, etc you could hope for in the base system, without a full desktop environment.

I find this simplicity quite relaxing compared to linux, where you would have to install either a full DE or a bunch of not-so-well-integrated softwares (acpid, tlp, powertop, ...) to have your machine just-working with a simple terms+browser+tilingwm setup.

On the other hand, browser performance is not as great, virtualization, docker, USB automount and wifi roaming aren't really there. It doesn't make a difference for me though.

What about mounting devices that use common filesystems? This is probably one of my biggest gripes with obsd. Mounting a regular msdos for read/write ought to work, but many times it just doesn't. There's no ext4 read/write support at all, etc.

If I knew anything about filesystems at all I think I'd volunteer to get it done, it seems like a pressing issue that nobody seems to care about much. I'd rather be able to mount as many things as GNU/Linux can before even thinking about USB automount...

Most people running OpenBSD (or any other BSD) probably don't come across many devices that have been formatted as ext4.

Mounting msdos filesystems works for me on NetBSD, maybe the OpenBSD folks could copy some code.

You can mount ext4 readonly, depending on the feature used at creation, but you are right, there aren't so many filesystems available for RW.

There are many things missing in obsd, but overall, I find the experience on a thinkpad relaxing enough to be worth it.

Echo this; I was using an X201s with a bunch of OS's

Linux has the mess of NetworkManager

FreeBSD idled hard and also has wifi-supplicant and crap.

Solaris is a dead end and you can forget wifi.

OpenBSD was perfect, it felt so cleanly engineered with wifi/wpa handled by ifconfig.

the only concern was the bluetooth- they do not support, in any form, bluetooth. Because: "We have never seen a clean implementation of bluetooth". And yes, they trail with wifi support, but on a 7 year old laptop, that's fine.

Did wonders for my battery life too.

I avoid NM for reasons, archlinux netctl and/or systemd networkd is good enough.

> wifi-supplicant and crap

What's wrong with wpa_supplicant? It works really well, you just write one config file with all the networks and you can set the networks' priorities…

Much easier to just:

  ifconfig wlan0 scan

  ifconfig wlan0 ssid "thingIfound" wpakey "password" up

  dhclient wlan0

That's easy for joining random hotspots, yeah. But for a more stable setup, wpa_supplicant is excellent. I have a config that prefers my home network (which is EAP-TLS secured, how does ifconfig on OpenBSD handle that?), then mobile hotspot, then a couple other known networks. It automatically decides the best network to use.

That is indeed cool, I used to rely on my bash history to find my old ifconfigs for common networks I liked. It's lower power though. Due to lack of polling.

I guess there are advantages to the wpa_supplicant way of doing things too. But you have the option on openbsd too at least.

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