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Comment by oneplane | Hacker News Reader

While it obviously does run, it's still so broken it's hardly usable. You basically have a 'mobile PC' rather than a laptop/notebook. There is no suspend/resume, hibernation is slow, video not really supported and the touchpad doesn't fully work. Basically, it's fine for when you want a 'mobile server', but for desktop or human interaction via the local console this is just as bad as a cheap windows laptop: things are there, but they don't really work well.

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Things like suspend/resume, hibernate, video drivers, and touchpads generally get fixed when developers have a need for them. You can hack it together yourself, or you can buy a developer the same model laptop that you wish had everything working and hope they like it enough to fix stuff. Or you can shut up.

And fwiw, cheap windows laptops "just work" far more often and far better than almost any linux distro I've tried.

Edit: Author notes he is working on improving touchpad. This is exactly how it gets done for OpenBSD.

Or one can continue pointing out the deficiencies in the software as it relates to a consumer-ready laptop WITHOUT doing anything you mentioned, which is almost as impolite as you telling people to shut up when they notice an imperfection in the OS.

It's free software. Does OpenBSD owe you a perfect OS?

No, but if you want people to switch to it, then ignoring complaints is the first way for people to just boycott using your OS. I also work as a free software developer, and I don't understand why you would act that way when someone tells you they don't like the state of your project.

Responding to a reasonable complaint with "as developers we only scratch our own itch and we don't owe you a 'perfect OS'" is just hostile for no reason.

Also, nobody said they expect a perfect OS, but I also wouldn't call this a laptop install if everything that GP said didn't work was correct.

I stand to be corrected, but I don't think most OpenBSD devs care too much about getting others to switch to it.

They build the OS that they want, and make it available for anyone else to use.

There are some evangelists, to be sure. I just don't think it's a primary concern to many of the devs.

Was the table at the bottom of the page somehow insufficient? jcs managed to present all the same information, with more detail in fact, in an easily parsed format, so I'm not sure what contribution the comment really adds.

Looks like $1500+ here. Bit steep, but I may try to find the cash so I can send one to any developer who can make HiDPI not suck on Linux.

I think one of the biggest challenges for FOSS (that proprietary software gets right) is making an app work and look right when half of it is on a HiDPI screen and half of it is on a lower resolution screen.

Sad to say, once I could afford $2500+ HiDPI laptops, I became a lot less picky about running proprietary OSes...

From what I've heard (I don't use proprietary OSes), Windows had a lot of issues with HiDPI in exactly the situation you're describing. They also had scaling issues with having different resolution monitors.

So, do you have a laptop to recommend where suspend/resume work well? Or should i just avoid openbsd if i want to use a laptop?

OpenBSD is very good at suspend/resume, particularly for non-bleeding edge laptops that developers have had a chance to use. I've had better luck with suspend/resume on OpenBSD than on Linux. I recommend Thinkpad X/T series laptops and have also had success with older Asus Eee PCs.

Great recs; i'll check out the thinkpad x!

This is obviously a work in progress, not a finished port.

I bet one month from now things will look much better.

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