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Comment by wegs | Hacker News Reader

Computers aren't things I enjoy. They're things I stomach. I think I'd use OpenBSD if I were confident that after setting it up, it worked reliably, without changes, for the next few decades, with transparent system upgrades.

Part of that is working Bluetooth, power management, webcams, video conferencing, OBS, and similar. Historically, OpenBSD was behind Linux on working reliably.

Debian used to do this before:

1) It fell behind on hardware support, as laptops took over desktops; and

2) Ubuntu/Fedora started putting out massive numbers of half-baked technologies, and everything building atop those.

I switched to Ubuntu, without Gnome, but increasingly, things don't work without Ubuntu's UX, and snap shows a future I don't want to head down anymore.

I'll look into arch linux, as someone suggested.

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Fair enough.

Webcams and power management work fine on OpenBSD (assuming there exist drivers for your hardware), but Bluetooth isn’t supported at all.

What I like about it is the simplicity of everything. If you want to change your mouse sensitivity, you add a line to a particular file in /etc. If you want to autojoin a particular WiFi network, you add the SSID and password to a particular file in /etc. If you want to start a daemon on boot... you get the idea. No massive complex configuration systems with giant blobs of XML that nobody understands.

Unfortunately the flip side is that things move more slowly — they won’t support Bluetooth until someone writes code that meets the system’s bar for correctness, simplicity, reliability, documentation, etc. — which might be never. But the stuff that does work is fantastic.

If hardware/software support requirements tie you to more mainstream OSs, I do agree with other posters that Arch is the closest thing to what you want, but it’s still far from perfect.

On that list, I can live without Bluetooth.

Do you know if:

1) Zoom works? Linux has a blob which does.

2) OBS works? This is critical.

3) How is video support with ATI/Nvidia? Will my multimonitor setup break?

The other thing which scares me is the manual upgrade process. On my systems, I've done apt-get update/dist-upgrade for a quarter century now, with never an issue.

1) There isn’t a standalone binary, but you might be able to get the web client working in Chromium. I’m not sure.

2) I don’t know.

3) AFAIK it should work.

Using the BSDs as a workstation, rather than a server, is a bit niche. Like Linux, but even more so. So unfortunately it’s still a labor of love and a lot of modern stuff won’t be supported.

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