Hacker News Reader

Comment by midislack | Hacker News Reader

OpenBSD gets better all the time, but not larger. It's what made me switch.

Do you use it as a desktop? My biggest problem there is WiFi. I predominantly use a laptop, and BSDs are notoriously bad at that use case. I tend to like to keep my servers and workstations on the same OS if possible. Hence, I haven't made the switch.

Anyway, all that to say, what are you running it on?

I’m currently using OpenBSD as my only operating system on my Thinkpad X1 carbon (gen 7).

Wifi works just fine. I remember that the wifi drivers aren’t part of the base install system for licensing reasons, but they provide a very simple tool that will download it and set it up.

Generally, with openBSD, if something is supported, it is supported correctly. My go to example is that my keyboard backlight controls work even from the tty terminals.

But also, if there is something that the developers don’t think they can support correctly, they don’t hesitate in removing it entirely from the OS. They removed Bluetooth support for example.

It’s not for everyone. But for me, I love the idea that I can trust my primary computing environment because the developers care soo much about the little details.

I can't say how it is for the Thinkpad but most of the time keyboard backlight control is done in hardware. You can catch the keypress event and sometimes control it from the OS but the dimming/brightening works completely independent of the OS.

Yeah, kb backlight even works under Linux most of the time. Monitor backlight works everywhere out of the box under OpenBSD though, nothing at all like the hackish mess on other systems.

Except when it doesn't, like on T450s laptops for instance.

That's what's great about OpenBSD. Other systems might support 802.11n, 802.11ac and stuff like that. But OpenBSD supports 802.11g, _correctly_. Not like Linux or Windows that support it, but _incorrectly_.

OpenBSD, in general, has better Wi-Fi support than the other BSDs. Not as good as Linux, but improvements are made regularly.

You can have a look at the boot log for an idea how other users are doing on their hardware

https://dmesgd.nycbug.org/index.cgi?do=index&fts=OpenBSD

I used OpenBSD on servers, but the lack of Bluetooth stack keeps me from using it on the desktop.

> lack of Bluetooth

You can use usb hardware bluetooth dongles [0] with OpenBSD, they are detected like any other audio device. I assume that there are a variety of these available.

[0] I'm using https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00ZYYPFHU

I primarily need it for my mouse, but that's good to know for audio.

FWIW, you can also get a mouse that wirelessly talks to a USB dongle, i.e. the interface to the PC is USB (which OpenBSD does support); the first hit I got is https://www.amazon.com/Logitech-M185-Swift-Wireless-Mouse/dp...

I use a cheap, wireless mouse with OpenBSD on a ThinkPad. I've never had a problem with it. No special configuration. It just works

I was smart enough to buy a computer that OpenBSD is compatible with, so I don't have any of these issue of which you speak. I use a T420. I have more powerful computers at my disposal, a Talos workstation and a high core count recent AMD. But this is the computer I use 90% of the time, at least as an interface to the others.

If you're using Intel wifi, it's supported and works full speed.

When using wifi that works [0] I actually quite like the use of ifconfig for making connections.

[0] I was actually surprised my particular ath9k chip was unsupported (it would panic the kernel is added) as it was fully supported in linux-libre.

OpenBSD has the only correct implementation of wifi among all Unix and Unix-like operating systems. It's really the best thing going.

Tempted to install it again but I have vague memories of tedious battles against the WiFi firmware on this me_cleaned laptop I have kicking around.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com