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Comment by nanolith | Hacker News Reader

I've used OpenBSD as a laptop daily driver for nearly 20 years. It's small. It remains mostly consistent between updates. In fact, it's so stable that I barely notice changes when I upgrade until I go hunting for them.

The Lenovo laptop I use as my travel laptop and console display is a 2012. It still runs OpenBSD just fine.

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AOL 'me too' here :)

Same here, but 10 years (6.1). The T420 I have is also my travel laptop. pledge(2) and unveil(2), which is in firefox, makes me feel even more secure while away from my home router.

Upgraded to 8.0, started it, made tea during download, ran sysmerge(8) amd pkg_add -u and done.

Is it possible to get a modern filesystem with openbsd or are they still stuck in the past? Also, is it possible to run openbsd without jumping through hoops on a laptop from 2025 including suspend, graphics, web browser?

I want this to be the case, because the more Linux petrifies, the more a free BSD option is needed.

GeFS is in the works. I hope it gets into the tree some day:

https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20260918115729

Thats great to hear! I also love the title for this talk about it:

GEFS: The File Shredder of the Future. https://events.eurobsdcon.org/2026/talk/NVMSCJ/

By default, OpenBSD uses FFS / FFS2. There is an effort in place to port GeFS (from 9front) to OpenBSD. It's unlikely that ZFS will be ported to OpenBSD, due to licensing incompatibilities. For the same reason, btrfs is also unlikely. That's why I run FreeBSD on my big server, and OpenBSD on my laptop and other edge devices. I don't really have any issues running FFS on a laptop; it seems overkill to run anything more advanced than that.

I'd recommend taking a look on forums to see what other folks are running. If it's a modern Lenovo with integrated graphics or an AMD GPU, it will be supported before others. OpenBSD folks tend to use Lenovos. My best recommendation is to pick a laptop that a core maintainer is using, unless you feel comfortable making your own patches. They have AMD GPU support via DRM from Linux. Intel graphics typically works alright.

OpenBSD works well with relatively recent versions of Chromium and Firefox. That being said, they are on a six month release cycle. The Chromium port can fall behind if you stick to -stable or releases. Building Chromium or Firefox from source is... well, I have a 2012 laptop, so that's not something I am going to do. Regardless, you'd need to be pretty comfortable with applying OpenBSD specific patches to one of these browsers, which isn't always obvious, especially since they are moving targets.

If you're used to being on a rolling release Linux, this will be a bit disorienting. But, in my opinion, it's significantly more stable and better thought out.

> OpenBSD works well with relatively recent versions of Chromium and Firefox. That being said, they are on a six month release cycle. The Chromium port can fall behind if you stick to -stable or releases.

Just to clarify here, security patches are backported to -stable. So it is not like you stick to the same browser release for six months.

Personally, I run www/firefox-esr. In part because the ESR moves more slowly in general and in part because it is maintained by someone working for Mozilla.

Not the case for chromium and ungoogled-chromium... at least I can't find them in packages-stable directory.

Thank you, I think you are correct. Compare:

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-ports-cvs&s=ungoogled-chromium

To:

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-ports-cvs&s=firefox-esr

You will see that the Firefox patches are tagged for -release/-stable and the Chromium ones are not.

Excellent answer. Thank you very much. I will keep this in mind when the next life cycling of my current laptop happens. I will keep an eye on the core teams laptop experiments as well if there's anything about that available. Will search the mailinglists.

OpenBSD usually has far fewer hoops than Linux on laptops - IME, either it works or it doesn't. Pretty much any x86 machine that isn't bleeding edge is going to work.

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