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Comment by na85 | Hacker News Reader

OpenBSD is really great, and it qualitatively feels really solid and cohesive. Especially compared to Linux which by comparison feels like a bit of a clusterfuck at times.

But I just can't switch to OpenBSD as a daily driver yet. The big ones for me are battery life and responsiveness. Unfortunately compared to Debian I get almost 2 fewer hours on a single charge, and using OpenBSD's power management functions makes my i7 thinkpad sluggish and laggy. Noticeably longer delays when starting applications and whatnot.

I'm sure OpenBSD is a great desktop/server OS but IMHO it's just not there yet for laptops, which is surprising/disappointing to me because I'd always heard the OpenBSD guys dogfood their stuff heavily.

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I can't yet get it to boot and run properly on my Haswell based workstation, but it works a treat on my 15 year old laptop apart from aggressive cooling cycles (Windows and Slackware would rarely spin the fan up above idle speed, OpenBSD runs it full blast 50 percent of the time). It amazes me just how responsive and useful that ancient laptop is with an OS released less than three months ago.

And yes, it just feels solid, much the same way Slackware does but even more so. It's not the perfect "Desktop OS", dogfooding or not, but it's good enough if you're focused on using it to get work done and leaving the entertainment stuff for Linux/Windows/OS X.

And you should submit your dmesg and any info you have about your battery and PM issues to the OpenBSD devs. They really do listen and try to fix issues like that!

Yeah I'd submit it but I don't really want to have to deal with Theo and his planet-sized ego.

I've yet to interact with him specifically, but it's been my experience that OpenBSD devs are helpful folks, if not as friendly as the Slackware crew. But I'm not submitting bug reports to make friends.

You should watch some talks and interviews with Theo. He is very nice and cares about his development team and his users; he's really not the cranky jerk that he's often depicted as.

Oh, he is from time to time, but it's mostly towards people from the outside who pop in at random and tell OpenBSD folks How Things Should Be Done. I get it that some people tend to think they know what's right for any and every project and I'm sure their heart is in the right place. But at the same time I can see why this comes across as impolite to order people around like that. Dev's responses are typically proportional to BS dumped at them. But taken out of context it's easy to paint them as hostile and ego-driven.

"it's mostly towards people from the outside who pop in at random and tell OpenBSD folks How Things Should Be Done"

See also: Richard Stallman's attempt to troll the OpenBSD mailing list[0] after having been called out[1] about a misunderstanding of the OpenBSD ports tree (and its existence as an index of software that can be built or installed on OpenBSD, free or otherwise).

[0]: http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=119730630513821&w=2 [1]: http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=119725673616073&w=2

Theo is South African. He comes from a culture where you are very blunt.

Oh please what absolute bullshit. Almost in the same vein as all Americans are stupid and know nothing of world affairs.

Haha, yeah I was thinking the same thing. SA, like most countries, is too diverse to be able to make such blanket statements.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27ve_Never_Met_a_Nice_South_A...

>He comes from a culture where you are very blunt.

No we're not. Stop talking kak.

Is the joke too subtle? Oh well.

:-) you got it

The solution I have used for this for well over a decade is Windows on the hardware, then a VM, then my OS of choice running full screen ontop. The overhead of even semi-modern virtualisation is pretty low, and you benefit from power management that has thoroughly matured.

I always test drive a new-to-me OS in VirtualBox and VMWare first, just to make sure I can get my head around how it works, but even running it fullscreen on a fast system, it's not quite the same as bare metal. Random slowdowns, unaccelerated window managers, printing not working properly, and issues with some guest OSes sharing folders with the host can be annoying.

Another thing to consider is that bug reports are only valid for the virtual environment; sometimes things that happen there simply don't happen on bare metal. I always test Haiku OS on any new hardware I get so if I come across something wonky, I can submit it to the devs for more testing. In a VM, that's pointless (but then Haiku is a hobby, not a job, so maybe not relevant to this discussion).

All that said, if all you need is a terminal and a web browser to be productive, a VM is a solid choice for getting things done efficiently.

I tried that out and noticed minification and bundling of my js code taking several seconds rather than a couple of milliseconds. Am I doing it wrong or is that to be expected? I was using Ubuntu in virtual box on win8.

Are available hardware virtualization features enabled in the BIOS?

A little digging brings a 9/2014 comparison of virtualization software that notes VirtualBox as a distant third on performance benchmarks (http://www.tekrevue.com/parallels-10-fusion-7-virtualbox-ben...) and an Ubuntu thread noting that its performance under VirtualBox leaves much to be desired (http://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/virtualbox-or-vmware-for-linux...).

If the files are in a Virtualbox shared folder from the host OS, that performance is to be expected. Just google "Virtualbox shared folder performance."[1] If you're using Vagrant to manage the VM it's easy to work around this by switching the file share mechanism to nfs. If you're not using vagrant, you can do this manually too, or just move the files to a non-shared folder inside the VM.

[1] Scroll down to the graph at http://mitchellh.com/comparing-filesystem-performance-in-vir... to get an idea of how bad this is.

Have you tried Hyper-V as a client hypervisor?

I haven't, most of my experience is VMware (on server farms) and VirtualBox on desktop.

Yes, sadly the last time I've tested, OpenBSD was actually the best of the BSD's when it came to power management... And I'm not even a big laptop user, but I've gotten so used to suspending systems instead of shutting them down…

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