This way a malicious user with physical access to your machine can easily get around your locked desktop by switching to tty1. It would be better to fork the xinit proces to the background and exit the tty after:

  echo 'xcompmgr &\nexec cwm' > ~/.xinitrc && xinit & && exit

   xinit & && exit

I don't mean to ask a silly question, but what exactly is this meant to do? (What might it do that plain old `xinit & exit` doesn't do?)

&& is a binary op meant to execute the following command if the return code of the preceding command is success (0)

& is another shell builtin that sends the command preceding it to the background, and lets the shell continue with whatever comes next...

So, at first I read your edit and thought "Oh, this will exit the shell unless X can't be started" ... but exit should be running before X ever gets around to returning, no?

I just read the man page for my favorite shell, and it says the return code for `&` is always 0. So it's clear that `& &&` will work, but I don't see anything suggesting it will do anything that `&` alone won't do.

Just want to know if you know something I don't, and I figure there's no better place to learn a new shell thing than on a HN thread about BSD OS.

Nothing special going on here; my syntax is based on me not knowing the particulars of `&`. I'll try to remember using yours in the future as it's more elegant. Thanks for the reply.

Echoing this sentiment.

FreeBSD idled heavy on my Thinkpad X201s, but OpenBSD was much better, longer battery and all the hardware worked basically flawlessly (except X11 tweaks for the middle mouse button thing, which is not exclusive to BSD).

Also wifi being handled by "ifconfig" is super nice.

The wonderful world of Unix.

Dunno why you're downvoted, you have a totally valid point. Trying to shoe-horn a hacker-friendly OS into a layman-friendly desktop/laptop experience is going to be painful. Extremely fun and satisfying, sure. (Well, sometimes.) But there will be pain.

Absolutely agree. The UNIX desktop for the most part has significantly regressed over the past decade or so; OpenBSD has at least stayed where it was.

I'm waiting a llvm-compiled base to express my total admiration

Ok, I'll bite, what does that do?

`.xinitrc` is loaded by xinit when you start X; they're adding `exec cwm` to use cwm as their window manager.

Appreciated.