It depends on what you need for your daily use, OpenBSD has ports of common desktop environments, KDE Plasma, GNOME. In fact, thanks to KDE and GNOME port maintainers, Rafael Sadowski, and Antoine Jacoutot, respectively, OpenBSD 7.6 -current has the latest versions of both (KDE Plasma Desktop 6.3.1, GNOME 47).

I recently checked out KDE 6 for the first time last year, it really is as easy running as 'pkg_add kde kde-plasma kde-plasma-extras' and then reading through the local pkg-readme file, that said if you're not familiar with OpenBSD it won't be like other systems where it comes preinstalled and preconfigured.

https://brynet.ca/article-l13gen2.html

There's many popular window mangers and applications you can install using the package tools, as you'd expect, including Chromium and Firefox, but you can quickly search here: https://openbsd.app/

The developers often use ThinkPads, and so consequently it works quite well on ThinkPads.

Your experience will be a lot more variable on any other laptop.

Worth remembering that OpenBSD has no support for bluetooth, which many users often require on a laptop.

Worth mentioning lack of Bluetooth is only because they felt the existing BT stack was not up their standards and ripped it out rather than let it rot like most software.

There are a grand total of zero valid reasons for not including bluetooth in a desktop OS.

It's pretty easy to avoid Bluetooth, and it'a a complex stack and having code quality standards means sometimes you have to remove features because the code quality isn't there, and nobody had time/interest/motivation to do the work to make an implementation with the proper amount of quality.

If you have a 'must have' device for your desktop environment that's bluetooth, then yes, it makes OpenBSD unviable for you; but OpenBSD isn't viable for every use case.

> isn't viable for every use case

Yes, and desktop, especially laptop, is an example.

I’d prefer not to have something than to have a bad something.

Yeah, it was annoying when I tried to pair my mouse- but you know… a wired mouse isn’t that big of a deal.

One thing that brings me the most displeasure about internet discourse about operating systems is this idea that they all have to do all the same things.

Thats homogeny by another name; the point of different operating systems is different trade-offs.

Sure, and openbsd has traded off being a desktop OS for not tainting their code with the Bluetooth stack

If we're going to be bad faith discussing: as you seem to be should I remind you that your definition of "being a desktop OS" means running a stack that is primarily useful for phones and laptops- definitively not "Desktop" devices?

I haven't used a Bluetooth device on a desktop or laptop in decades now. Not because I'm using OpenBSD, but because while the promise is there, the reality of using Bluetooth has been so disappointing it's not even worth trying for me anymore. Personally, I'm not opposed to wires, because wires usually mean low latency and no dropped connections; but even when using thinks like wireless mice, using them in propriatary modes was so much better than Bluetooth that after a couple attempts, I stopped trying.

You've clearly had a different experience with Bluetooth, and that's good for you, and neither of our experiences is universal, but I think there are plenty of people willing to use a desktop OS without Bluetooth.

Heck, my new car only uses bluetooth to do phone pairing, then it switches to wifi to talk to phones, because that's clearly better than Bluetooth.

Sounds easy to buy one of those bluetooth dongle things that can talk to your external mouse/keyboard and pretend to be a set of wired usb-hid devices to solve that small issue.

Not having developers to work on it seems pretty valid. It's a matter of opinion, but I feel like it's better to have no Bluetooth, compared to having a half-broken and unsupported implementation. Again you could also view is as having a semi-functional Bluetooth is better than none and then hopefully attract developer wanting to fix it.

Then make it. Are you waiting for someone else to do the work?

I can't recall having needed bluetooth for anything else but audio[1] on my laptops so there is a huge YMMV.

[1] for which there is an easy workaround in the form of class compliant usb audio cards that output to bluetooth.

Small usb bluetooth dongles work, they show up as a regular audio device. I use one and sndiod can set set to automatically switch back and forth to it.

I run openbsd on my laptop, a thinkpad x260 with an ssd, and it works great.

It works quite well. The OOB experience is very complete and hardware gets picked up without issue. However you’re limited in the amount of apps and it’s also incredibly slow, so you’ll need to really use minimal, fast cli apps.

I left it ultimately because it had way worse battery life than Linux on my T480s and I also wanted to play some games with steam.

> it’s also incredibly slow

I never used OpenBSD. Why is it incredibly slow?

Disk I/O is notably slower than e.g. Linux or Windows and executional performance is generally a tiny bit slower, but nothing about it is "incredibly slow".

browsers are exceptionally slow in my experience.

You will want to enable GPU-accelerated rendering for Firefox and Chromium to get a smoother experience when scrolling pages and for certain video playback, because that's disabled by default. Besides that they load and parse pages and act on input pretty much as fast as they do on Linux.

well, SMT/hyper-threading is disabled by default[0] , not sure if there are other reasons though. It's not that bad, but yeah OpenBSD is probably not your optimal gaming OS :P

[0] https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg9...

SMT being disabled is not a reason for anything to be incredibly slow, or even tangibly slower, unless the CPU has a single core.

You could probably get close to the same experience by running your BSD in a VM when you need it?

Yes but depends on the laptop.

Get a Mac laptop. OS X is based on BSD.

OpenBSD is as different from macOS as Windows 11 is from OpenVMS.

Common misconception. It is not. The kernel is XNU, and the OS base is Darwin which has some BSD parts in it, and some of the userland came directly from FreeBSD (though heavily modified).

You’re not actually disagreeing with the OPs statement though. And they’re technically right too.

The problem is that all the user facing stuff in macOS isn’t BSD. It’s Apples proprietary APIs. So while macOS was originally and technically based on BSD, almost none of that is exposed to their users.

So they’re technically correct that macOS / Next was based on BSD. But also completely wrong to recommend macOS as a comparison to OpenBSD.

macOS was originally based on OPENSTEP. OPENSTEP was based on NeXTSTEP which was based on 4.3 and later 4.4.

BSD stuff has a complicated history due to the lawsuits in the 1990s.

NetBSD and FreeBSD were based on 386BSD. OpenBSD was a fork of NetBSD by one of the NetBSD founders (Theo deRaadt)...

It’s not even as clear cut as that because there’s FreeBSD and NetBSD code in XNU too.

Also OpenStep is an API rather than an OS. So macOS contains both NextStep and OpenStep code.

OPENSTEP is the OS, OpenStep is the framework.

After NeXTSTEP 3.3 there was OPENSTEP 4.0.

OPENSTEP 4.2 is the last operating system release prior to Rhapsody.

Yes it’s confusing.

True. The capitalisation rules for releases kills me every time too. Not just with OpenStep but with Next too. I now don’t even bother trying to get the capitalisation correct.

Considering how obsessed with UX that Jobs was, I don’t get how he thought the naming conventions were a good idea.

I believe it all came after Paul Rand did the logo.

NeXT looks good in the logo, and they spent $100,000 on it.

FWIW, I like it but it is confusing and made harder by the fact they also didn’t stick to their own conventions much of the time.

I'm pretty sure I've even read about FreeBSD code in the Windows networking stack. Is Windows now based on BSD? Open source code, especially when it's permissively licensed, ends up absolutely everywhere.

Windows is very much based on NT, which has its influences from a few different OS, most notably being VMS.

AFAIK there isn’t any BSD code in Windows however the original TCP/IP stack in Windows was a port from BSD. But we are talking about the early 90s here and it’s long since been rewritten by Microsoft (or so they say, but I have no reason to disbelieve Microsoft)

For NT 3.1, Microsoft purchased a TCP/IP stack from Spider Systems[0]. It's not clear how much of that code was based on BSD's TCP/IP stack. Microsoft wrote their own TCP/IP stack for NT 3.5.[1]

Microsoft did leverage BSD code for common network utilities (ping, tracert, ftp, etc.), which still exist in Windows today, although Microsoft's preference is to leverage the "better" equivalent PowerShell cmdlets where available.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider_Systems

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20151229084950/http://www.kuro5h...

EDIT: If you want to hunt for BSD code, try taking a look at NT4[2].

[2] https://github.com/lianthony/NT4.0/tree/master/private/ntos/...

The BSD TCP/IP stack went away when Vista was released, it is long gone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista_networking_techn...

For one, we don't know if it was "BSD TCP/IP" stack, just that the stack purchased from Spider was licensed as such, two, that stack went away with NT 3.5.

It was a few years ago, but I ran OpenBSD for about a year in college (on a Thinkpad). It worked because I rarely needed anything more than Firefox, code editors, and a shell with ssh. Most of my time was spent reading, writing papers, writing emails, and writing code.

my big issue when I looked into it was the default filesystem was quite an antiquated design that would lose or corrupt data in a powercut or unexpected shutdown. Last I checked many of the devs have fairly elaborate uninterruptable power supplies to deal with this.

A lot to like about openBSD; doas is my daily driver on linux, openbsd man changes are incredible, but I'm not going to mess about recovering disks just because I forgot to plug my laptop in.

I use OpenBSD. You must check the hardware support. If it works, it works far better than Linux from my experience. Somethings to take note:

  1. Power management may not be as good as with Linux
  2. No HDMI sound support
  3. No bluetooth
  4. You need to be comfortable with config files and man pages.
  5. Probably fewer applications in the ports tree (I have all I need).

If you are fine with the above, OpenBSD is the finest OS I've used so far. I've never run into random issues like wifi connectivity, audio issues like with Linux.

I use it, and even run wayland (sway) on my dell laptop. No bluetooth support. Encrypted disk. Takes a lot of time to setup. Generally similar to linux, but less hardware support.