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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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 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.
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.
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".
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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/
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:
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.
https://jcs.org/openbsd-laptops
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 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.
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".
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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/source-changes@openbsd.org/msg9...
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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.
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