Comment by LeoPanthera
10 months ago
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.
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.
6 replies →
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.
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.
Then make it. Are you waiting for someone else to do the work?