A few months ago, after failing to get wireless working under FreeBSD on a new-ish Thinkpad T14, I installed OpenBSD, and the whole process was shockingly simple. The installer recognized the wireless card, downloaded the correct firmware (over ethernet) and upon reboot, I had full desktop and working wireless. Getting XFCE and Firefox was also simple. It worked very well until I wiped the laptop to give to a friend.
It’s come a long way. I remember an earlier attempt at an OpenBSD desktop taking hours, and requiring a lot more effort to get everything working correctly. This was also before the recent improvements to the FreeBSD installer, which I hear has improved significantly. The performance was low compared to linux on the same machine, but that’s expected since OpenBSD favors security and correctness over performance.
Does anyone have any experience with using OpenBSD/NetBSD as a desktop? It seems to be improving quite well in recent months
score 1 · canonical
A few months ago, after failing to get wireless working under FreeBSD on a new-ish Thinkpad T14, I installed OpenBSD, and the whole process was shockingly simple. The installer recognized the wireless card, downloaded the correct firmware (over ethernet) and upon reboot, I had full desktop and working wireless. Getting XFCE and Firefox was also simple. It worked very well until I wiped the laptop to give to a friend.
It’s come a long way. I remember an earlier attempt at an OpenBSD desktop taking hours, and requiring a lot more effort to get everything working correctly. This was also before the recent improvements to the FreeBSD installer, which I hear has improved significantly. The performance was low compared to linux on the same machine, but that’s expected since OpenBSD favors security and correctness over performance.
score 2 · canonical