Sure they do. I personally know a few who use OS X, and I even saw someone using Windows!
Whether the scope of this phenomena differs between FreeBSD and OpenBSD, I can't say. Speaking for myself, I run OpenBSD as a desktop on ThinkPads and I am very happy with it. In fact, I am so happy with OpenBSD, I will even tolerate poorer battery life on laptops to use it and to avoid Linux.
But I still use OS X on my primary machine.
This is exactly why OpenBSD, in my opinion, is currently failing at their stated goal of "Provide the best development platform possible." (as 'stsp stated).
If you get poorer battery life on a platform and still use it, you are doing something very contrary to like 99% of all laptop users, including developers. Now I'm fine if OpenBSD says "We don't care about that, we're a server OS", but there should be some big red stickers saying "We have terrible battery life on laptops" on the BSD websites.
It's not terrible, just worse. On an X240, it was about 60-70% of what I could get from optimized Linux. Before you say that's terrible I will say that stock Ubuntu only got 70%-80% of optimized Linux too. So OpenBSD was only slightly worse than Ubuntu in this regard.
Sure, Linux in general can be optimized much further than stock Ubuntu, but that's work I'd prefer not to do. If it's important to you, sure, go ahead and do it!
Battery life is important to me, but even more important to me is having more reliable networking, and network tools I can actually understand and use. Ever tried to set a GRE tunnel in NetworkManager?
And sure, I can chose not use to NetworkManager and Ubuntu and do everything "the old fashioned way" in Linux too. I can install Gentoo and make it work without all that, but that's work I prefer not to do. OpenBSD does what I want from it from the default install. Nothing else to tinker with.
I have no doubt that doing advanced network stuff is easier in OpenBSD than Linux -- but remember I was talking about average users. How often does your average desktop or laptoo user need to set up a GRE tunnel?
Overall, I see your viewpoint, and I think you see mine too. OpenBSD is a more reliable OS for servers and in general headless stuff. That being said, given your optimism, I will try out OpenBSD again on a laptop.
- it doesn't break random stuff on upgrades
- just works, if something worked yesterday it works today
Yeah, and that's on OpenBSD -current upgraded about once a week - that has the perception of being more stable than Ubuntu, Archlinux & Debian.
I didn't notice battery live degradation but I never ran Linux on that laptop. I do notice performance decrease on Firefox but at this point it's hard to pin point if it's the OS & SMP support (which the developers actively point out as an active area of focus) or Firefox itself (also being actively worked on by upstream).
All in all, my wife is using the OpenBSD laptop daily and I don't hear here complaining that much.
Check the recent C-state work by guenther@. apmd and cpu freq scaling has recently been fixed for multiprocessor system.
But these things can take time to work on new machines. Unlike Linux and Windows, we don't get device drivers written for us by Intel employees in time for their product launch.