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Comment by mkirschner | Hacker News Reader

I started playing with OpenBSD 6.3 as a desktop (actually laptop) OS a couple of months ago. Installation was very straightforward. In my case I used the whole disk, no dual boot.

Here's a tribute/introduction written by Derek Sivers:

https://sivers.org/openbsd

As for my own experience, I don't know if I'm ready to give up Debian as my primary desktop OS, but I really like OpenBSD on my coding-or-surfing-on-the-couch laptop.

On the server side, I also use both (as VPS) for personal projects.

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I've just improvised my way through a netBSD install on an old thinkpad X60 with 1Gb ram and a mechanical hard drive, whole disk, defaults mostly. Seems generally quite similar to OpenBSD (which makes sense given OpenBSD is a fork from netBSD).

$PKG_PATH is set up but commented out in the .profile for root. I'm going for a light window manager and Seamonkey and a few bits and pieces to see how the land lies.

Alas, can't install many packages, dependency errors. Example below for texlive-collection-all

     fmtutil [INFO]: Not selected formats: 29
     fmtutil [INFO]: Total formats: 29
     fmtutil [INFO]: exiting with status 0
     pkg_add: no pkg found for 'tex-pgf-[0-9]*', sorry.
     pkg_add: Can't install dependency tex-pgf-[0-9]*
     pkg_add: Can't install dependency tex-pgfplots-[0-9]*
     pkg_add: Can't install dependency tex-milog-[0-9]*
     pkg_add: Can't install dependency texlive-collection-langgerman-[0-9]*
     pkg_add: 1 package addition failed

This could just be mirror flakiness, $PKG_PATH is resolving to

     http://cdn.NetBSD.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/i386/8.0/All

There appears to be no native binary for LibreOffice. Investigating.

Building packages can't start until the final release build of the base Operating System has been done, things like LibreOffice depend on a lot of other things. Maybe check again in a couple of days.

Cool, will try again in a bit. Looking very interesting so far.

> (which makes sense given OpenBSD is a fork from netBSD)

... Over 20 years ago. Over almost the exact same time period NeXTSTEP became OSX. Any similarities are probably more coincidental or due to on-going borrowing from each other than to do with the fact that one is forked from the other.

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