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Comment by sdfsdfsdfsdf3 | Hacker News Reader

Odd that you put this on a the travel laptop and not the desktop, I imagine most OS polygot its the inverse for things like battery life, touchpad drivers, webcam driver. Am curious why not make the switch on desktop? Same semantics? Same dotfiles?

Do you use the same window manager across both linux and openbsd?

Also what's the "much nicer" you refer to.. Please sell me

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I am a huge OS polyglot, I run Windows at work (heavily), Debian, Fedora+CentOS, FreeBSD (also at work on servers and for a long time on my work desktop) and was using openbsd as my only homeOS for 2 years. Now I'm on Arch and MacOS.. So I can weigh in.

>I imagine [..] its the inverse for things like battery life, touchpad drivers, webcam driver.

Battery life is as good as linux, much better than FreeBSD. FreeBSD was idling hard on my laptop (load average of 1.00, 2hrs of battery when OpenBSD was giving me 4. Windows gave me 2.5) Touchpad is "fine" but I was using an X201s mainly which has a teeny tiny touchpad. Webcam... I don't use webcams.. you'd understand if you saw me :p

> Am curious why not make the switch on desktop? Same semantics? Same dotfiles?

I can't answer the OP, but openbsd is actually super slick on laptops, it's good on a desktop too, but compared to FreeBSD (and wpasupplicant to connect to shit ++ bad battery life, and a bad security record) or Linux (where connecting to wifi basically requires use of a GUI) I think it's an acceptable choice. As for dotfiles, you'd be surprised how little changes to third party software there are.. I was running the same dots on my archlinux machine as I was on my FreeBSD and OpenBSD machines (with relatively minor tweaking of which programs control the up/down volume keys for i3)

> Do you use the same window manager across both linux and openbsd?

Yeah, i3.

> Also what's the "much nicer" you refer to.. Please sell me

No pulseaudio (the mixer in openbsd is kinda good, not as many features but that's not needed imo), no wpasupplicant - WPA is built in to ifconfig, really, astonishingly clear man pages. (for the first time in my life I was reading about how the OS was even built through man pages).

Oh and I don't want to start a fight, but I didn't miss systemd (even though I generally think the concept fits a desktop use-case quite well).

I mean, you have to try openbsd to understand really. Although, personally, the input latency and sluggish feeling really got me down, especially when web browsing.

Oh, I need Docker a lot. And our target platforms are Linux and OSX, so I just want to have some kind of standard OS on Desktop.

Also stuff like Signal, Spotify etc. I still haven't been able to get running on OpenBSD, maybe some day...

Nicer in a way that setting up the wifi, suspend et. al. just works. And is very easy.

Ah okay, Docker would be a sticking point for me too. Thanks for sharing

All the OS X users seem to be content running Docker in a Linux VM. It's more secure that way too, fitting with OpenBSD mentality :)

Doesn't help with the desktop OS part though.

OpenBSD does not yet have kvm support, so you can run qemu, but it'll be very slow.

OpenBSD has its own hypervisor these days https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq16.html

Do you know how VMM performance compares to something like KVM2?

KVM has more than a decade of performance enhancements from companies like rhel/intel/google.

It will definitely perform better. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't experiment and see if the performance hit is something you can accept.

Not sure if this helps, but OpenBSD does have vmm/vmd. Some have reported success running Docker within a Linux guest. https://medium.com/@dave_voutila/docker-on-openbsd-6-1-curre...

Something to try next weekend, thanks for the link.

I don't know how adventurous that may be but you can try to run Docker in a Linux VMM ;)

Battery life is about double Windows and equivalent to Linux on my X220. Touchpad works out of the box on all my laptops including gestures, but I use the TrackPoint. Even without a big bloated DE installed, brightness and volume hotkeys Just Work[tm].

Try it on an old laptop and maybe you’ll like it.

OpenBSD's a notable exception for ThinkPads specifically, primarily because most (if not all) of the OpenBSD devs do their development from within OpenBSD itself (i.e. using OpenBSD either as their primary system or otherwise with significant regularity), and said devs tend to reach for ThinkPads. So, naturally, ThinkPads ended up being the de facto "preferred" devices for (i386/amd64) OpenBSD.

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