I know that OpenBSD is "opinionated" but I can't really accept that their opinion on bluetooth is "we don't support bluetooth", which otherwise seems essential, at least to me, for any mobile device.
https://github.com/openbsd/src/commit/b8042ed98e3e7a691133b4...
I love this word.
I'm apparently behind the times, though: It's on Urban Dictionary and I love their example
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=do-ocracy
> “Jeez, why does Mary get to decide what everyone eats and when they work? Who put her in charge?” Older and wiser heads will say, “This is a do-ocracy. If you think you can do Mary’s job, and you want to, then get up there and do it. She’ll probably be relieved. If not, don’t be a jerk and make a big stink about it, or else she’ll stop working so hard and we won’t have anything to eat!”
... which is apparently taken from:
https://communitywiki.org/wiki/DoOcracy
... which is another wiki I'll have to dive into.
As an openbsd user, I will say that bluetooth is pretty far down the list of things I care about.
This is getting really old. Not all users are programmers.
That's because enough people decided to put enough effort to support as many use cases as possible, until the OS got enough momentum to be hard to ignore.
The BSD approach has instead always been "you want it? then code it yourself and open a merge request". That sounds legitimate, but that's the real reason why OpenBSD has never taken off outside of its small niche of geeks - despite being an amazingly designed OS under the hood.
And I know many of those geeks who are quite proud of being part of a tiny niche that scuffs at Bluetooth, USB 3.0, QHD displays or anything that a "normal user" might want - had it been for them a 640x480 screen with a working session of xterm would have largely sufficed. But that's also the reason why there aren't many "normal people" using their OS.
At some point one should also ponder why we support and contribute to open-source projects (especially considering that we mostly do it in our spare time, that, in the case of developers, is often limited and precious). Is it because we want to make the (IT) world a better place with more free and cool products and attract more people, or is it because we like our own well-curated niche and we don't want to let anybody in?
For an example of the last point, transgender care in the UK -- it takes 2 appointments to get treated (hormone therapy), it can take up to 4+ years to get the first appointment (those are the smaller waiting lists), and another year or longer to get the second before you are finally treated for it. This isn't done out of bad-will, it is done out of intent to not mistreat people. However, the effect of this is that it gatekeeps people who can have access to trans care to those who are able to afford it.
Gatekeeping does not require intent, nor does it require malice. It can simply be the result of a cultural artifact creating what is percieved to be a hostile culture.
Both? OpenBSD's niche is being so secure it (almost) hurts. Curating that is worthwhile in a Research OS sense: How many knobs can we tweak on a POSIX system to increase security while explicitly and loudly not caring about much of anything else? Keeping everyone who doesn't share that vision out is part of the plan.
They can be the security pioneers, and the rest of us can see where they get scalped so we don't repeat their errors.
The difference is that OpenBSD BDFLs (Theo et al.) have not been willing to compromise their vision of what the OS should be and how it should be developed just to chase popularity. Look at how they still use CVS, ship their own httpd and ssl libs, dropped sudo years ago (and then rewrote it)... they prioritise consistency and reliability over ubiquity and “the new shiny”. Chances are that, even if you wrote a BT stack yourself and submitted it, it wouldn’t be merged unless it fits their philosophy.
That’s the real difference: Linus and his generals have been willing to accomodate and support a higher number of features just for the sake of it, because it was cool; they were more accepting of incoming developers; and they were much friendlier towards business interests, accepting binary blobs and so on, which is somewhat ironic (Linux is very hard-GPL “inside” but then gave up when it comes to drivers; OpenBSD is, well, BSD everywhere, but they push super hard for manufacturers to open their drivers).
OoenBSD makes IT better too, but it does it on its own terms, and that’s fine.
Then pool resources via a funding platform, get the word out (here on HN, social media, mailing lists) and you may get it done quite soon and also at a low relatively low cost per user.
But like, that's actually _also_ a lot of effort! Especially for projects that are "abandoned" or have no obvious owner, since then you're in "hire a random X programmer to do this for you".
I feel like more OSS projects should go beyond "Donate" and have a "buy a feature/bug fix" button.
You could run into a problem with a lot of OSS no-warranty policies this way.
I am curious what they are?
This is what I had in mind. This obviously impacts some useful gdb features, but such is the nature of OpenBSD.
Perhaps prohibiting access to user-space except GDB would be a reasonable compromise. Also, debug registers are not unique to x86: most (all?) CPU architectures have them. So calling it a "fad [...] Intel cpu feature" is a bit unfair.
There are larger forms of this but Creative's form factor is very small.
This is probably why no-one has written it yet.
Thet also have a BT-W3 that's USB-C now.
So, my guess is nobody who works on OpenBSD a lot cares about bluetooth on OpenBSD, because they're not using bluetooth much, and don't see any use cases for it that would help them.
Well, that's not true. People in the Apple bubble say that Apple devices work with Apple headphones. But that is it.
Saves everyone a lot of frustration.
And it’s a laptop, lots of people almost never use bluetooth on a laptop. You might, I do sometimes, but it’s hardly essential.
It's an important commentary on bluetooth that it cannot be included in such a system. In that sense OpenBSD is a valuable filter, even if that makes it impractical to run on a laptop for your use case.
I'm happy to make this trade-off, given how consistent and reliable OpenBSD is. Not a deal breaker for me.
https://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD-5.5/bluetooth.4
I'm not sure why the article says it doesn't support bluetooth.
Bump 5.5 up to any higher number and you'll get "not found". Bluetooth was removed around ~2014 in OpenBSD.