I Stopped Using OpenBSD

This is very similar to my prior with NetBSD and life on a dell, and then an older Thinkpad model, brought into a new era.

Basically, you can love an OS but wind up frustrated by the lack of progress against modern hardware. Things which "don't matter" to core, wind up affecting your lived experience because you don't only work with "core" but with people in your #dayjob who expect their lived experience in Windows or OSX or Linux to work on you, and pass you work related content or tasks you cannot directly do the way they expect, because .. your OS choice isn't tractable for that problem.

I still retain a fondness for NetBSD. I haven't used it in anger for over 2 decades. I do work in FreeBSD but increasingly marginalised. Great OS. hard to live in, when you need to inter-op with people for outcomes beyond the tty.

I will say that modulo a working GPU, or accepting non-accellerated, non-decorated X, if you have a browser which supports javascript and conforms to the expectations of O365, almost anything can be done fine. Audio/Video gets a bit harder sometimes, but mostly it's fine.

I do worry modern Oauth2/MFA is going to kill the free OS. I now depend on some python3 code to make the nmh mail client work for me, hacking around company policy.

I'm in the same position with Linux. I'm back on Windows as a daily driver for the first time in about 12 years. WSL2 makes this more pleasant than I expected.

There are a few reasons for this. The first is hardware support; I bought a ThinkPad T14 Gen 5 AMD, which is almost a perfect Linux machine save for a whole bunch of bugs in the amdgpu driver that I'm not willing to live with. This is always a risk when you buy recent hardware.

The second is that no mainstream Linux distribution does secure boot or disk encryption very well, and that's not something I can do without on a portable machine in this day and age. Fedora is moving in the right direction quickly with UKI[1] and SED[2] support, but it's not there yet.

[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Unified_Kernel_Suppor...

[2] https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/f41-change-proposal-s...

It’s kinda sad about the BSD operating systems …. fantastic operating systems and in a different universe without Linus Torvalds these probably would have been the server operating systems to take over the world. But ultimately outclassed by Linux - it’s impossible to compete with such vast community.

Laptops are typically designed and manufactured to a price-point. Increasingly, I'm finding it easiest to just use the laptop with the OS it was supplied with. For the daily-driver I find a modern ChromeBook suitable.

Then ... I use a Debian mini-tower for development and hacking work. No need to run iffy webapps, etc on it.

Used to mostly use NetBSD for older server oriented hardware. But increasingly using Alpine Linux instead.

About systemd: there was one proposal for systemd equivalent for openbsd, but it got cancelled in the start. the only thing i know of is "launchd" (not sure its the exact name), that runs on macos.