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Comment by shin_lao | Hacker News Reader

A lot of open source os caught up in the security field, making the choice of OpenBSD less interesting because it supports less hardware.

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I never used openbsd because it is secure, I used it because it is the least horrible OS I've tried. Poorly supporting more hardware is not very important to me, supporting the major hardware well is far more valuable.

OpenBSD hardware is in the state where Linux was ten years ago - you buy/build a machine that contains the hardware that OpenBSD supports well.

OpenBSD will run on almost everything, just the kernel does not contain binary blobs in order to support absolutely everything. You can if you want download non free firmware and install it yourself painlessly if the installer doesn't automagically find your drivers. I have yet to find a machine where I've had to do this though, since I usually buy no-name Taiwanese hardware which is always supported by *BSD because the manufacturers give out hardware documentation to them

>OpenBSD will run on almost everything, just the kernel does not contain binary blobs in order to support absolutely everything.

Not running with 3D acceleration with nVidia video hardware is a big stopping point. Yes, it's not their fault, but that's not running on "almost everything".

That is still the state linux is in. The difference is with openbsd, 99% of hardware is supported, and the 1% has no driver. In linux, 99% of hardware is supported, and the 1% has a buggy broken driver that will crash your kernel. Buying dodgy hardware is a bad idea regardless of your OS.

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