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Comment by ams6110 | Hacker News Reader

I use OpenBSD as my main desktop and dev machine, with Awesome as the window manager (it's a tiling window manager).

http://awesome.naquadah.org/

I use Xombrero (formerly called xxxterm) for browsing, or Chromium from packages if I'm working with anything on Google.

https://opensource.conformal.com/wiki/xombrero

I use Emacs as my editor and email client, and do pretty much everything else in a terminal.

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Are you using any specific font setup? Infinality patches etc? At least default install leaves the fonts in a pretty bad state.

Hm no.. have never heard of Infinality and didn't see anything OpenBSD-specific.

I'd say if you're needing extensive font support, or do any really heavy graphics work, OpenBSD may not work well for you as a desktop. For me, the stock fonts on OpenBSD meet my needs.

The fonts are looking nice and sharp for me:

http://s24.postimg.org/n94n4dred/fonts.png

I fetch freetype via CVS from xenocara tree:

    cvs co xenocara/lib/freetype

Apply the subpixel patch (the Adobe CFF stuff is already default in -current):

http://dpaste.com/hold/1438578/

And use the following `~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf`:

http://dpaste.com/hold/1438579/

You might also want to delete `/etc/fonts/conf.d/30-lucida-aliases.conf`.

Forgot to add, after you uncomment the subpixel stuff, just do a `make && sudo make install && make clean` from the `xenocara/lib/freetype` directory.

Also, repeat the same after each snapshot upgrade, as the X sets will overwrite it every time, naturally. Don't forget to keep it updated as well, with `cvs up`.

What do you code?

That awesome looks um.. awesome. Never come across it before. I have an old netbook here that has a broken trackpad. I might be tempted to give it a go with that.

Please try out the tiling window managers. Awesome, i3 or Xmonad are all great work environments. The learning curve is maybe a bit tough, but when you get over it, you just can't go back.

Right now I'm working mostly in python and javascript, with some database development (mysql and postgres) and general sysadmin (can't ever seem to get away from that). I've had success using the FreeTDS and sqsh packages to do SQL Server work (with a remote server, obviously. In theory you can run VMs on OpenBSD using qemu but the one time I tried it was so painfully slow it wasn't worth it).

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