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Comment by chrissnell | Hacker News Reader

I used to use OpenBSD extensively in my job because of the awesomeness of PF but later moved on to big iron F5 and Cisco gear. In this new age of NSA wiretaps and cloud based services built around advertising and tracking however, OpenBSD feels more relevant than ever. I'd like to give it a shot as a desktop again.

So, who makes a modern laptop with good OpenBSD hardware compatability?

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It works like a charm on any intel i-series CPU with integrated intel HD graphics and most intel wireless chipsets (excluding the newer AC* versions).

I use it exclusively on servers, and on all laptops/desktops I use for real work. Its a breath of fresh air! No bloat, no evil, gets the job done - Not to mention some lovely features such as Full (no unencrypted boot slice) disk encryption via softraid, a completely unprivileged X server (with KMS supported GPUs), and a brilliant set of simple and solid daemons included in the base system.

The only time I'll switch away is to use linux - The two reasons there being 1) High-end Gaming, 2) Virtualization.

All of the openbsd devs use thinkpads and they have good compatibility in my experience. The newest ones might have UEFI and they might not work well.

I heard this and installed OpenBSD on my thinkpad only to find out there is no support for nVidia. I suppose you need ATI or Intel video to get a working X.

There is a brief warning about nVidia here: http://www.openbsd.org/amd64.html

Everybody else supports nvidia chips by running a big blog of proprietary code in the kernel. That kind of defeats the purpose of openbsd, right?

Debian doesn't support them with a big binary blob; by default, it supports nvidia chips with an open-source driver (nouveau), which works fine for most things other than 3d gaming. It just hasn't been ported to OpenBSD yet, though there is interest in doing so [1].

[1] http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/gsoc2014.html#nouveau

That's it in a nutshell.

Check wifi adapter support also (in general, not specifically on ThinkPads).

On a laptop I'go with linux any day. I don't feel like any BSD was/is intended to be run on laptops, not if you don't wanna lose time in extensive configuration to make everything (almost) work.

That is a weird feeling you have.

If it wasn't intended to be run on laptops, why do most OpenBSD devs run it on their laptops? Why does it have graphics drivers with LVDS output? Touchpad support? Why does it have X with multiple window managers and OpenGL with 3D acceleration? KMS? ACPI suspend & hibernate? Sound daemon? Disk encryption?

There are a lot of features that make mostly (only?) sense on laptops, and the developers spend a lot of effort to make sure it works. It'd be absurd to claim the system is not intended to run on laptops.

I've run OpenBSD on my netbook for years. And it works pretty damn well, right out of the box.

Was thinking the same thing myself. I keep thinking recent MacBook Airs would make a good candidate--reasonably standard Intel hardware, decent components, tons of systems in the wild. Hence my comment about trim support for SSDs.

Try FreeBSD if you want TRIM. Also has LLVM, PF and ZFS out of the box.

Might as well use Linux.

That's like comparing a Volvo to a Trabant. FreeBSD is the Volvo for reference.

Lenovo X201 works well. Not exactly modern but a nice machine and more than adequate.

Caveat laptopor. I installed OpenBSD on my X201 just to give it a shot, and the battery life is atrocious.

http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi/OpenBSD-current/man8/...

This may help. Using `apm -C` or `apm -A`

This.

People mustn't expect everything to ever work straight out of the box on anything. Much like you have to install the Lenovo PM driver on windows, you have to config apm on OpenBSD.

This is also well known.

Quick howto which covers the basics: http://geekyschmidt.com/2011/03/27/openbsd-laptop-mini-howto

Thanks for the link at the end, but--

> People mustn't expect everything to ever work straight out of the box on anything.

--Why?

> Much like you have to install the Lenovo PM driver on windows, you have to config apm on OpenBSD.

I don't for my Hackintosh. And I don't install the Lenovo PM driver on Windows. Windows update may, but I don't.

They certainly can expect that, remember how it was before when nothing worked out of the box?

Yes. Even worse than that, I remember when the box contained a pile of bits and you had to sift through piles of manuals to assemble it all first.

I've heard only positive things when using OpenBSD on Lenovo X2XX's. What window manager are you using?

GNOME. It's significantly worse than either Windows 8.1 or Hackintoshed OS X.

T420 is great too, so long as you have Intel graphics and wireless.

> moved on to big iron F5 and Cisco gear.

Just pointing out that this is a perspective thing. PFsense and similar can very-much-so be just as "big iron" as Cisco et al.

ASICs start to play a big role at scale. To me the phrase "big iron" signals towards them.

In that case, things like Mikrotik's would be considered as "big iron". (I happen to be a big Mikrotik fan)

Just making the case that "just buy Cisco" doesn't do anyone really any good in a very wide market with a lot of very good options - sometimes paying for the brand doesn't mean you are getting something better.

you are getting "market familiarity" meaning they aren't beholden to you or your "crank" operating system and any schmo with a CC can bilk/bill them for support.

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