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Comment by miduil | Hacker News Reader

Previous discussion on another blogposting of the same author: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8871705 Though, OpenBSD rarely supports hardware, since this isn't their goal.

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I had three different Lenovo laptops that I used to experiment with the various BSDs. One fairly old (2009) and the other two were between 6 - 10 months old. On all three of them OpenBSD detected my hardware (wireless, sound, lan, etc) better than Net or Free did.

Anecdotal I know and I don't have specific model information in front of me at the moment but, at least in my case, I found OpenBSD to be the best choice for these laptops simply because when I finished installing, everything Just Worked.

Oh, and they sleep properly too...

Another anecdote: I had the same experience with my new Gigabyte laptop. OpenBSD 5.6 supported the hardware better than FreeBSD or Linux (Qubes-OS, which is based on Fedora). I ended up running OpenBSD on my laptop and FreeBSD on my servers: one leased physical box with lots of jails, and one hosted VM for redundancy.

I'd like to run OpenBSD on my servers, but acquiring the dozen or so machines I need for service separation is just not cost effective or resource efficient.

I do know what you mean there. After getting pretty much everything else I wanted working well I looked for a VM solution and was a little disappointed in the dev's attitude toward VM tech in general. I understand it but don't have to like it. :-)

I've used Linux for years and am only recently checking out BSD so I just kept Debian around for most of my servers.

I do like the new, very simple, httpd in OpenBSD though, been playing with that a lot lately.

If you watch the the ruBSD 2013 interview video with Theo de Raadt[1] at the 6:36, he states that they should take a shot at dealing with modern x86 VMs. That gives me quite a bit of hope along with the work on vmware related drivers in each release.

1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXS8ljif9b8

Thanks, I will check that out. Based on some comments he made in the past I thought hell would freeze over before Theo went that route! I can't find the original kernel trap post at the moment but it was pretty, um, Theo. But I think it's at least 7-8 years old now so I guess times change.

You're probably thinking of this post, I would guess? http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=119318909016582&w=2

The x86 landscape has changed a bit between that post and the recent video linked upthread, though (e.g. addition of a bunch of hardware protection instructions aimed at virtualization), which might have led him to reevaluate.

Which Gigabyte laptop?

It's a P25W with 16 GB RAM and 3T SSD (I dual boot with a Steam-only Windows install). I don't care about the nvidia card in OpenBSD-- the Intel card works fine with xfce. I haven't figured out how to make the internal speakers work, but I use headphones pretty much exclusively anyway. Linux has trouble with the trackpad, and both the internal wired and wireless NICs fail to work under FreeBSD.

OpenBSD works quite well as a daily use OS.

"rarely"? I use OpenBSD for a long time, mostly on laptops, and rarely found hardware which isn't supported.

Of course that there are some wi-fi devices that require blobs, and I'm glad OpenBSD do not support these. However, I learned that no support at all is better than half support of some crap drivers.

Well, since it should mostly be used as a firewall, having a little restriction of which hardware you can use isn't a big deal.

since it should mostly be used as a firewall

This is a misconception.

What other uses are you suggesting? The OS is optimized for firewall and security. Not for desktop or anything like that. It lacks both hardware and software in almost every respect for anything more.

Sure, I would be very happy to use it as my desktop. Even donated for them. But it needs more time to adopt more tools at the very least for broader adoption.

I've used both apache and their new httpd to serve up perl, php and html. I've had no issues with mysql. I like their nice, simple named service as well.

Really, anything I've used Linux for on servers I've been able to replicate on OpenBSD... I don't feel like everything is automatically more secure just because I'm using OpenBSD but it's simplicity with regards to package management and system configuration does help me understand just about everything running on the system which, IMHO, does lead to better security.

> The OS is optimized for firewall and security. Not for desktop or anything like that. It lacks both hardware and software in almost every respect for anything more.

I'm doing web development for the last 4 years and programming for almost 2. My desktop and laptop have only OpenBSD as an OS.

What do I miss?.. apart from some more recent games (which is the reason I have a console), nothing[0]. ;)

As for hardware problems? Well, if you want to run some new (for you) OS without doing some homework (will it run? what problems are unresolved for X hardware? what hardware do I already own? will it cause problems?) you're out of luck even with Linux in some cases.

Hell, even my x41 single core laptop can play 1080p video files.

[0]: http://openports.se/

[edit]: also, upgrade process => ~3-7mins (depending on hardware). Can't beat that. :)

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