Hacker News Reader

Comment by gonewest | Hacker News Reader

When the article says "wifi required a firmware update" the premise that openbsd "just worked" is false. This sort of tweaking and configuring is exactly the same as for any Linux distro. We've been doing this sort of Linux tweaking in my employer's systems group for 15 years, and no end in sight. For that matter, the same as downloading a new device driver for wifi on Windows, and of course we all have shared that experience too.

It seems to me that the only way you get a seamless experience with an OS install is if the hardware vendor has carefully tested and tuned the OS configuration for that specific piece of hardware. Apple does this, and even they aren't flawless.

View on HN

OpenBSD packages firmware and handles it automatically on first boot with fw_update(1). There is no "manual tweaking", it just means that some wireless adapters won't function using the ramdisk kernel for installation.

If it was automatically handled, why would the author mention it specifically?

And if you have to go to the "very thorough OpenBSD documentation" just to configure basic desktop setup, then no, it doesn't "just work". You shouldn't need to go to documentation to set things like timezone or user/pass, so why is documentation mentioned for a "just works" install?

If you don't have wired networking configured, fw_update(1) won't be able to fetch firmware on first boot, in that case it needs to be run manually.

The timezone and a default user can be created during installation, however yes, it is perfectly acceptable to expect that a user is capable of reading documentation.

It is not perfectly acceptable to claim "just works" if the user has to read documentation. It violates the definition of "just works" if you have to crack open the docs.

Okay then, with that definition no operating system I've ever used has "just worked".

Hmm. I was trying to be snarky there, but now that I think about it, it might not be so far off the mark...

Yes, any task you have to read documenation for is, pretty much by definition, not a "just works" task. Of course, 'using' an operating system has so many aspects to it that your point is pretty nonsensical. In any case, we were talking about installing the OS, not using it.

That said, there are several OSes out there that have plenty of users who never read the docs for using it. Android, iOS, OSX, and Windows all have teeming masses of people who are able to use them adequately without reading documentation (just ask someone who's worked a support desk).

Yeah, even with OS X, after doing an update my webcam stopped working. I had to find an older driver for it and overwrite the new one with it.

Half the time wifi drivers don't work on Windows when you install either. But all it took was plugging in ethernet and running fw_update. That's pretty minimal.

It's not fair to blame these OSs for asking you get firmware. It is a LEGAL issue, not a technical one!!!

Get the vendors to make wifi firmware freely redistributable (or even better, fully open source + build instructions) and it will work out of the box.

In my experience you don't get anywhere asking a vendor to do that. There isn't enough Linux desktop market share to justify a change to their business model.

hell, vendors can't even be bothered to use consistent chipsets from one shipment of product to the next. The Linux community are left with checking serial numbers or product skus and maintaining wiki sites with cross-referenced tables that tell us if a given product is known to work or not. That's the world of Linux webcams and wifi.

Sadly, if there were more Linux desktops the vendors would take more care. Until the vendors take more care there won't be mainstream Linux desktop adoption.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com