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Comment by rufius | Hacker News Reader

So I'm the author of the linked post. I hadn't ever used OpenBSD seriously in a desktop setting. I've installed it for servers to play around with.

And to answer your question "Is this a joke?", my writing is partly in jest and partly in seriousness. The fact that I had the laptop configured in about 45 mins (still faster than setting up Windows) was a surprise to me. It's faster than attempts at setting up Linux on it. Exception might be Debian but I've slept since then.

Regarding configs, those are just preferences. With the exception of the trackpoint middle click button, I don't actually need any of the other things as some nice OpenBSD devs have informed me. For example, the PF settings I included aren't necessary.

edit: expound on configs

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I would say that to really use OpenBSD as a desktop OS, the login.conf tweaks are non-optional. Otherwise you will find "big" software like browsers with more than a few tabs open, Office suites, etc. being killed due to the default memory limits.

Or you can do as I do and only change the limits for these big applications. In which case you don't touch login.conf.

Note though that in current the login.conf defaults for the default user have been raised on amd64 at least: http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/etc/etc.amd64/l...

Minor correction: firefox (at least) isn't "killed" due to memory limits. firefox segfaults because it tries to allocate memory and doesn't check for null. chrome in effect works around the memory limit by using one process per tab.

What does "configured" entail that it takes you more than 45 minutes to get Windows up and running? The Windows 8 install is less than 15 minutes start to finish even from a USB dvd drive. Your options are: select the drive, put in a license key if you have it, pick a username and password. Windows 10 is faster still.

If you're talking about changing settings or installing apps after the fact, that can all be slipstreamed.

In Linux-land, you can do all of the above as well with kickstart/derivatives.

I use the same laptop (Thinkpad X201) as my daily driver. It's got several generations old Intel wireless and video, which is supported out of the box just about everywhere.

When I installed OpenBSD on it, I could get Gnome 3.10 working but I was unable to find a good way to use the wireless working without having to use the console.

Yes, unfortunately there is no tooling for configuring wifi graphically. The existing tools from Linux land are tightly coupled with frameworks that don't exist on OpenBSD (network manager, linux mac80211 ioctls, and probably systemd in the near future). That's not a blocker in principle since we could patch the software, but it takes some effort. It would be great if someone could get this done.

You can install Ubuntu, Fedora or Windows 8 in less than 45 minutes

You're the author. There's no "So" about it.

Starting a sentence with "so" (or any other conjunction) is a valid stylistic preference.

How about a paragraph?

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