This is an OS which has everything. It’s clean, it’s simple, it has a helpful community, stable code, and even pretty good package counts to support nearly any desktop/workstation activity.

And yet, I feel like there are nagging issues which ultimately affect all non-mainstream1 OSes. Display driver complications, janky system upgrades, a lack of groupware clients. I’m not picking on OpenBSD, I love the distro and I think it should succeed in this particular area (the desktop/workstation) where other open source alternatives have failed, but why hasn’t anybody managed to make it happen yet?

For a while, there was a similar hope around DragonflyBSD in the FreeBSD community, but I don’t know where that ended up… I do know I see nobody really using it.

What’s it going to take?

1Obviously, I mean MacOS and Windows, since Linux is at least as hampered on the desktop, perhaps moreso on account of the poor community and scattered vision.

  • @[email protected]English
    7•2 years ago

    OpenBSD is a great desktop. If you can’t live without some proprietary shit, you’re going to have a bad time.

    I prefer doing most of my work on OpenBSD. I have a windows machine I can use for some garbage I am forced to use and the occasional game. Mostly I will VNC in from the OpenBSD machine.

    I think we should normalize using a system that does 80% of computing tasks very well and delegating non-optional stuff to a secondary device. I don’t think there’s a 100% one-stop shopping solution to a problem as diverse as “desktop utilization patterns”.

    • David EmersonOPEnglish
      3•2 years ago

      I’ve found sysupgrade to be pretty good at the core OS, but I have definitely had issues with drivers (particularly audio and display) and third party packages installed through pkg_add. Upgrading seems to be a mixed bag in terms of continuity of function when you’re running a richer system, as a workstation often is. On a server, with minimal package surface area, things are just fine.

  • @[email protected]English
    3•2 years ago

    I tried it but had two major pain points:

    1. X just isn’t great with high DPI, multiple monitor setups, hot plugging monitors, and especially combinations thereof.

    2. A bunch of things are configured at boot-time rather than on-demand, e.g. networking (wlan), video/font settings, mounts, etc. For all its faults, the modern systemd/event bus Linux desktop better about these things.

  • Mark CornickEnglish
    3•2 years ago

    The ship has sailed for anything other than Windows or Mac as a mainstream, popular desktop. And it’s sailing away from Windows and Mac too, towards phones and tablets. Mobile devices are “computers” for a profitably large number of people, and I don’t see that changing.

    That said, for this (literally) graybeard old UNIX admin, OpenBSD makes a great desktop. I like that it feels very much like my old SunOS, Solaris, and historic Linux machines, and I like administering my systems by editing simple text files instead of dealing with systemd/dbus/etc.* That said, I do still have an iPhone, and use it for the things it’s better at.

    * systemd is fine, dbus is fine, they do what people want them to do. This isn’t a rant about those things. I’ve learned to deal with them in my professional life. For my own stuff, though, I want something that I consider simpler and easier to understand. I do enough fighting systems at work; I don’t need it at home, too.

    • @[email protected]English
      3•2 years ago

      A long time ago I really enjoyed the pf firewall in openbsd - it was so much easier than iptables and chains, which I somehow still don’t fully understand. How is the obsd experience to do NAT and manage a firewall ruleset these days?

      • z3braEnglish
        1•2 years ago

        I’ve been digging through the most specific edge cases of pf recently, and while I don’t know how it was 10 years ago, I’d say that nowadays it’s fantastic.

        The syntax is simple, clean, and very powerful. And with anchors you can easily add/remove rules on the fly with a single command.

  • @[email protected]English
    2•2 years ago

    I’ve been using OpenBSD-current as a desktop for over a decade now and only very rarely (like once in a blue moon, and fixed in the next snap) experienced the issues you mention.

  • @[email protected]English
    2•2 years ago

    I use OpenBSD on desktop because linux boot messages are ugly with too many capitalized words.

  • @[email protected]English
    1•2 years ago

    OpenBSD can be used for a desktop and I’ve used it for that in the past… but IMO it shines as a server. Why? Today’s workflows often include a binary which isn’t available on OpenBSD. This could be nvidia’s CUDA drivers or Adobe Photoshop for example.

    OpenBSD excels in the space that doesn’t depend on these things: gateway device, email server, LAMP, lemmy?

  • @[email protected]English
    -2•1 year ago

    I love the distro

    WTF? Which distro? What does this have to do with OpenBSD, it has only one distribution?..

    but why hasn’t anybody managed to make it happen yet?

    They didn’t have you. Now get at it.