edit: I just noticed the wikipedia page shows the default Xorg environment with a colored root. That is blasphemy. Someone should upload a proper screenshot.
I’ve been running OpenBSD on my desktop for just over a week now. It seems to be working pretty well! Needs a bit more work than Arch here and there, mostly due to there being less packages. I’m liking it a lot so far though. I have a three monitor setup, one of which is 4K - was really surprised when it worked with absolutely no issues straight away!
I’ve had to patch some things to get them to compile, but not much other than that. I’m going to be installing on my laptop this weekend hopefully, fingers crossed it goes well.
Do you mind sharing sharing what GPU you are using (or presumably which model of discrete video card?) and which drivers?
I ask because, in my experience, discussions of “worked pretty well”, or “went seamlessly” or even “I could never get X working” w.r.t. Linux and BSD graphics tend to get murky without those sort of details.
I have a HD 7850, on Arch I used the open source radeon driver which worked great. OpenBSD has the video stuff already there so you don’t need to install it, it “just works”.
I installed, booted, installed a couple of programs and cloned my configs, then started X. Just generated a config with arandr, loaded it, and from there and on all was fine.
Edit: My laptop is a 2015 MBP. Installing Arch last year required a few kernel patches and compiling my own, though as of 4.2 it has been all good. I’m hoping OpenBSD will be ok, though I know WiFi won’t work because Broadcom - I have a dongle for that.
I have been using Arch for the last decade. I have been running OpenBSD on my desktop for the last three weeks. For me it has been even easier to setup OpenBSD for the first time than Arch for the first time. The real issue was that chrome and firefox were really slow on 5.9. After moving to current everything works faster.
I had a really good experience with openbsd on a server and I would love to have it on my laptop, but unfortunately it has optiwhatchamacallit from nvidia… It was hell enough to get xorg running properly on arch.
OpenBSD has been my desktop OS since July 2001 - and it just gets better and better. Need to add a 2016 to my deviantart gallery to prove it is the year of the OpenBSD desktop :~)
I’ve been meaning to try out OpenBSD for a while, once I have more time. I read that T430’s are supposed to work well, but unfortunately mine recently died…
Does anyone have any recommendations for OpenBSD laptops? If it has a nice screen and good keyboard I’m happy!
If it isn’t obvious from the other comments for sure you should avoid laptops that have nvidia graphics hardware. The reason being that nvidia provides no documentation or help for people wanting to write open source drivers.
None of these desktops have a stippled root, these cannot be OpenBSD.
Fighting the good fight.
Forgive my ignorance, but what does this mean? The top Google result for “stippled root openbsd” is this thread.
My original e-mail isn’t archived, but here is a reply quoting it.
edit: I just noticed the wikipedia page shows the default Xorg environment with a colored root. That is blasphemy. Someone should upload a proper screenshot.
To the person that uploaded that new screenshot to Wikipedia: thanks!
I’ve been running OpenBSD on my desktop for just over a week now. It seems to be working pretty well! Needs a bit more work than Arch here and there, mostly due to there being less packages. I’m liking it a lot so far though. I have a three monitor setup, one of which is 4K - was really surprised when it worked with absolutely no issues straight away!
I’ve had to patch some things to get them to compile, but not much other than that. I’m going to be installing on my laptop this weekend hopefully, fingers crossed it goes well.
Do you mind sharing sharing what GPU you are using (or presumably which model of discrete video card?) and which drivers?
I ask because, in my experience, discussions of “worked pretty well”, or “went seamlessly” or even “I could never get X working” w.r.t. Linux and BSD graphics tend to get murky without those sort of details.
Intel graphics up to broadwell work well. Some older Amd chips work well, but it’s more of a mystery without poking around the mailing list.
There’s not much choice of driver selection, however. There’s just the driver and it works or not.
I have a HD 7850, on Arch I used the open source radeon driver which worked great. OpenBSD has the video stuff already there so you don’t need to install it, it “just works”.
I installed, booted, installed a couple of programs and cloned my configs, then started X. Just generated a config with arandr, loaded it, and from there and on all was fine.
Edit: My laptop is a 2015 MBP. Installing Arch last year required a few kernel patches and compiling my own, though as of 4.2 it has been all good. I’m hoping OpenBSD will be ok, though I know WiFi won’t work because Broadcom - I have a dongle for that.
I have been using Arch for the last decade. I have been running OpenBSD on my desktop for the last three weeks. For me it has been even easier to setup OpenBSD for the first time than Arch for the first time. The real issue was that chrome and firefox were really slow on 5.9. After moving to current everything works faster.
I had a really good experience with openbsd on a server and I would love to have it on my laptop, but unfortunately it has optiwhatchamacallit from nvidia… It was hell enough to get xorg running properly on arch.
OpenBSD has been my desktop OS since July 2001 - and it just gets better and better. Need to add a 2016 to my deviantart gallery to prove it is the year of the OpenBSD desktop :~)
I’ve been meaning to try out OpenBSD for a while, once I have more time. I read that T430’s are supposed to work well, but unfortunately mine recently died…
Does anyone have any recommendations for OpenBSD laptops? If it has a nice screen and good keyboard I’m happy!
tedu recently also had a post about this: http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/openbsd-laptops
If it isn’t obvious from the other comments for sure you should avoid laptops that have nvidia graphics hardware. The reason being that nvidia provides no documentation or help for people wanting to write open source drivers.
The Lenovo X and T series are pretty well supported and seem to be very popular among the other devs. I personally have an x240 that works very well.
I had the same question so I posted it to reddit. Check this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/openbsd/comments/4d7ksv/any_good_ultrabook_that_runs_openbsd/
It has some good answers.