gettie's space

Over the last few months, I've been using OpenBSD as my secondary system. I have been trying various BSD systems over the years, like FreeBSD and GhostBSD, and OpenBSD was a system I really want to try.

After some testing on a virtual machine, I decided to remove the hackintosh installation I had on my secondary partition and to install OpenBSD in its position. And I love it, despite being occasionally a pain in the ass.

OpenBSD is great

I like how OpenBSD is such a small and simple system. In a few hundred megabytes you have pretty much a full system ready to use, while on most Linux distributions for the same size you get a very basic system. Of course, comparing these two systems is like comparing apples and oranges. Also the installer is very easy to use, although it might seem a bit hard to install the OS if you have a system with multiple partitions (I couldn't find documentation about it), but it really isn't.

After the first boot, I installed a bunch of software, as well as a different desktop environment. Having fvwm as the default isn't that bad, but I personally prefer Xfce. I also installed a bunch of other useful applications, like a music player, video player, a few other utilities and some games to waste my time at. Most of the stuff I wanted were available on OpenBSD's repositories.

Getting things to work was fairly simple. OpenBSD's FAQ section covers most of the basics and everything comes with pretty good documentation. I wouldn't say it's easy, but it makes sense if you're used on how manpages work. For example, configuring the MPD server system-wide was more straightforward than I expected.

Until it isn't

While OpenBSD (and generally every BSD) runs well on my machine, I encountered the classic hardware issues for my machine. No drivers for my laptop's dedicated GPU and Wi-Fi card. Not unusual, considering my laptop has an Nvidia GPU, and they're notorious for their software support (they deserve all the middle fingers from every OS developer in existence in my opinion). As for the Wi-Fi card, there still isn't a driver for it. But I always used an external adapter. Unfortunately, the one I had is broken, so my only option is using RNDIS (the "USB tethering" option) from a phone. In my case, it worked just fine.

OpenBSD is great as a server OS, having all the things you need to get started, it's not as great as a desktop OS. OpenBSD isn't made with performance in mind and it shows. The desktop feels a bit slower. Browsing the internet from Firefox feels slow, especially when it comes to video playback. Media playback needs a bit of fiddling with your configuration to get it right. There have been a few times where audio playback was choppy. MPV is unusable on OpenBSD and playing a 720p video locally is awful. Fortunately, VLC is much better on video playback on OpenBSD, but it still stutters a bit, but it's not as bad as on MPV.

But will it replace my Linux setup?

Definitely no. It won't replace my Linux setup anytime soon. Many programs that I need just aren't available on OpenBSD. For example Mixxx, which is a program I use for my audio streams, is not available on the repositories and I don't think sndio is supported. But it's great as a secondary system, as a minimalistic server or just throwing it on a good old machine to have fun with.