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.

  • nocko@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    3·
    1 year 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”.