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.

  • sjmulder@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    1·
    1 year 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.

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

  • unix_joe@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    I recently used it as a desktop for over a decade.

    But at some point, I found that more and more of my family’s needs had to be handled on an iPad Pro with keyboard, or iPhone. But I always thought it was cool that I was still “technically” using output from the OpenBSD project since my iOS ran pf and LibreSSL and other stuff developed by the OpenBSD devs.

    At some point, I got tired of Apple, switched to Android, and then brought my computers over to Linux. It’s better integrated than what I had going on before with things like Dropbox and Proton Mail and Spotify and Signal and my bluetooth trackball working natively.

    So while I had been using OpenBSD and enjoying its simplicity (nothing beats a custom cwm and a couple of xterm sessions with terminus), it was not meeting my needs.

    At this point, I would need at least Signal to work, and a working dropbox client, to consider going back. And even then it would be limiting as I would still be doing a majority of things in a Chrome browser.

  • vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    02·
    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.