Comment by 😎 decant
Re: "Anyone ever use OpenBSD with a desktop environment as a…"
I would say pretty good, I run the OS on everything. For years I jump around DEs, xfce, mate, then I switched to DWM for a while. After getting a big monitor, I switched to JWM. But now I settled on FVWM 2.X.X that came with the base os. I try to avoid freedesktop applications when possible. libreoffice, mupdf, mpv all work well. Recently we got HW video code support, which is nice. I suggest 3 to 5 years old X1 carbon or dell/lenovo minipc with intel processor and NIC. The amdgpu driver is HUGE, which scares me. Post whatever questions you come across, we are all here to help
2025-11-26 · 5 months ago
10 Later Comments ↓
🐰 99thplace · Nov 26 at 17:38:
@decant - what's wrong with freedesktop? why would you want to avoid it? is it a systemd type situation?
@99thplace there are a few reasons, the gist of it is I like to keep my system simple. 1. huge dependency chain - installing gtk app pulls in a lot of gnome libs, OpenBSD packages tend to be compiles with all optional dependencies turned on, which made it worse. 2. I don't known much about linux politics, but I think linux - freedesktop - redhead - IBM is a kind of big software bloc? I have the impression that they hold key pressure points in the linux desktop ecosystem, I don't like this.
🚀 ibannieto · Nov 27 at 20:28:
OpenBSD user here. I'm using a Thinkpad x280 as a desktop. It's my daily driver for several years. Works like a charm. I'm using suckless desktop, chromium, helix editor, compilers, vmd for Linux and 9front machines and several scientific tools. OpenBSD is so clean, concise and with beautiful documentation. Aye, it's a little slow compared with Linux but it's a trade for maximum security. I'll never back again to Linux desktop.
The cool think is that I've installed OpenBSD in my "new" Thinkpad x1 carbon gen9, with the same packages and tools, just copied the configuration and rsync'ed my $HOME and it works almost flawlessly.
I recommend you to give a try!
I just installed it on my ThinkPad the other day. I'm using cwm, and it's going great (although there are still a couple of kinks that need to be worked out).
there's cde in ports right?
sorry for necroposting. I ran obsd on my laptop for around a year and loved it, but i had several problems, so i wrote about them in a gemlog here:
— pixeldreams.tokyo/gemlog/openbsd-cons.gmi
i rarely see others bring these up, but i think it's relevant here. one more thing i didn't cover in there is change in workflow: electron apps don't work, so discord and element ran inside firefox, i dropped vscode for neovim and later helix, etc.
is necroposting means commenting on old posts?
i love it. why start same discussions anew and repeat same comments when we can go to the old discussions, read and complement them with useful links like yours?
🐐 boringbbsuser · Apr 30 at 17:37:
Interesting! I haven't had the DNS lookup issues with VMM. The input issues sound tricky. Monero is its own beast -- I have not been able to get it to be performant at all. It tanks the system.
@parikko, thank you for sharing your experience.
i have some guesses.
i think the trackpad issue might be hardware related. if your machine gets hot and trackpad gets hot it may stop working.
on limiting cpu niceness of sync: there should be a way to maybe limit i/o of the process in some way.
operating systems tend to tell the userspace program that the file is already saved/copied but it actually is only copied to write cache and is then being written from cache to disk.
thats why windows has this 'safely remove hardware' and one must unmount before removing in unix.
this cache may be also limited but writes will be slower. but i often limit it in linux because otherwise i/o buffers are
full and other things that need i/o are slowing down drramatically and hang waiting for their i/o opportunity.
so maybe limiting i/o or caches may help?
on file systems: another non latin writer/reader here.
windows made a design desicion to store files internally as utf-16.
in linux world we usually use utf-8. since linux is widely used it has no choice but to be "user-friendly", and it is expected to not cause troubles, when you write a utf-8 encoded file name, the filesystem driver converts it to utf-16 and stores. and vice versa, reads utf-16 and shows you as utf-8, it is an implicit default behaviour.
in bsds one needs a special option for a mount command to mention encoding.
if you use utf-8 as mount option, it will behave like linux does.
just bsds need that explicit mount option.
Original Post
Anyone ever use OpenBSD with a desktop environment as a daily driver? How was it? Can you do most stuff on it? It sounds like a potentially fun project.