OpenBSD Desktop

https://x61.ar/log/2024/05/06052024135732-openbsd_desktop.html

by hggh • 2 years ago

141 130 2 years ago

x61.ar

hedora• 2 years ago

What sort of battery life do you get?

Online reviews say to expect under two hours from the x395 running zoom in windows.

I assume stuff like suspend/resume, webcam and audio work, since it’s a daily-driver.

(My only other question is whether I can have vs code yet, but that’s not related to the laptop.)

DiggyJohnson2• 2 years ago

Is there an issue with electron apps on BSD?

rjsw• 2 years ago

Why wouldn't there be an issue?

Any electron app will be using a Linux build of the Chromium browser, whether this will run on a BSD variant will depend on how well any Linux emulation layer works, OpenBSD has removed their Linux emulation layer.

bee_rider4• 2 years ago

Zoom is a shockingly CPU consuming program. I know people have to use it, that’s been the case for me too, but it was easier to make sure I had a plug handy when using Zoom than trying to make it run well.

I think a review that use based around Zoom battery life is about as useful as one based around short circuiting the battery terminals.

spockz• 2 years ago

Teams hogs power as well. I get about 4h on my 16” MBP M1 Pro. When in a teams call it also significantly impact single core benchmark results of the app I’m working on.

So maybe power drain is inherent in conferencing tooling? Is teams even utilising the hardware decode/encoding paths? When in a call Teams consistently consumes a full single core.

yabones• 2 years ago

I have an old X201 with OpenBSD. My setup on that machine is deliberately "gimped" with all ads and most JS blocked to make webpages load acceptably fast, and with the `apmd` enabled and hw.setperf at 10-20.

With a 3rd party 9-cell battery, I can easily get 4.5-5 hours runtime like this. I think the biggest power draw at this point is the display, since it's an older and less energy efficient panel.

Granted, most of my usage is either SSH'ing into another machine or X11 forwarding apps from another machine. I think with hw.setperf dialed up, SMT enabled, and the blockers turned off I'd be lucky to get 45 minutes of runtime...

Either way, not bad for a "museum" computer :)

accrual5• 2 years ago

Very nice! It's impressive how much can be squeezed out of these Thinkpads. I daily drove an X230 until earlier this year, it's only a bit faster than the X201 and I basically used it in the same capacity - a jump box to other machines. The keyboards and form factors of these laptops are top tier though.

sach12• 2 years ago

I've switched to Alpine Linux for anything with a battery. OpenBSD ran very well on my X220, X230, and T430 but there's a 2-3 hour difference in battery life during normal usage that's hard to pass up.

If you've never played around with Alpine, check it out! You'll find the installer... very familiar!

VK538FY• 2 years ago

X201 i5? I installed OpenBSD latest on mine and was impressed by the battery life contre toute attente. Fvwm with some essential tray apps and we're good! If Jupyter Lab ran on this setup, I'd be a total convert. In terms of hardware, I installed coreboot and replaced the wlan with something modern from China. I plan to upgrade from 2 GB to 8 GB but hard to find compatible SO-DIMM these days. It would be bloody awesome to upgrade the display to FHD but that looks... complicated, we'll see. But I love working with an OS where I understand everything.

kuon• 2 years ago

I trimmed down my linux machine more and more, but I still need linux for some usages (I stream and use OBS for one). But I use OpenBSD on a dozen of servers I manage, it is rock solid for many (not all) usages.

I really like those simple desktop environment where you have a good understanding of the machine you are using. I do use ranger as file manager, it is heavier than walk, but it is very capable and scriptable while staying quite simple.

fsflover2• 2 years ago

This reminds me of Debian- and Fedora-minimal on Qubes OS: https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/templates/minimal/

TacticalCoder• 2 years ago

I always begin with a Debian minimal install (on bare metal though, not on Qube): no GUI. Just a minimal install, disk encryption/LUKS and booting to a text console. From there I install X, the awesome WM (a tiling WM) etc. It feels very light (despite the systemd monster of a PID1 and overreach spreading its tentacles everywhere around the system).

Needless to say: when I'm on my wife's Ubuntu desktop, it feels very heavy compared to my very minimalistic Debian / Xorg / tiling WM.

vundercind5• 2 years ago

Every now and then I poke my head back into GUI Linux-land to see how it’s doing (never any better, it seems) and the last time I found much to enjoy about the experience was when I tried out Void Linux on a “weak” Asus chrome box—probably 6-8x more powerful than the laptop I used in the early and mid ‘00s, but webshit makes that feel slow, no mainstream web browser was usable at all, only stripped-down WebKit browsers were sorta OK.

It’s got that sense of actually knowing WTF your machine is doing that’s so hard to come by these days, but isn’t masochistically awkward to use (I ran Gentoo for a long time :-) )

If Macs ever go to shit, Void’s my current frontrunner for a Linux distro if I can’t get FreeBSD working ok on a laptop.

bee_rider4• 2 years ago

GUIs on Linux seem mostly fine in the sense that you can just use a tiling WM and terminals. Now you have a computer that you can use properly. You mostly use one terminal full screen, but if you have to you can pop open another one and they’ll arrange themselves nicely. Tmux can do this of course, but sometimes you have a nice tmux layout all set up and don’t want to mess with it.

Plus you can also open a web browser if you want to goof around and comment on HN.

And you’ll even have X installed if somebody manages to find some use for non-terminal programs (unlikely but we should admit the possibility).

resource_waste2• 2 years ago

Try Fedora Cinnamon.

You keep picking lone distros that have tiny communities. If you use something Nice, it might actually be nice.

Feeling like you are judging Linux Desktop from some obscure view.

DEADMINCE11• 2 years ago

It's weird you say you value knowing what your machine is doing, but then say your first choice is a mac.

SoftTalker2• 2 years ago

I've never felt that file managers bring much to the table. I use the shell.

skydhash3• 2 years ago

It's Vim vs Ed. The shell is all powerful but sometimes it's easier to yyhpl (select the file for copying, then paste a symbolic link in the parent directory) than typing the commands to do so even with shell completion. Sometimes having visual feedback is good. But a GUI FM doesn't bring that much. I spend as much time with Ranger as Finder on macOS.

DEADMINCE11• 2 years ago

Different tools have different strengths. There is some stuff you can do in a graphical file manager that would take you significantly longer to do on a shell.

tiffanyh2• 2 years ago

I am a minimalist

I have to laugh when I read blog posts about how people go to great strides to run a "minimal" and lean OS, to then only come to find out that 95% of what they do is in a web browser.

At that point, the OS doesn't even matter any more if it's all web/cloud-services.

medo-bear6• 2 years ago

I have to laugh when security conscious people think their browser is secure. I use TTY almost exclusively. But for a minimal desktop one should really look into stumpwm

nolist_policy5• 2 years ago

The browser is the most secure piece of software that everyday users come in contact with.

Koshkin5• 2 years ago

Or https://dwm.suckless.org/

Boogie_Man• 2 years ago

Offloading and/or obfuscating complexity doesn't remove it.

hpeter2• 2 years ago

It's still better to use a minimalist OS with a browser than a bloated OS with a browser.

Not everybody is a javascript developer BTW

yjftsjthsd-h• 2 years ago

I'd go exactly the opposite direction: If the browser is the only important thing, surely it's best to have as little overhead to running that browser - every byte of memory wasted on something else is a byte the browser could have used (and it needs enough of them!), every running process uses time and battery that the browser could have taken, every additional package/program/library is security risk on top of the secure(ish) sandbox where your real (web)apps are running.

tiffanyh2• 2 years ago

as little overhead to running that browser

If you're implying OpenBSD is fast, it certainly is not.

It's actually one of the slowest "main stream" OS around.

thesuitonym• 2 years ago

Just because you spend your day in a web browser doesn't mean we all do.

anthk7• 2 years ago

You can use the cloud with cli by using rclone, and there are clients for tons of webs.

matrix122• 2 years ago

We use it for our nfs servers. Very secure, but the file cache is still nerfed.

znpy3• 2 years ago

We use it for our nfs servers. Very secure, but the file cache is still nerfed.

Why not FreeBSD or Linux for that use case? Chances are you'd get better "file cache" (and hence better latency/throughput)

matrix122• 2 years ago

Security was the only concern.

ahnick• 2 years ago

Anyone made the jump from Linux to OpenBSD on a laptop as their daily driver? If so, any tips or suggestions for making such a change? What did you find the biggest benefit to be?

binkHN4• 2 years ago

I love OpenBSD, but can't do it; there is too much in Linux that allows for better battery life, especially on more modern hardware.

apgwoz• 2 years ago

There's a userspace frequency scaler (https://tildegit.org/solene/obsdfreqd) that increases my battery life to well beyond what I actually need. I easily get 6-8 hours on my Thinkpad X1 Nano (previous generation). This is not even close to the M series Macbook battery lifes, but works well enough for me.

I do not run heavyweight stuff though, but that's with WiFi, cwm/dwm, Emacs, compilers (go, cc) and Chrome. I've had a bit of trouble with Firefox performance, so having to use Chrome has been my biggest hurdle.

perihelions• 2 years ago

I made a deliberate effort to, and realized I was making an expensive mistake and cut my losses. The (user-interactive) performance difference between modern Linux and minimalist, "correct" OpenBSD, on normal x86 laptop hardware, is night and day. No reasonable of amount of system tuning could work-around that. It was the wrong tool for me, with the wrong tradeoffs.

My suggestion is don't—or at least think deliberately and dispassionately about tradeoffs. UX latency really sucks.

(The painful thing is that almost none of it seems to be OpenBSD's fault—it's all the desktop applications that demand 10x more hardware resources than they legitimately need, and then degrade unacceptably when layers that actually should be less optimized, like OS things that have a safety & correctness tradeoff, do make that valid tradeoff...)

anonymous_union• 2 years ago

yes. simplify your expectations. realize that not every piece of technology is worth using. biggest benefit is they say no.

dleink2• 2 years ago

OpenBSD doesn't have bluetooth support. I'm on linux as my daily driver, but have started playing around with OpenBSD and FreeBSD on my antique thinkpads.

binkHN4• 2 years ago

This is less of a bother for me nowadays as I mostly use Bluetooth through my phone.

binkHN4• 2 years ago

net.inet.ip.forwarding=1

Why is this a normal change? I thought it was only needed for routers?

accrual5• 2 years ago

IP forwarding shouldn't be needed for end-user machines. I only ever set it on machines that need to route traffic.

anthk7• 2 years ago

Or virtualisation with simulated networks.

rnhmjoj• 2 years ago

I'm guessing, but I would say it has something to do with the fact they're using a VPN: you may want to route packets between your physical and virtual interface.

accrual5• 2 years ago

I recently started using OpenBSD on my circa 2001 Pentium 3 rig for fun. It has 384MB of RAM and no SSE2.

I use i3wm for the desktop (1024×768×80Hz on a CRT), urxvt for terminal, netsurf for browsing (no JS), leafpad for GUI editing, and VLC for streaming music.

For coding the CPU supports the latest versions of Go and Python3, but Node/TypeScript no longer works since it now requires SSE2.

It's surprisingly snappy and fun to use, I can even post to hn from here. :)

Screenshots:

https://i.imgur.com/shozUbO.png

https://i.imgur.com/F22p3Z8.png

skydhash3• 2 years ago

I'm running a Debian VM on my M1 Mac (it's a mess to cleanup dependencies and tooling after a project on macOS). I also use i3wm and before launching Firefox, the whole OS consumed only 300 MB of ram. In the past I use Arch with i3wm to have enough free ram (on a 8GB laptop) for Android Studio and Firefox. Some people are angry with Apple for their 8GB offering, but it would be great to imagine what can be done with less and the operating system being just an operating system, not an application suite.

detourdog2• 2 years ago

I have always found MacPorts as the best way to manage tooling.

All packages and dependencies are installed under /opt/.

The consistent pathing is the only sane way to manage tooling.

gawa• 2 years ago

Are you saying you're using a debian VM on your Mac as a daily driver? Running i3wm and Firefox and ultimately living in Linux, but on your Mac? Does that mean you never have to use MacOS much (beside upgrading the host mac OS, and launching the VM right after boot)? If that's your setup I would love to hear more about it, the pros and the cons.

niutech• 2 years ago

384MB is plenty of RAM. Tiny Core Linux (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_Core_Linux) requires only 46 MB, although recommends 128 MB of RAM.

vundercind5• 2 years ago

It’s a ton if you avoid things Poettering was involved in (anyone remember when Pulseaudio came out and its memory use when idle was insanely high? AFAIK that never got better, we just all got more memory; Systemd’s similar), don’t run a “modern” DE, and don’t use webapps.

That’s a lot of “ifs”, but that really should be quite a bit of memory.

In fact you can’t even really run Firefox or Chrome with a single light page on that, now. In one of the minimalist WebKit browsers, yes, but probably only 2-3 tabs and no webapps.

Koshkin5• 2 years ago

My first PC had (what I thought of as) an infinite amount of RAM. 8 MB. I could not believe that someone (else) wanted 32 MB, it was insane.

anthk7• 2 years ago

Try mocp for music, you will save tons of resources.

Also, try the new dillo fork.

With gopher, you have gopher://magical.fish and gopher://sdf.org as starting points to read news and blogs. Use either sacc or lynx.

grpt• 2 years ago

I use... netsurf for browsing (no JS)
https://i.imgur.com/shozUbO.png
https://i.imgur.com/F22p3Z8.png
If you're seeing this message, that means JavaScript has been disabled on your browser, please enable JS to make Imgur work.

Hmmm...

accrual5• 2 years ago

Surprisingly, the images open just fine on this machine! Imgur sends me the actual .png and not the HTML wrapped version that requires JS. Maybe they look at the agent to decide what to send.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 2 years ago

I have no problem retrieving the PNGs from those URLs without Javascript.

I'm not using a browser nor am I using curl.

I do not send a user-agent header.

DEADMINCE11• 2 years ago

This has nothing to do with OpenBSD though. Any linux or BSD kernel can run a light WM on same or older hardware just as well.

cenamus2• 2 years ago

Are you sure most Linux distros still support a pentium III by default?

rydgel2• 2 years ago

Anyone knows where to find that Blade Runner wallpaper?

znpy3• 2 years ago

This one? https://www.reddit.com/r/wallpapers/comments/ao25bk/blade_ru...

It was a simple google search away...

rydgel2• 2 years ago

Thanks

mjhay• 2 years ago

cwm is very nice and usable. I used it for a long time before I switched to Mac (for the hardware, not software).

haunter• 2 years ago

Just use GhostBSD if you want an out-of-box desktop BSD (and it has a Live CD too)

https://ghostbsd.org/

bruh2• 2 years ago

What's the deal with the seemingly-spam links at the bottom of this page? Does it contribute to SEO somehow?

Aaronstotle• 2 years ago

I tried running OpenBSD on my desktop but kept running into issues where my display would freeze after 10-15 minutes. I assume it was because of my nvidia-gpu

binkHN4• 2 years ago

I think Theo might actually hate Nvidia more than Linus does.

0x37• 2 years ago

I'm really torn. A while ago I made the decision to abandon linux and use a BSD as my daily OS. In almost every way I prefer FreeBSD over OpenBSD, except when it comes to the source code. The clarity of OpenBSD source seems unmatched, and for me that's really important as I have picked up interest in contributing to the kernel of the BSD I choose. Also in some naive way it gives me a warm feeling knowing that the code of my operating system is in tip top shape.

simonblack• 2 years ago

Having problems with my AlderLake 4K video.

rbc• 2 years ago

I've recently switched to OpenBSD as a workstation desktop using Xfce. Chromium and Firefox (ESR) are the browsers. Emacs is used for many things (authoring, calendaring, contacts, email, IRC, task tracking, etc.). LibreOffice gets used for the balance. That covers most workstation activities. All the web sites that I care about work. The performance is good enough. With OpenBSD, there's some assembly required. I don't mind that. The right way to approach OpenBSD and its ports collection is as a toolkit. You have to use the tools provided, to make the solution you want. I'm already running OpenBSD servers. It was just easier to use OpenBSD for the destktop as well.

DEADMINCE11• 2 years ago

The only people who should be using OpenBSD as a desktop are the developers. For anyone else I think the choice to do so would be a result of being contrarian and little else.

cenamus2• 2 years ago

I guess there are a lot of contrarians like me in the bsd community then

hggh• 2 years ago

Derek Sivers comes to mind: https://sive.rs/openbsd

DEADMINCE11• 2 years ago

I guess users could be hobbyists and maybe want to play with some of the few unique things OBSD offers like pledge and unveil and whatnot, but it has significantly worse graphical performance and isn't built with desktop use in mind at all.

You can make it work, and maybe it wouldn't be that much work for hobbyist users with specific and limited needs, but generally it's no where close to being the right tool for the job.

OpenBSD Desktop

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