Comment by 🐰 99thplace

@decant - what's wrong with freedesktop? why would you want to avoid it? is it a systemd type situation?

Nov 26 · 3 weeks ago

4 Later Comments ↓

@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.

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?

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.