I loved running OpenBSD on my laptop. The man-pages were insanely good and the *ctl commands to configure stuff were refreshingly well organized - no more mucking around with a 100 different config files. My major gripe last time was that Firefox was unusably slow. I was told that this was because multi-threading support in OpenBSD was poor. Also, while chromium was tolerable, playing something on youtube would make it feel like the system was under a lot of load. I finally had to move away from it because of this. That said, I plan to move to Vultr and run an OpenBSD box when my current Digital Ocean account runs out of balance.
> UEFI boot support means systems that lack BIOS compat will work now.<p>> ASUS X205TA is an example of a machine with reduced hardware ACPI. Also has Broadcom wifi. I don’t know of a particularly good choice in the netbook category.<p>The ASUS X205TA is a machine that is hostile to anything not Windows.<p>It doesn't have bios. It has 64 bit architecture, but a 32 bit EFI. That makes it harder ot install for example some Linuxes.<p>Here's a 51 page thread in the Ubuntu forums: <a href="http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2254322&page=51" rel="nofollow">http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2254322&page=51</a><p>Here's someone trying to write a driver for sound: <a href="http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.alsa.devel/138822" rel="nofollow">http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.alsa.devel/138822</a><p>Here's the guide to getting debian on it: <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Asus/X205TA" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Asus/X205TA</a><p>Here's the (as usual, excellent) guide to getting Arch on it: <a href="https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Asus_x205ta" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Asus_x205ta</a><p>I guess people using BSD are happy with installs that are more complex than "burn an image to a USB stick; boot from that USB stick; click a button". But here's an example of someone installing Arch: <a href="http://ifranali.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/installing-arch-linux-on-asus-x205ta.html" rel="nofollow">http://ifranali.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/installing-arch-linux...</a><p>It's a shame it's so hostile because, considering the price, it's a nice enough machine. (The screen is lousy, and the sound is odd. If you liked the EEE PC 701, well, this isn't as good.)
>Lots of fixes to USB and and xhci mean USB 3 devices should attach much more reliably.<p>Does anyone know how much code FreeBSD and OpenBSD share? FreeNAS uses FreeBSD 9 and the forum is allergic to any mention of xhci. I've got it working on a Atom C2758 system but it runs at USB 2 speed.
Does anyone else just run Linux (or OS X if you're on a MacBook) and then just run OpenBSD in a VM? Run it fullscreen and can't even tell. You get all the advantages of OpenBSD plus all the advantages of using the regular host OS.
I'd love to run OpenBSD on my laptop computers, but last time I tried (5.7), the fan on my Dell Latitude 6410 was permanently on, while on FreeBSD with performance_cx_lowest="Cmax" the fan barely runs at all.<p>As much as I love OpenBSD, this is a knock-out criterium to me. Has the situation improved significantly since 5.7?
> There’s also some very preliminary support for HID over IIC, for systems that attach keyboards and touchpads over an I2C bus.<p>Keyboards & trackpads over I2C? I liked the trend of moving everything to USB, even for internal devices.
> There are a few minor quirks, but generally it works well<p>> As ever, support for Broadcom wifi and Nvidia graphics is nonexistent.<p>This is exactly the big issue with adoption of any *nix system on laptop or desktop. No user wants to have to live with quirks. Users just want their system to work.
I've never tried OpenBSD, but it seems to have better laptop/desktop support. Maybe I'll fire up an instance in a VM tonight and play around a bit.<p>Is there anything significantly different right off the bat from someone coming from the FreeBSD world?
5.9 is going to be amazing. I've been running current and with the patches from Bitrig's port of Netbsd features, we now have a working dtrace/zfs. No more fsck!
Dtrace lacks the pledge(2) probes, but hope that gets fixed soon. Otherwise it's nice to have alternatives to desktop linux. Only miss Spotify. oh well.