OpenBSD laptops

Can confirm that snapshots from December run almost flawlessly already on an X250. Great work OpenBSD team and roll on 5.9.

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.

Almost all laptops these days come with SSDs and last I checked, OpenBSD doesn't support TRIM. Has this been fixed? Is lack of TRIM a non-issue?

&gt; UEFI boot support means systems that lack BIOS compat will work now.<p>&gt; 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&#x27;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&#x27;s a 51 page thread in the Ubuntu forums: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ubuntuforums.org&#x2F;showthread.php?t=2254322&amp;page=51" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ubuntuforums.org&#x2F;showthread.php?t=2254322&amp;page=51</a><p>Here&#x27;s someone trying to write a driver for sound: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;comments.gmane.org&#x2F;gmane.linux.alsa.devel&#x2F;138822" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;comments.gmane.org&#x2F;gmane.linux.alsa.devel&#x2F;138822</a><p>Here&#x27;s the guide to getting debian on it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.debian.org&#x2F;InstallingDebianOn&#x2F;Asus&#x2F;X205TA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.debian.org&#x2F;InstallingDebianOn&#x2F;Asus&#x2F;X205TA</a><p>Here&#x27;s the (as usual, excellent) guide to getting Arch on it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.archlinux.org&#x2F;index.php&#x2F;Asus_x205ta" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.archlinux.org&#x2F;index.php&#x2F;Asus_x205ta</a><p>I guess people using BSD are happy with installs that are more complex than &quot;burn an image to a USB stick; boot from that USB stick; click a button&quot;. But here&#x27;s an example of someone installing Arch: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ifranali.blogspot.co.uk&#x2F;2015&#x2F;04&#x2F;installing-arch-linux-on-asus-x205ta.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ifranali.blogspot.co.uk&#x2F;2015&#x2F;04&#x2F;installing-arch-linux...</a><p>It&#x27;s a shame it&#x27;s so hostile because, considering the price, it&#x27;s a nice enough machine. (The screen is lousy, and the sound is odd. If you liked the EEE PC 701, well, this isn&#x27;t as good.)

&gt;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&#x27;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&#x27;re on a MacBook) and then just run OpenBSD in a VM? Run it fullscreen and can&#x27;t even tell. You get all the advantages of OpenBSD plus all the advantages of using the regular host OS.

I&#x27;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=&quot;Cmax&quot; 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?

&gt; There’s also some very preliminary support for HID over IIC, for systems that attach keyboards and touchpads over an I2C bus.<p>Keyboards &amp; trackpads over I2C? I liked the trend of moving everything to USB, even for internal devices.

&gt; There are a few minor quirks, but generally it works well<p>&gt; 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&#x27;ve never tried OpenBSD, but it seems to have better laptop&#x2F;desktop support. Maybe I&#x27;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?

Do they still exclude all 3rd party binaries?

Up and running on a 366Mhz Pentium II based Dell CPi. Using w3m-image through FVWM for browsing.

5.9 is going to be amazing. I&#x27;ve been running current and with the patches from Bitrig&#x27;s port of Netbsd features, we now have a working dtrace&#x2F;zfs. No more fsck! Dtrace lacks the pledge(2) probes, but hope that gets fixed soon. Otherwise it&#x27;s nice to have alternatives to desktop linux. Only miss Spotify. oh well.