throwawayish, 1 year ago (edited 6 months ago)

OpenBSD and its derivatives (like OmniOS)

First time hearing of OmniOS, thank you for mentioning it! EDIT: I just took a look at it and it doesn’t seem to be based on OpenBSD, at least the one I could find seems to be a derivative of Solaris instead. Though, I might simply not have found what you referred to*.

because it of its security-oriented features, especially things like ZFS

Does OpenBSD’s implementation of ZFS offer security features as well?

I would like to switch my daily driver, a Linux laptop, to OpenBSD so I can get used to using it as an administrator, but I worry about OpenBSD being able to support the laptop hardware, especially things like WiFi, BlueTooth, and managing the battery, screen dimming, laptop lid, and so on.

Do you think that using OpenBSD inside of a qube (from QubesOS) is perhaps something worth considering? Or don’t you think there’s any merit of doing this over the use of any virtualization software found on any other system?

I have another Linux computer with a Radeon graphics card which connects to my TV that my children use for video games, and watching streaming video, and I would like to switch this to OpenBSD as well but I worry that it will not be able to run Steam games very well.

From what I’ve read, running games on OpenBSD is a lot less mature compared to running games on Linux. Though, perhaps it’s worth noting that cloud gaming solutions (like Google Stadia in the past) are known to work great on OpenBSD. Not sure if you would want that, though.

(On a more general note) I definitely agree that OpenBSD works wonderfully on the server side of things. But I’ve gotten skeptical over time to its feasibility as a desktop OS. Note that I’m well aware that OpenBSD’s developers use it as their daily drivers, so I definitely recognize the possibility. However, when it’s lacking features like Secure Boot (or any form of Trusted and/or Measured Boot for that matter), I just find it hard to justify putting it on something like a laptop that I carry around all the time. I hope that you can prove to me that my logic/understanding is flawed and that I should reconsider the use of OpenBSD as a desktop OS.