This is an OS which has everything. It’s clean, it’s simple, it has a helpful community, stable code, and even pretty good package counts to support nearly any desktop/workstation activity.
And yet, I feel like there are nagging issues which ultimately affect all non-mainstream1 OSes. Display driver complications, janky system upgrades, a lack of groupware clients. I’m not picking on OpenBSD, I love the distro and I think it should succeed in this particular area (the desktop/workstation) where other open source alternatives have failed, but why hasn’t anybody managed to make it happen yet?
For a while, there was a similar hope around DragonflyBSD in the FreeBSD community, but I don’t know where that ended up… I do know I see nobody really using it.
What’s it going to take?
1Obviously, I mean MacOS and Windows, since Linux is at least as hampered on the desktop, perhaps moreso on account of the poor community and scattered vision.
After years of frustrated distro hopping on Linux, and with an increasingly risky internet thanks to half the world being in conflict with each other, I’m really close to give OpenBSD a shot on my desktop. I’d love to use it on my notebooks as well, but honestly, I can’t be arsed to deal with the wifi over there. I tried it, it was incredibly slow for some reason and I just don’t feel like fixing that or dealing with it. But on the PC, with ethernet, that is no issue. I’ll still keep a linux distro in dual boot for gaming and some occasional shiny app that isn’t available on OpenBSD though. I think since every OS has its shortcomings, the best approach is to use multiple OS’s and machines to have all the benefits.