I've been experimenting with OpenBSD, and it's been pretty nice. The code is beautiful, and a lot of stuff just works. Not sure how it will behave on a laptop though.
I bought a ThinkPad specifically to install OpenBSD. It's a great combination. I find OpenBSD much more straight forward and coherent than Linux. There are some bells and whistles that I wish it had, but in terms of the foundation it is wonderful.
How is the graphics support in OpenBSD for the ThinkPad, and which model?
I've found the recent P and X models underwhelming as far as hardware goes, and support in Linux hasn't been great in my experience. While I'd like to give BSD a try, I fear I'll have to deal with even more driver issues.
For example, all video out ports on my X1 Extreme are wired to the dedicated NVIDIA card, which forces me to either use Nouveau which causes kernel panics, or use huge binary blobs from NVIDIA, which I'm reluctant to do for several reasons, one of which is breaking my initramfs image and making the system unbootable.
I'm quite tired of the amount of these types of issues in the Linux ecosystem, so I'm very interested in trying something simpler and better thought out, as long as the hardware support is decent.
Only reason why hybrid kernels and Linux is popular is the stable driver API, otherwise recompilation is necessary (which was new to me when I discovered it).
OpenBSD is suited for simple workstations or as a tablet substitute, but I don't think the OpenBSD desktop will quite take off, unless driver developers will return to releasing obfuscated code.
That is for in kernel drivers, as stated. It something breaks in kernel, it just won't compile with the kernel, but user space drivers have great ABI compatibility as stated in the link you provided.
Not an expert though, might be wrong but the text makes it pretty clear
I think it would be great on the right laptop. Most of the OpenBSD developers use thinkpads, from what I can tell.
It wouldn’t fly at work for me at the moment, and I don’t do much computing at home, so I played around with it a bit on a laptop, but didn’t switch. The results were encouraging, though.
My biggest beef with it right now is the upgrade story, but that’s because I need to update my router (through a serial console!) and am afraid of what happens if I brick it.
