Do you use it as a desktop? My biggest problem there is WiFi. I predominantly use a laptop, and BSDs are notoriously bad at that use case. I tend to like to keep my servers and workstations on the same OS if possible. Hence, I haven't made the switch.
Anyway, all that to say, what are you running it on?
I’m currently using OpenBSD as my only operating system on my Thinkpad X1 carbon (gen 7).
Wifi works just fine. I remember that the wifi drivers aren’t part of the base install system for licensing reasons, but they provide a very simple tool that will download it and set it up.
Generally, with openBSD, if something is supported, it is supported correctly. My go to example is that my keyboard backlight controls work even from the tty terminals.
But also, if there is something that the developers don’t think they can support correctly, they don’t hesitate in removing it entirely from the OS. They removed Bluetooth support for example.
It’s not for everyone. But for me, I love the idea that I can trust my primary computing environment because the developers care soo much about the little details.
I can't say how it is for the Thinkpad but most of the time keyboard backlight control is done in hardware. You can catch the keypress event and sometimes control it from the OS but the dimming/brightening works completely independent of the OS.
Yeah, kb backlight even works under Linux most of the time. Monitor backlight works everywhere out of the box under OpenBSD though, nothing at all like the hackish mess on other systems.
That's what's great about OpenBSD.
Other systems might support 802.11n, 802.11ac and stuff like that.
But OpenBSD supports 802.11g, _correctly_. Not like Linux or Windows that support it, but _incorrectly_.
I was smart enough to buy a computer that OpenBSD is compatible with, so I don't have any of these issue of which you speak. I use a T420. I have more powerful computers at my disposal, a Talos workstation and a high core count recent AMD. But this is the computer I use 90% of the time, at least as an interface to the others.
You can use usb hardware bluetooth dongles [0] with OpenBSD, they are detected like any other audio device. I assume that there are a variety of these available.
I legit wonder if it's not time for OpenBSD to switch to Java.
I mean, there's so much work to keep C safe and make sure memory is managed well, etc.
What the project needs is a virtual machine! Clearly they don't care about performance when security is on the line (they did disable multithreading, no?). A good virtual machine will be a small performance loss compared to dealing with this stuff... forever.
Of course, you still have to deal with user land binaries.
Garbage collection and just-in-time compilation in the kernel? I'm thinking you must be joking.
This mailing list article is about providing new or modified behavior in the kernel to guarantee behaviors - and security - to userland programs in any language.
Re: Disabling multithreading, I think you might be referring to disabling simultaneous multithreading (SMT) (edited: fixed thanks to a comment), also known as hyperthreading.
Sure, but this seems like a non-sequitur. eBPF has its memory managed in a very different sense than a garbage collector, eBPF programs cannot loop, and so on.
Java's virtual machine is so substantially different it's hard to know where to begin.
I don't understand why this non-sequitur keeps going! There seems to be a lot of point-missing here.
OpenBSD is a kernel and a general purpose operating system. It runs arbitrary userland software.
Rewriting the kernel in Java will not make C user code safer, and the cost to convert OpenBSD is so nontrivial as to make it an absurd suggestion. I mean, really truly absurd. As in, "am I even talking to real people who work with software?" absurd. If you think it's a good idea to rewrite a posix-compatible OS kernel in Java, by all means, go do so and make a patch against OpenBSD. It's a monumental undertaking, and I'm sure it'll be impressive!
On the other hand, rewriting userland software in Java (from C) will definitely make it safer, but users can already do this and are choosing not to. The goal of this change is to make it easier to write safer C.
I am fully aware UNIX clones will never use anything beyond C for most part, although there are some famous UNIXes like Apollo that did indeed trail another path.
The context of this thread is adding syscall to the kernel to allow C userland programs to be safer.
Even if the kernel were written in Java - which is, again, absurd to ask of the OpenBSD developers - it would still be a viable syscall to add for user mode programs written in memory unsafe languages.
