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.
The ship has sailed for anything other than Windows or Mac as a mainstream, popular desktop. And it’s sailing away from Windows and Mac too, towards phones and tablets. Mobile devices are “computers” for a profitably large number of people, and I don’t see that changing.
That said, for this (literally) graybeard old UNIX admin, OpenBSD makes a great desktop. I like that it feels very much like my old SunOS, Solaris, and historic Linux machines, and I like administering my systems by editing simple text files instead of dealing with systemd/dbus/etc.* That said, I do still have an iPhone, and use it for the things it’s better at.
* systemd is fine, dbus is fine, they do what people want them to do. This isn’t a rant about those things. I’ve learned to deal with them in my professional life. For my own stuff, though, I want something that I consider simpler and easier to understand. I do enough fighting systems at work; I don’t need it at home, too.
A long time ago I really enjoyed the pf firewall in openbsd - it was so much easier than iptables and chains, which I somehow still don’t fully understand. How is the obsd experience to do NAT and manage a firewall ruleset these days?
I’ve been digging through the most specific edge cases of pf recently, and while I don’t know how it was 10 years ago, I’d say that nowadays it’s fantastic.
The syntax is simple, clean, and very powerful. And with anchors you can easily add/remove rules on the fly with a single command.