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As I feel the need for a more minimalist and more coherent system, I downloaded OpenBSD and FreeBSD to install on a spare laptop (a Starlabs Star-lite MKII). I was baffled by the very pleasant OpenBSD installer. Clean, efficient.
Best of all?
I could choose, at install time, my keyboard layout (French BĂ©po) with capslock already replaced by Ctrl. Waw! Nice.
Too bad, the installer didn’t managed to load the wifi driver (and this computer doesn’t have an RJ-45 port). Maybe I should report the issue somewhere.
Anyway, I know that I could not make it my main OS as OpenBSD has no bluetooth support, something I use to listen to music (headphone) or watch a movie with my wife (bluetooth speaker).
Also tried FreeBSD but the installer was a lot messier and still had a 15 years old Frech-Dvorak keyboard unrelated to Bépo. Didn’t want to spend time installing with a bad layout so cancelled the installation. Perhaps I should investigate to contribute the Bépo layout into FreeBSD. FreeBSD also have a nice feature allowing to run Linux binaries, which would be very useful to run the spellchecker Antidote (which recently announced removing Linux support…)
I also downloaded images of Alpine Linux and Void Linux but I guess I will stay with Debian and install a fresh Regolith 2.0 as soon as it is released. You don’t change easily 21 years of apt-get.
But I’m really impressed by how nice and clean OpenBSD installer is. "Absolute FreeBSD" by Michael W. Lucas is a wonderful book even if I don’t currently use FreeBSD. Learning a lot of stuff. I welcome OpenBSD books suggestions.