💾 Archived View for sir-photch.xyz › openbsd-as-a-daily.gmi captured on 2024-08-31 at 11:49:02. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
... is for hackers. I am not intentionally citing mental-outlaw on youtube, but it is true.
initial writeup: 2024-08-04
Trying to stay consistent with my "scratching itches that only exist because I like scratching myself" (that sounded weird) attitude, I just had to try out OpenBSD on my laptop.
So I went and got me a fresh SSD to make sure my existing Arch setup needn't be wiped. 1TB! Maybe not that smart of a choice actually, because:
But yeah, I eventually willy-nillied that terabyte into those partitions. (That /home was big! O.o) Now I know that it absolutely makes sense to have multiple partitions, since from OpenBSD's security perspective wxallowed partitions are for sussy impostors. And I know that I could've just partitioned it myself without all those extra partitions.
But OpenBSD is advertised as easy and working out of the box! So cmon :(
Anyway. Next up was connecting to my wifi, which is a hidden WPA3 network. WPA3 because WPA2 has already been breached, and hidden because I'm in a weird situation where any of my neighbors knowing about my wifi would potentially cause some headaches. So I went and did:
/etc/hostname.wiface0 join myhiddennw wpakey sekritkey inet autoconf
to then figure out that join doesn't work with hidden SSIDs. So I switched to:
/etc/hostname.wiface0 nwid myhiddennw wpakey sekritkey inet autoconf
Which means that I'd effectively have to switch between configuration files if I wanted to connect to other, non-hidden wifis. But that still didn't work, because WPA3 is not a thing in OpenBSD. After downgrading my AP to WPA2/WPA3, it finally worked. ...so I had to downgrade my wifi security.
Whatever, I had internet. Now, I was aware that OpenBSD has no bluetooth support. (Which is actually also a killer-criterion in my book.) But I convinced myself that if I sticked with OpenBSD on my laptop, I'd just get some nice wired earbuds, like in the good old days :b
Okay then. Moving on, one of my big use-cases for my laptop is using my projector as a second display to watch some movies. My projector has a builtin speaker which I could use instead of my bluetooth speaker. HDMI audio is not a thing however. Mailing list says that it is something to be maybe implemented in the future but right now, it doesn't seem like anyone is working on it.
Of course, I could use some bluetooth-audio dongle to connect my speakers, as suggested on reddit and everywhere else where people rant about missing bluetooth on OpenBSD. But they cost money! And I already have bluetooth builtin, so that really feels like bolting a fifth wheel onto a car that can already drive.
Now I have to admit that I chose the hard route by changing to 7.5-CURRENT and installing wayfire (which is a wayland compositor). It kind of already works but after a while, it ceases to do so. I spare myself of describing the bugs. I just assumed that wayland really fits well with the OpenBSD "security first" philosophy. (It does.) Only after a while I found out that wayland is mainly developed with linux-isms that are not a thing on BSDs, but ports are in progress. So... I just have to wait until the OpenBSD folk manage to bring up a working wayland ecosystem.
I really hate to say it but for me, OpenBSD is not a thing to daily drive. I will definetly try again with Xenocara and cwm or xfce, and maybe I'll spend those bucks on a bluetooth-usb dongle.
Until then, I might as well use linux-hardened with wayland and WPA3 wifi on my laptop, and OpenBSD as my VPS router.
Cheers!