⚠ I would like to notice that this article is not a serious and objective review of BSD systems, but just something written for fun and meant purely for entertainment.
I’ve heard about BSDs many times but never actually understood how they differ from a normal Linux distribution. And BSDs are important piece of technology, especially OpenBSD project. I think most of Linux users know what OpenSSH is, the ones who value simplicity probably is aware of doas existence. And I am personally very found of OpenSMTPD, which I use to selfhost my mail server. All of those applications are developed by The OpenBSD Project.
And there is something like BSDs being direct descendant of the one, true and original UNIX system. But who cares🤷?
So, I’ve got urge to check what that whole BSD thing is, with some serious skew to check OpenBSD. But I’ve heard that this project is all about security and simplicity, so I wasn’t sure how it handles a casual hardware: laptops with WiFi. Because of this uncertainty I’ve started my adventure by checking how should I start with FreeBSD but found opinion that OpenBSD handles a casual hardware better than FreeBSD. Weird I would say? But this finding was very welcomed nonetheless 😉. OpenBSD it seems is the way to go! I decided to do quick check of both systems and decide which one I’ll check more seriously after testing what works better on my hardware.
I’ve a big pile of discarded old laptops. Every single one is broken except one which is broken in different sense: Lenovo ideapad S100. This netbook was a crap when it was new, and now it is even worse 😒. The keyboard need some violent force to notice that a key is pressed but I’ve found a bigger RAM stick for it: 2GiB instead of original 1GiB, so that’s something. It should suffice for my test but I’ll need to take under consideration, how crap this hardware is in my verdict.
I installed OpenBSD first. Installation process went very smoothly. Except of one step: Automatic disk partitioning.
👐 Soooooo many partitions 😮.
I’ve later read that this is for security and those partitions have different mount options (nosuid and friends), so that actually makes sense but I was surprised at first.
And sum of allocated space exceeded size of my HDD.
Wait what 🤨?
The biggest partition “c” was marked as unused. So I’ve started digging and found that the “c” partition is special and means the whole disk and will be always marked as unused. Sorry, but it seems like workaround for me. I like Linux convention better where sda is whole disk and sda1 sda2 and sda3 are partitions on this disk.
Rest of installation process was breeze. Nice one OpenBSD 👍!
I had great time, but my laptop’s fan seemingly didn’t. It was giving its all and after reboot it started making weird sound. I’ve decided to change thermal paste on CPU and something else connected to the same piece of metal.
Checking sysclt shown me that in result of my operation temperature went from 70°C to 65°C on idle. A little too hot for idle I would say? I’ve enabled apmd and set its flag to -A whatever it means but it didn’t helped.
And now, who is at fault? My laptop? Or OpenBSD is doing something weird with power management 🤔?
I’ve decided to ignore this problem for now and check if it will solve itself.
So, after installation OpenBSD was working and started Xorg, how nice!
But…
I’ve thought that fluxbox was weird at the beginning.
I’ve thought that Enlightment was weird but I have been using it for some time.
My girlfriend cannot use my PC with sway on it, and she think it is weird.
But we all were wrong.
There is the pinnacle of weirdness. The true weird king: The fvmw! It seriously broke my mind. Good thing that xterm was autostarted on login…
I started clicking things randomly and found few things:
So, OpenBSD went pretty smoothly. Much better than I’ve expected.
Time for FreeBSD!
Installer of FreeBSD looked nicely. But there was a small issue – my keyboard wasn’t working! I’ve decided to connect external keyboard and finish installation with it and try to solve this issue after installation. So managed to install FreeBSD. Installer was pretty nice, simpler than OpenBSD’s one. But FreeBSD after installation is much more minimal than OpenBSD. So no Xorg for me. You want something – you need to install it yourself.
So, back to keyboard issue.
I’ve checked forum – no luck.
I’ve checked mailing list – no luck.
Kayboard not worky.
So I’ve bailed. Sorry FreeBSD, I haven’t managed to see your greatness. This laptop is probably too ancient for you 😅.
So, before installing OpenBSD again I’ve decided to see what this crappy laptop is capable to. And check CPU temperature. Mainly check CPU temperature. I throw Alpine Linux in data mode install – / in RAM and I’ve decided to go with /home and not /var (which is the default in data mode) as real partition on HDD.
System was usable. I’ve installed fluxbox and Firefox to do some check and it was passable. Not great but not too bad. I’ve disabled JavaScript and surfing net was possible with this combination. Lagrange worked too.
And temperature? 45°C – 49°C on idle. I’ve simulated some light load – 15% CPU reported by top and temperature went to 64°C. Seems like issue is on both sides. 64°C on such light load is not OK, but it was 65°C on idle with OpenBSD and only 45°C on Linux.
Ok, so I’ve checked what I can expect from this hardware. Time to install OpenBSD again and try to do something on it this time.
So I’ve installed OpenBSD again and was dropped to fvwm again. This time I did some light research and found some nice cwm config, which was somewhat similar to “normal” i3/sway. I’ve installed Firefox aaaand…
…it was unbearably slow.
I know that this laptop is crap but it wasn’t that bad on Alpine Linux.
I’ve added myself to staff group, added softdep and noatime to fstab, forced Xorg to use intel driver instead of modesetting one, and forced acceleration on Firefox. And it started to work a little bit better. It was not the performance of Alpine Linux in data mode, but it was somewhat bearable.
Have I wrote how great is OpenBSD’s documentation? I think not.
It’s really, really great! On the beginning I still tried to look for info on the web but quickly went man-only.
So, I’ve found that widely-recommended softdep option in fstab does nothing at all:
Use soft dependencies on an FFS filesystem. This flag is provided for compatibility only and has no effect on OpenBSD.
Yeah…
Seriously, this documentation is great. The one on the web is very outdated and web browser worked like crap on this hardware but simple man was doing it’s job!
OpenBSD installs applications from ports in /usr/local. And there are filesets which are somewhat read-only parts of system, with ability to patch them but I think I cannot change anything in them, this OS looks similar to immutable Linux distros for me. There is some immutable OS base but split into a few filesets, and mutable ports on top of them. I think I like it.
Fresh installation of OpenBSD is rather fully featured one, few games, xterm, 3 window managers, some X’s apps, etc. Something like some really lightweight but fully-equipped Linux distro. I have mixed feeling about it. I prefer install everything by myself but I on the other hand: fileset with X11 is optional, I can not install it and install what I want from ports.
So, I’ve started digging in this OS and:
There is Wayland in ports. I didn’t checked it as I’m almost sure that mesa (which is also in ports) doesn’t support this hardware on required level.
I’m also was very pleased that Lagrange is in ports! So, I managed to surf Gemini on OpenBSD. Great!
Default shell: ksh is similar to busybox’ ash. I think it’s usable on its own. Bash, dash, fish, zsh and even nushell are available. So, I don’t think anybody will miss their preferred shell.
So far, so good. But I also found some things that I liked less:
My personal nitpick: mount always requires superuser… I don’t like it in Linux and don’t like it in OpenBSD either… There was option for allowing users to mount filesystem but it was removed… So no luck here 😞.
There is a lot of things in /dev, Many, many disks, every single one with full set of partitions. I think it show everything what might be supported and not what actually was found. Totally confusing for me, I prefer Linux way.
Despite of everything, I think I liked OpenBSD. Not so much to daily drive it on my PC or worktop.
But.
What I found, and what surprised me in good sense the most is that OpenBSD has excellent support for older hardware. And such old machines are really cheap now. I think this might be ideal niche for OpenBSD. If you need some really cheap computer, want it to be simple, stable and secure I think Linux might be not so great choice anymore. Debian is not very lightweight. *buntus also might have problem with really old hardware. Alpine should work, Puppy Linux probably too, but I don’t know anything about it, I’ve just heard that it exists. And OpenBSD is interesting choice with this immutable-like design, fully-featured system just after installation and excellent support for older hardware.
Only problem is that hardware must be a little faster to offset OpenBSD performance loss in comparison with Linux.
I think I caused few brows to rise when I’m writing that OpenBSD is better for older hardware than Linux and mentioning that Linux is more performant. But wait! The applications in Linux distro’s repos are usually compiled with a lot of features and a lot of crap and from what I found, ports in OpenBSD comes with lot of unnecessary things disabled! So they usually behaves better on OpenBSD than on Linux. I managed to observe performance loss only on web browser.