[Discuss] I Hate Ubuntu

[smallm at sdf.org (Mike Small)]

Bill Ricker <bill.n1vux at gmail.com> writes:
...
> *BSD is great for servers. As a "former" Security type, I respect OpenBSD's
> commitment to security out of the Box. A recent client had a mix of Centos
> and *BSD servers, worked fine. I might have notes to remind me whether it
> was FreeBSD or OpenBSD.
>
> What I'm curious about is which *BSD has good APCI support? I do want my
> laptop to act like a laptop. One advantage of Commercial distros - Ubuntu
> and RedHat - is they test new big brand laptops early. (OTOH I really
> prefer older Lenovos now, so maybe that matters less for me now?) Or should
> I give up and embrace Darwin/BSD (aka MacOSX) for the laptop?

OpenBSD's ACPI support is interesting, because they wrote their own ACPI
code whereas FreeBSD (and everyone else?) uses the reference
implementation from Intel:

https://www.freebsd.org/projects/acpi/
https://man.openbsd.org/acpi.4

I'd guess OpenBSD would work well on your older Lenovos, since that
seems a popular choice of people on the mailing lists, but perhaps not
immediatly on the newer laptops for the reason you name. The perception
out there may be that OpenBSD is for servers not laptops, but their
developers don't think that way:

https://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/openbsd-laptops

My own experience is pretty limited since I've only tried it on two
laptops in the last 10 years or so. It works great on an Asus Z35Fm
(from 2006) but last I tried had sound and X problems on an HP Elitebook
8440 (from 2010).

Best to avoid NVidia video cards if you might end up wanting to run
OpenBSD. That's a big problem with that second machine, and the usual
response on the mailing lists to people having a bad time is that few
developers have the time to figure out Nvidia cards, what with there
being no decent developer documentation, so don't buy their
stuff. Though I think someone in NetBSD or maybe even DragonFlyBSD is
working on porting the Nouveau drivers over, so maybe someday someone
from OpenBSD will take that in. OpenBSD's kernel now imports Linux code
for AMD/ATI and Intel video cards, but not NVidia's.

Also, while I don't run it myself so have no first hand impressions, a
couple of French developers do a lot of work to make sure recent Gnome
runs well. There is or was apparently a large multinational using Gnome
on OpenBSD as the desktop environment for some large swath of their
users.

-- 
Mike Small
smallm at sdf.org