The perfect OpenBSD desktop
OpenBSD may not for everyone, but for people with limited need for commercial software, OpenBSD may provide the best desktop experience available.
Some arguments that speak for OpenBSD as a desktop are.
- OpenBSD is regarded as the most secure OS
- OpenBSD takes software freedom very seriously
- Low maintenance. Things tend to "Just work ™️"
- Easy to install and keep up to date
- 3rd party package system is very robust
- Very stable runtime
- Minimalistic.
- Base OS is slim. Just install what you need.
- Good performance
The hardware
It is recommended to check that the targeted hardware is supported by OpenBSD before you buy it.
Hardware supported by OpenBSD generally work very well, but unsupported hardware won't of course.
OpenBSD have a wide hardware support, but you should still check before buying new hardware.
For accelerate graphics, DRM, Intel and AMD generally works, but not Nvidia.
One way to make sure that a specific hardware is supported is to boot a live OpenBSD OS from an USB stick to verify that everything works.
For this install I will use a very cost and power efficient setup with enough performance that would suffice for most common uses.
- Intel BOX NUC5CPYH
- Crucial 8GB 1600MHz SODIMM
- Intel 540s Series 120GB
Detour
Because of problems with video on OpenBSD I need to verify the hardware by installing Ubuntu from a USB stick.
Download Ubuntu
Install on a USB stick.
dmesg
sd1 at scsibus4 targ 1 lun 0: <SanDisk, Ultra Backup, 1.26> ...
sd1: 7633MB, 512 bytes/sector, 15633408 sectors
fdisk sd1
...
disklabel sd1
...
i: 15631181 64 MSDOS
sudo dd if=/home/peter/Downloads/ubuntu-16.04.1-desktop-amd64.iso of=/dev/rsd1i bs=4m
The above does not work. Probably because the .iso is not formatted for the USB stick and/or usb stick is not bootable.
So I turned to creating the USB stick on OSX.
Boot with Ubuntu USB.
http://askubuntu.com/questions/773575/ubuntu-16-04-server-random-boot-crashes-on-intel-nuc5cpyh
New hardware
NUC5CPYH is not recommended anymore. Video fails both for OpenBSD and Ubuntu. Even with BIOS upgraded to version 0058.