I used FreeBSD on a laptop for a few months and then OpenBSD for a over a year (on the same laptop).
FreeBSD had various small issues:
Plugged in headphones didn’t automatically output audio (and I never figured out how to do this in a non-hacky way).
Locking on suspend would sometimes fail.
My trackpad wasn’t recognized, and I had to use the console mouse driver under X to enable it IIRC (this also made the pointer freeze until X was restarted sometimes).
More stuff I can’t remember.
It was nice in a lot of ways too - I really like the ports system, the OS is very customizable and very well documented.
On OpenBSD almost everything just worked out of the box. It comes with a privilege separated version of X11 (Xenocara) and 3 wms (FVWM (old), cwm and twm). I did have to setup lock on suspend but it never failed.
OpenBSD also got better all the time - I used the snapshots for a while and meaningful improvements and great new ports were constantly being added.
They just recently built a whole new set of networking daemons specifically to make it easier to hop between networks on a laptop, all while keeping things simple and well documented.
I currently use OpenBSD on a server from openbsd.amsterdam, and honestly it’s amazing.
Service management is dead simple and yet works very well.
It includes a bunch of useful daemons built by the project, which have a sane configuration format and a nice set of features (httpd, relayd, smtpd, etc.)
Downsides are the package manager (although they made it way faster recently), no support for Bluetooth, recent WiFi versions (with sone exceptions) and Nvidia GPUs, and IMO overly aggressive attitude of some developers on the mailing list.
![[Xfce] Finally made the switch to BSD](https://i.imgur.com/nQwIyHE.jpg){kind=link}
I used FreeBSD on a laptop for a few months and then OpenBSD for a over a year (on the same laptop).
FreeBSD had various small issues:
It was nice in a lot of ways too - I really like the ports system, the OS is very customizable and very well documented.
On OpenBSD almost everything just worked out of the box. It comes with a privilege separated version of X11 (Xenocara) and 3 wms (FVWM (old), cwm and twm). I did have to setup lock on suspend but it never failed.
OpenBSD also got better all the time - I used the snapshots for a while and meaningful improvements and great new ports were constantly being added.
They just recently built a whole new set of networking daemons specifically to make it easier to hop between networks on a laptop, all while keeping things simple and well documented.
I currently use OpenBSD on a server from openbsd.amsterdam, and honestly it’s amazing.
Service management is dead simple and yet works very well.
It includes a bunch of useful daemons built by the project, which have a sane configuration format and a nice set of features (httpd, relayd, smtpd, etc.)
Downsides are the package manager (although they made it way faster recently), no support for Bluetooth, recent WiFi versions (with sone exceptions) and Nvidia GPUs, and IMO overly aggressive attitude of some developers on the mailing list.