Daily Driving OpenBSD
Based on my experience with OpenBSD's hardware support, I have started using OpenBSD as my daily driver on my desktop. Like any Unix-based system, "it just works." Having used Unix since my teenage years, it feels like home.The flavors of Unix and Unix-like systems may vary over time, but the core remains the same. However, I have had to make some changes to the applications I use.
The reason is that I am either too lazy to use existing ports or prefer to compile what I want on my own. I have grown accustomed to the wide variety of ports and pre-compiled packages available on both FreeBSD and Arch Linux/EndeavourOS. Over the past few years I have migrated from traditional Unix utilities to more modern iterations. Unfortunately, some of these do not yet exist in OpenBSD, namely zellij and gitui. Both sort of work and mostly crash a lot in OpenBSD. I am still working on why this happens. However, I have work to get done. I have started using gitg to replace gitui. Similarly, I have replaced zellij with xterm with tabs for now.
Another difference is that there is no Publii for publishing this blog. I have played around with Hugo locally, but I'm not ready for a full migration. So for now, I just run Arch Linux in a virtual machine to run Publii. I may start down the porting path in the future, but I lack the time now.
OpenBSD is conservative by design. It solely uses the fast filesystem 2 (ffs2) as the filesystem. While a performance improvement over the original FFS, it doesn't appear to match the performance of ZFS on FreeBSD or Linux. However, FFS2 seems solely dependent on the underlying storage hardware. For instance, I backup my system to an external drive over a USB-C 3.0 connection (5 gbps theoretical). With ZFS, a full 2TB backup takes 10-12 hours. With FFS2, it took 3 days. Same hardware in both cases. I tried both dump and rsync to see which was faster. The hardware was the limiting factor.
Otherwise, I haven't had any real issues with OpenBSD as a daily driver. Like all well-made software, "it just works". Here's a screenshot of my desktop running XFCE4.
