OpenBSD Wonder

I bought a used minisforum Venus UM790 Pro off a friend of a friend. The original seller stated that the machine was "completely unstable" when running Windows 11. It was cheap, included a small NVMe drive, and 64 GB of RAM. Ok. I reset the RAM, the CPU, and the NVMe drive. I then installed FreeBSD 14.1 onto the drive. The install didn't find any network interfaces, but otherwise worked fine. The Realtek 8125 2.5 GBps Ethernet network card is embedded in the board. FreeBSD apparently supports it via a package or port, but not native. I finished installing the system and rebooted. On boot, as expected, there was no network. Copy over the necessary files, install the right module, and voila, we have 2.5 GBps network connection. The AMD Ryzen 9 is ridiculously fast. Install all my normal software and configuration. One last reboot. 

X11 won't start. The graphics card isn't found. Odd. Do some debugging. Turns out, the FreeBSD 14.1 kernel doesn't support the embedded AMD GPU yet. In general it does support AMD GPUs, just not this specific one tied to the Ryzen 9 CPU. Apparently, the support is in -CURRENT, but not ported to 14.1 yet. 

Just to confirm I'm not crazy, do something crazy. I boot the EndeavourOS (99% Arch Linux) installer. Everything works in the Live Image, so it seems the hardware is good.

A random user on Matrix suggests OpenBSD will likely support everything by default. Ok, I'm game. Install OpenBSD 7.5. They're right. Everything works on first boot. Install X, start it, and it works flawlessly. I really like ZFS and FreeBSD, but let's try this setup. Most of the software I use daily doesn't exist on OpenBSD. I clone some git repos, build the software and within an hour, I have a fully functional system to use as my main desktop. Have I mentioned how ridiculously fast the AMD Ryzen 9 is yet?

Something else catches my eye about this OpenBSD setup. It's using a very small amount of RAM (340MiB). Jeez. 

For now, OpenBSD stays on the system. Literally, it just worked. Zero fuss. I spend another 30 minutes mapping my ipfw to pf firewall and setting up some more software. I think of OpenBSD for servers and firewalls, not desktops. However, I'm literally running OpenBSD as my desktop now.