About OpenBSD Desktop

Why create OpenBSD Desktop

As a somewhat experienced GNU/Linux user, I wanted to know if OpenBSD was suitable to be my main operating system on a laptop, ThinkPad T480.

Some points of interest:

Programming

Emacs & Vim are available as text editors. Many interpreters and compilers are available (C, C++, Node, Perl, PHP, Python, Rust, etc)

Web browsing

Chromium & Firefox are available as Web browsers. The browsing experience isn't the fastest one, but it's clearly fast enough. I usually have between 10 and 20 tabs open in my web browser, with some heavy web applications like Sharepoint or Excel online, and it works pretty well.

Running Linux VM

Works well with vmm. Described in a post.

Conferencing

Microsoft Teams works well in Chromium. Described in a post.

TODO Running Windows VM

It should work (slowly) with qemu. Actually the Windows installer boots after a couple of minutes, but it doesn't find the driver for the disk.

Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi works out of the box with the ability to remember several networks. Described in a post.

TODO Wireless printing

Cups is available. On the web UI, a new printer can be added. If the printer isn't supported out of the box by Cups, it's possible to extract the PPD file from a Linux driver for the same printer. It should be possible to print at least from PostScript. For the moment, each job is stopped before starting.