French BSD enthusiast Joel Carnat has written a how-to guide on setting up a laptop with OpenBSD for general use. It's worth a go for the Unix-curious.

Carnat calls his guide "OpenBSD Workstation for the People," and says:

That strikes us as a noble goal. There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of Linux distros that share this aspiration, but outside of the most mainstream of FOSS OSes, such goals are rarer.

The guide uses its author's Thinkpad X280 as the target. The Register reviewed that model in 2018 and at the time noted that it doesn't have a standard 8P8C connector - or RJ-45, as everyone calls them. Carnat uses a USB Ethernet adapter to install the OS and fetch Wi-Fi firmware, after which wireless connectivity is available. (But not Bluetooth, which OpenBSD shuns.)

He also assumes that OpenBSD will be the sole OS on the machine. OpenBSD 7.5 came out in April and we looked at it soon afterwards. We can attest that the partitioner is about as user-friendly as a cornered rat. Others might well respond that it "is user-friendly; it's just picky about who its friends are," as one classic quote put it. Either way, Carnat is right: Don't even try dual-booting it.

He covers adding a desktop, focusing on Xfce, which is an excellent choice: It's lightweight and works well on OpenBSD. It's what this vulture's OpenBSD box runs. If you prefer KDE, OpenBSD 7.5 includes Plasma 5.27.

In a few months, OpenBSD 7.6 should contain Plasma 6, thanks to the efforts of the same developer, Rafael Sadowski. He also seems to be the main developer of the shiny new hardware-accelerated video encoding and decoding. This uses Intel's VA-API, but will work on other GPUs as well. This addition was recently reported by Bryan Steele on Twitter:

Carnat's guide also covers common apps and tools, localization - obviously, aiming at French, so some edits there will be necessary for Anglophones and others - themes, and more. He calls out the project's documentation and recommends studying it, but if you just want to follow a simple step-by-step guide, this is the best we've seen. You'll need to keep your wits about you, interpret, and not type blindly. Many choices, from locales to user and network names, must be changed. If you're not able to handle that, though, this isn't the OS for you.

If you're tired of all the shenanigans in the Linux world in recent years, from fancy file systems to elaborate cross-platform packaging schemes and of course the ever-controversial systemd, OpenBSD is perhaps the smallest, cleanest, simplest, and most comprehensible of the BSD family. If you can dedicate a machine to it, it's worth a try. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/07/25/openbsd_for_the_people/