This is an OS which has everything. It’s clean, it’s simple, it has a helpful community, stable code, and even pretty good package counts to support nearly any desktop/workstation activity.

And yet, I feel like there are nagging issues which ultimately affect all non-mainstream1 OSes. Display driver complications, janky system upgrades, a lack of groupware clients. I’m not picking on OpenBSD, I love the distro and I think it should succeed in this particular area (the desktop/workstation) where other open source alternatives have failed, but why hasn’t anybody managed to make it happen yet?

For a while, there was a similar hope around DragonflyBSD in the FreeBSD community, but I don’t know where that ended up… I do know I see nobody really using it.

What’s it going to take?

1Obviously, I mean MacOS and Windows, since Linux is at least as hampered on the desktop, perhaps moreso on account of the poor community and scattered vision.

  • David Emerson@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
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    1 year ago

    I’ve found sysupgrade to be pretty good at the core OS, but I have definitely had issues with drivers (particularly audio and display) and third party packages installed through pkg_add. Upgrading seems to be a mixed bag in terms of continuity of function when you’re running a richer system, as a workstation often is. On a server, with minimal package surface area, things are just fine.