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.
About FreeBSD… I recently wanted to give FreeBSD a shot on my ThinkPad. But aside from the rough idea that BSD should have some more unified and better coding standards than Linux and a few less bugs, already the damn installer bugged out on me. I think that ZFS is a RAM hog, and wanted to try installing it with UFS. I got stuck in the selection between the different partitioning schemes and had to hard reset. I tried again, this time the installation seemed to run through, the system rebooted and no changes were written to the SSD at all, the previous OS I had on there just booted. It simply wasn’t installed, despite showing the entire procedure and progress as if it was… o.O To me, FreeBSD is just as messy as Linux, but with fewer and worse drivers and less modern and comfortable. It doesn’t seem to be any more secure than modern Linux either, so it’s kinda pointless to me. I really wish it was different and it would offer better quality and security, but it seems it doesn’t. At least OpenBSD seems to deliver a fairly more secure OS to make up for its shortcomings like the very limited selection of ported / available software.