Post #2008853

2026-04-17 13:01 UTC

@libreleah Huh. I once tried to put OpenBSD on a laptop (I can't remember if it was a thinkpad or a macbook) and the install went fine but I was never able to config a full GUI environment. I was repeatedly warned that daily driving OpenBSD in this way was not recommended. But I wanted to learn about BSD so I tried it (and failed). Maybe I will give it another shot. Thanks for the inspiration!

Replies (1)

@kaidenshi@exquisite.social 2026-04-17 14:16

@jamesvasile @libreleah I hope whoever told you not to daily drive OpenBSD on a laptop is not still giving out advice, because that's absolutely garbage advice. OpenBSD is really, really good on Thinkpads, older Intel Macbooks (pre T2 era), and pretty much any standard Intel or AMD PC. Their fork of Xorg (Xenocara) is in the base installation and out of the box the only thing you have to do to get an X desktop is answer "yes" to the question in installation asking if you want one, or if you answered "no" during installation you can (as root) "rcctl enable xenodm" and reboot. OpenBSD is really good on the desktop because its developers run it as their workstations, i.e. they "dogfood" the OS so that they are able to see what is needed for all use cases and improve the OS accordingly. If you'd like to follow a guide to setting up an Xfce desktop on OpenBSD, I wrote one a while back: https://www.kaidenshi.com/posts/openbsd-as-a-daily-driver/ ...and there are other guides out there as well.

Open ##2008854