The good: Unlike under FreeBSD 10.3 a few years earlier, hardware support was better. The Wi-Fi signal strength thing turned out to be i3status not supporting %quality
under the BSDs. 5 GHz worked fine. Suspension and hibernation worked well. OpenBSD also does not have the headphone jack switching issue that FreeBSD has.
The bad: Performance was unacceptably slow. If audio and/or video was playing, loading a Web page, even a simple one, in Chromium would cause the audio to stutter. Swapping would occur when memory usage reached roughly 1.5 GB (nomad has 3 GB) despite adding my user account to staff
and adjusting staff
’s resource limits in /etc/login.conf
. It would avoid the rest of the RAM as if it were poison or something. Wi-Fi was about half the speed it was under GNU/Linux for some reason. Also, some Web sites, such as Twitch streams (mpv + youtube-dl worked fine, though) and Internet Archive’s JavaScript implementation of MAME, would not work in either Chromium (with sandboxing) or Firefox.
I have reverted to Debian GNU/Linux in the meantime. OpenBSD mostly worked, and I would have stayed with it, if not for the above issue.
]]>I installed OpenBSD in a QEMU VM, dd’d its image to a USB flash drive, and then booted from it. Surprisingly OpenBSD supports all the relevant hardware. X even works at the correct resolution.
Shortly thereafter, I backed up as much data as I could, but still lost roughly 18 GB of data because I couldn’t fit all the data everywhere else. I then installed OpenBSD.
I have 16 packages installed from the repositories as of this writing. I use cwm instead of the default FVWM.
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