I am considering switching to OpenBSD. It has its own issues, but it is improving. Its performance should be good enough for me by 7.9.
OpenBSD is slower than GNU/Linux and FreeBSD. It got VA-API support just last year. Chromium and ungoogled-chromium recently got VA-API support in -current. I upgraded a throwaway OpenBSD installation to -current to test this. Video acceleration worked well under Chromium, even with 1080p60 YouTube videos. Playback of some videos in mpv also worked with hardware acceleration with hwdec set to auto and profile set to fast. Even unaccelerated 4K video playback seemed to work better under -current than under 7.8.
My Joey Jr V2++ Game Boy/Game Boy Color/Game Boy Advance cartridge dumper works under OpenBSD despite it not being officially supported. (It did not work under FreeBSD when I tried it.) My Hauppauge USB-Live2 video capture device does not, but I can probably install Alpine Linux on a USB flash drive or something for that. Network printing and scanning with a Brother inkjet network printer worked with some configuration.
That leaves OpenBSD’s filesystem (UFS/FFS2). I have heard horror stories about its reliability, and an OpenBSD developer admitted that UFS/FFS2 was “garbage”. A UPS would help, but I do not have one. Frequent backups (which I should do anyway) should help. (I would store most data on a fileserver running FreeBSD with ZFS if I could, but I have no hardware to use for that.)
[2025-12-09T17:59-0800] Update: The Joey Jr V2++ appears to work under FreeBSD 15.0, according to some bare-minimum testing I did.
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