OpenBSD works surprisingly well as a desktop, probably because the devs use it themselves. As long as you have supported hardware that is.

I tried it recently, but eventually gave up. It had so many little and not-so-little issues on my laptop, which I solved one by one over 2 weeks, reading and learning a lot. Even recompiled the kernel with a custom patch to get energy management to work.

Then I did a speed test on Wi-Fi, and it capped out at 6MBit (I have a Gigabit connection). The solution apparently is to install a Wi-Fi network adapter inside a Linux VM and connect to that on boot.
That’s when I went back to Debian where everything just works out of the box on my PC.

Dude we literally have that unix_surrealism comic there’s at least some love for BSDs here

Check out Root BSD on YouTube (or on Odysee or PeerTube!). He has quite a few interesting videos about various BSDs, and he actually uses OpenBSD on the desktop. Zaney’s older videos are also about BSD, nowadays he mostly covers Linux, but I still like his videos. I also like Joshua Stein’s blog jcs.org, he’s an OpenBSD developer and has some pretty interesting posts. He’s also on Mastodon: @jcs@jcs.org

I have a sneaking suspicion that there is one person at least !unix_surrealism@lemmy.sdf.org

I see little reason to use any of the BSDs. Neither for desktops nor for servers. The only benefit I see is that you can take the BSD licensed code and use it to create a closed source product like the PlayStation without having to contribute anything back. I dislike that benefit with quite some intensity.

I ran FreeBSD on my home server for a while since the old TrueNAS versions use it. The supposed simplicity of BSD rings hollow to me as it is just another thing I’d have to learn. I also don’t care much about the Unix philosophy or any other clerical reasons that distinguish the various BSDs. Computers and their OSes are a tool to me not a religion. Admittedly TrueNAS worked well for me, but reading up on the differences from Linux got old rather quickly. I migrated to the newer Debian Linux based TrueNAS Scale a couple of months ago because I feel more confident that if anything goes wrong I’d be able to fix it.

BSD is dying and it is not a bad thing