I always like it when I can link to an article written by an OSAlert, and this time it’s even relevant to me as I’m exploring OpenBSD myself. OSAlert reader and silver Patreon supporter Morgan has written an article about using OpenBSD as a daily driver.
OpenBSD is forever tied in first place with Void Linux as my favorite desktop OS. This is particularly funny because OpenBSD isn’t “just a desktop OS”; in its purest form, the base installation without any installed packages, it makes for an excellent Ethernet router, firewall, or web server. It even ships with its own fork of X11 called Xenocara, along with fvwm2 and its own calm window manager, so there’s a rudimentary desktop OS in there too. With that said, in 2024 there is no such thing as a fully functioning desktop computer or workstation without at least a web browser of some kind, and if you’re adding packages you may as well build a full desktop system to suit your needs.
So how do you go from the amazing but unfortunately limited base install to a “daily driver” workstation operating system? There are many ways to do this, and I will present a couple of paths I take depending on the hardware and use case involved. Before I do that, a bit of prep is necessary to get OpenBSD into more of a desktop OS mode.
Morgan
I’ll be using this guide over the coming days to make sure I end up with something usable. I still haven’t decided on what desktop environment I want to go for – I’m not interested in running GNOME or KDE, so Xfce is probably the most likely option. I’d also love to try out LXQt, but it seems the version OpenBSD has in its repositories is very, very outdated (1.0.0 from years ago, when 2.0.0 was just released). There’s a small chance I might suck it up and use one of those “build your own desktop environment” options, but I have no idea which one I should go for.
Xfce runs fine on OpenBSD. If you want a full DE, use that.
But most of the fun is in the simplicity of the base system.
You can do a lot with just built in cwm, a web browser, and pcmanfm.
Embrace the minimalism.
RE: LXQT
They’re working on it.
https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-ports&m=171346239630443&w=2
I can not bring myself to use GTK3/4
The great thing about OpenBSD is that it’s a blank slate on initial installation. You don’t have to use anything you don’t want to! At the end of the guide I talk about using cwm which is already built in, and you can add whatever non-GTK software you want to it. I once did a minimalist desktop using cwm, FeatherPad, xpdf, qtfm, and Firefox on a really old, slow machine just to see if it was usable and it worked out great!
I feel the same way, but guess what? You have a choice. Choose not to. There are other options.