Discussion
I'm writing this from my new GNOME-running #OpenBSD laptop. Everything works so well.
I can't remember if I ever ran #GNOME before in OpenBSD. I might have done it briefly a number of years ago.
Given the touchpad issue in #NetBSD where my cursor was jumping all over the place, highlighting and deleting text at random, in OpenBSD touchpad tapping is off by default.
I turned it on with wsconsctl and am testing how well I can type with it.
So far it's a lot less sensitive (in a good way).
@passthejoe are there any bsd distributions that use gnome by default?
@tctdiy_gaming I went with GNOME this time, but usually on my BSD laptops I go for Xfce. It does a lot, and a lot of people use it, so it tends to work well.
AFAIK, #GhostBSD is the only project that ships a GUI (MATE or Xfce) that is currently under active development.
I quite liked it the last time I ran it.
The main GhostBSD developer is very much into LLM development and the use of agents, so if that doesn't bother you, great. If it does, not so great.
@tctdiy_gaming I would love to see more BSD "distributions," but for whatever reason, it hasn't happened.
@tctdiy_gaming @passthejoe There are no distributions for BSDs, outside GhostBSD and HelloSystem based on Freebsd.
Gnome itself is a project deeply embedded with Linux SystemD and other Linux only components that porting it is a thorny matter that requires a lot of patching. No project outside Linux is going to adopt it as default as far I can think.
There is Mate that is the fork of the old Gnome 3 and is the main desktop for GhostBSD.
what @raster says.
As followup... technically there's also Midnight* and Nomad*. Although the latter seems to be asleep and is still based on an older FreeBSD 14.
@Tionisla @tctdiy_gaming @passthejoe I forgot about Nomad, but indeed it doesn't seem get updates and is thought most for running on removable media. Being put on an internal disk isn't the main goal as far I know.
I count Midnight more as a stand-alone BSD like DragonflyBSD than being a spin/distro like Mint that is built at top of Ubuntu, but good to remember it nevertheless.
@passthejoe does gnome still work with X or does the BSD have enough Wayland support?
@alienghic I haven't tried Wayland in #OpenBSD. I did try it in #FreeBSD last week. Not a success for me.
@passthejoe Gonna try this. Do you have any guides to recommend?
@passthejoe Have they clarified the weird AI trolling they were doing or issued any sort of policy yet?
@reflex The OpenBSD Project has its own sense of humor, for sure. I don't think there's a set-in-stone anti-AI policy, and I'm sure there will be third-party apps that have some LLM development (which is going to be hard but not impossible to avoid). I think the OpenBSD base (so far with the exception of tmux) is going to be meat-coded for at least the near future. The far future is uncertain for everything.
@passthejoe Well, should they choose to adopt an ethical no AI policy like #NetBSD has, I'll consider adoption. I always liked the project but I'm tired of the operating system rug pulls lately.
@reflex It's a sketchy, rapidly changing world we're in
@passthejoe oooo, what version are you on? Any more serious problems you encountered?
@tragivictoria It's OpenBSD 8.0. I tend to run Stable rather than -current. OpenBSD devs do a great job on many packages during the course of a release, among them Firefox.
The only problem I've had so far is that suspend/resume doesn't work. I had to turn that off in GNOME settings (b/c that's how I found out it suspends great but doesn't resume). I think the issue is that the keyboard is not "listening" for a signal to resume.
@passthejoe what's GNOME version?
The only negative so far on this 2017 HP Pavilion laptop is that it suspends but doesn't resume and messes up the filesystem during the hard shutdown. All the file issues do get resolved automatically on the next boot.
This is the first laptop on which #OpenbSD suspend/resume hasn't worked for me in some time.
I think the issue on this laptop is that the keyboard is not "listening" for a key press to go from suspend to resume, it's just dead, and the power button won't do it either.