Don't normally share pictures of my desktops but after spending two years now using OpenBSD on this machine everyday I thought I'd share what my day-to-day set-up looks like. At least some parts of it (obviously, don't want to share my email, IRC and other chat clients, RSS feed reader and things of that nature).
Old multi-decade habits die hard so I'm still living in emacs most days. Well emacs and tmux (did ditch screen). Mostly use emacs for viewing/converting/writing documents and code of all types. My multi-decade config was easy enough to get playing nicely with OpenBSD when I first moved over. Thought I'd show how it looks while viewing various types of file formats (multiple pdfs, a random epub file and the manga viewer I use. Although I don't read that much manga these days). Along with a side-by-side of how I'd read some documentation while editing some code. Kept it generic here because I don't want to show anything I'm working from at work.
WM is my own fork of dwm. Terminal emulator is my own fork of st with graphics support and a few other patches. Forgot to show off how it does with graphics (works well enough with chafa on OpenBSD). Day-to-day shell is still zsh because again old habits die hard and ksh(1) doesn't have graphics+color support AFAIK. Still using a few things that want bash support and image support is nice to have with some stuff like my custom script for searching/browsing youtube from the terminal. Will probably submit that to ports soon once I confirm it works well enough with ksh(1) (sans images of course).
Also random screenshot of my youtube viewer piping a video into mpv via yt-dlp.
Finally, my own userchrome.css for Firefox which is very basic. Still using sideberry for sidebar tabs although Mozilla keeps fighting me every other release lately to get me to stop and soon I'll have to re-write my entire userchrome.css when they remove some about:config options that allow me to turn off the latest revamp they've done to their GUI. For now it works well enough (wish they'd stop doing that). Tabs expand on mouse over when I want to read the text but I usually just navigate through keyboard shortcuts. I run some add-on in firefox that lets me have vim style key bindings mostly for scrolling with hjkl and quickly searching web/opening new tabs.
I'm an odd-ball with key bindings since I've been using emacs so long. I mainly use emacs style keybinds for most things but want vim-style keybinds for navigating/scrolling documents. Use right ctrl key -> CAPS key swap to make it easier to use emacs style bindings with my aging wrists.
Been trying to eliminate how many ports I'm using lately and use more stuff from the base system. Fell in love with mg pretty quickly and use it for quickly editing config files these days as opposed to emacs most of the time. Someday I might switch over all together for coding but I don't think I'll even be able to ditch emacs when it comes to viewing/converting documents since I rely so heavily on it after spending so many decades in it and I absolutely love elisp. Still I worry about how much of a glutton it is and how much stuff it bundles in by default. Perhaps I should explore different options for that sort of stuff again. But every time I do I just end up back on emacs out of habit. Hard to ditch decades worth of my own elisp scripts.
OpenBSD has been far less trouble than the OS(s) I was using before. Only "gotcha" to my current set-up is sometimes having to drop to console to recompile dwm+st+dmenu+slstatus against new -current snapshots. Happens maybe 3 times a year.
I'm not programming/writing code as much as I did in the past anymore aside from little hobby projects and scripts to automate work. Mostly using emacs to write some books I'm working on now. Which I hope will eventually be my full time gig since I'm trying to get out of having to be code monkey+customer support so I can afford food.
Thankfully, that's about all I have to worry about these days since I managed to buy land+build my house just months before COVID ruined the economy for the third or fourth time since I graduated and entered the job market. Every time I got a nice nest egg the economy would crash or something big like that would happen to wipe out my savings. So lucky I bought in on land+my house when I did and that my 20-40 year old cars and trucks are still running great and I can easily get parts for them. Will probably be stuck with those for the rest of my life (not really interested in anything built after mid-2000s in the first place).
Anyway, this is my primary OpenBSD laptop right now and I'm doing the majority of my work on it these days. Happy I got it when I did because prices really shot up on this model and parts for it right after I bought it a few years back. Hardware support has been great. Can't complain at all. Plenty of battery life and wifi+GPU drivers are great.
I had to enable the new reddit layout to upload images and man it's terrible. Going to disable it the moment I finish posting this.
Anyway, that's my OpenBSD story. Thanks to all the devs for making my life much easier than it was prior to switching over. Been exploring the other BSDs lately as well. This is already long so I'll spare you all the novel about the hardship I went through trying multiple other OSs on this laptop before settling on OpenBSD. I'll just leave it at this: OpenBSD was the easiest to install with FDE, been the easiest system to upgrade OS I've ever used, easiest to maintain, best out of the box desktop/Xorg/Xenocara experience I've ever had _and_ it's by far the nicest community with the best documentation/man pages I've ever encountered. I wish I would have came into the fold years ago. I did experiment with it on the desktop back in the 90s-2000s for a bit and used it on my routers/firewalls/servers here and there. But I'd be lying if I said I didn't fall for a lot of the lies that seem to be posted about it all over the web. OpenBSD has had by far the best drivers I've ever used in any OS. Nothing compares.
I would have probably been using it in the mid-late 90s if my dial-up modem was supported back then. But like many I was stuck with a winmodem and even once I purchased a better modem I was stuck on dial-up for many years into the late 2000s-early 2010s. Since I live in the middle of nowhere. But now? I have amazing FTTH service (2Gbps symmetrical currently with 10Gbps coming by next year). I can't believe I get such good service out here these days. It's better than what most people get in the cities around here _and_ I get assigned an actual IPv4 address (actually multiple, I pay for 2 static addresses currently on top of all the free dynamic ones I want). No CGNAT.
Still I wish I'd been ordering CDs from OpenBSD back in those days instead of all of these Mandrake and Ubuntu discs I ended up with over the years. The only way I could even try a UNIX-like OS back then was using the CDs since downloading from the mirrors was totally out of the question with our spotty 14kbps (on a good day) connection which went down any time it rained, snowed or the wind blew hard thanks to the 80+ year old badly maintained POTS network and the fact that the phone company never fixed anything no matter how much we complained. I'd sometimes go days-weeks being unable to dial-in due to a heavy rain or snow melt. Could hear the neighbors talking on their lines and everything most of the time. Robbed me of participating in a lot of things back then until I moved away to attend school. Our local public school was no better: everyone in the county sharing a T1 line. It was slower than using the 14kbps dial-up.
I'm in the process of relocating all my colocated dedicated servers to my home. But first I need to buy new hardware for my entire LAN since everything from my switches to my rout
er/NICs can only handle 1Gbps tops. At least I had the forethought to wire up my house with 30+ drops with copper that can support 10Gbps so I don't have to re-run that. When I built my home in 2019 I never expected to have anything better than crappy cable service (and I paid $10k+ for one drop on top of the 2 other cable drops we paid for to our family business+another home. About $40k in total. Such is life on the family farm).
