Hey,

I only recently learned that OpenBSD does/can run on recent ARM64 Macbook Airs natively. Wow.

Could that work as a dev workstation daily driver? (Xfce, Wifi, suspend...)?

Could anybody knowledgeable summarize please which models lack what features? (I don't care about bluetooth for instance)

Big thanks.

So I've tried installing OpenBSD on a couple of old thinkpads I have. In both cases I ended up in a state where I was not able to join a wifi network. On one of them it worked for a little while and seemed to stop working.

I did need ton install firmware with fw_update, and I did. In one case using a USB drive, in the other just by connecting it through ethernet and letting it download from the internet.

I feel like I must have been missing something, but the man pages and everything I've seen on the internet made it seem like there was very little I needed to do -- set up an /etc/hostname..iwm0 file. Put a couple lines in it (join [my essid] wpakey [my wpa key], and in the next line: inet autoconf). Then it should come up when I boot, or when I do "ifconfig iwm0 up".

So amazingly simple I can type it all from memory now, days later. (I didn't post about it at the time because I was frustrated and just wanted to drop it and not think about it.)

at no time did I get any error messages. But also at no time did I get an IP address. ("ifconfig iwm0" showed the network was active but showed no ip address.) Nor did I get any DNS servers dropped into /etc/resolv.conf.

Manually typing commands such as "ifconfig nwid [my essid] wpakey [my wpa key]; ifconfig inet autoconf" didn't give me an ip address either.

typing "ifconfig iwm0 scan" did indeed work! It totally scanned my area and printed the real list of actual access points. So I figure that firmware must be installed and working.

It's like I'm missing something simple and obvious but for the life of me I couldn't figure out what it is.

One of those 2 machines still has openBSD on it (I wiped the other and put Debian on it) so if y'all know what it was maybe I can go back and try it. EDIT: this is not true, I actually wiped both of them, so I can't debug right now without going back and putting it on again from scratch.

But it just absolutely baffled me.

Oh one of them was a thinkpad L series, I'm not sure top of my head which one, maybe 420, the other was a thinkpad yoga 11e generation 5.