My experience running OpenBSD as a desktop

I’ve been curious about OpenBSD for a long time, but always treated it as a server OS or something you SSH into — not something you actually sit in front of all day.

A few months ago I decided to change that and try running OpenBSD as my daily desktop, on real hardware, for real work.

This post is not a guide.
It’s just my experience: what surprised me, what worked extremely well, and what ultimately didn’t.

You can check out my OpenBSD dotfiles here, I keep them in case I will move back to OpenBSD in the future.

Hardware

I ran OpenBSD on my ThinkPad X220.

It’s not new hardware, but it’s a machine I know very well and have used with Linux for years. That made it easy to notice what OpenBSD does differently — for better or worse.

The good

The init system (seriously)

This was the biggest and most unexpected win.

OpenBSD’s init system is easily the most user-friendly init system I’ve ever used.
Even compared to OpenRC — which I already like — this feels cleaner and more predictable.

• Simple, readable config
• No hidden magic
• Things start when you tell them to start
• Things stop when you tell them to stop

There is a very strong feeling that the system is on your side, not fighting you.

I never had moments of “why is this running?” or “who started this?”.
Everything is explicit, boring, and reliable — which is exactly what I want from init.

Documentation and consistency

OpenBSD’s man pages deserve their reputation.

They’re:

• consistent
• written in plain English
• actually explain why things exist

I rarely had to search random blog posts or StackOverflow threads.
Most of the time, man was enough.

That alone makes the system feel calmer to work with.

Desktop setup

I ran a minimal setup:

• bspwm
• sxhkd
• sndio
• picom
• rofi

Once set up, the desktop itself was stable and predictable.
No crashes, no weird rendering issues, no random breakage.

The bad

Battery life (deal-breaker)

The biggest downside by far: battery life is awful.

And I don’t say this lightly — I really tried.

No matter what I did:

• tweaking power settings
• reading docs
• following recommendations
• experimenting with different configs

The battery life on my X220 was significantly worse than Linux, and not by a small margin.

For a laptop, this matters.
A lot.

If this were a desktop machine, I could live with it.
On a laptop, it became impossible to ignore.

sndio weirdness (and a browser bug)

I ran into a very strange sndio issue that took me a while to understand.

If I ran sndiod as a daemon, audio would work for some applications — but not in browsers.

The fix was unintuitive:

• run sndiod as a regular process
• start it from .xsession

Once I did that, browser audio worked perfectly.

This is not a huge problem once you know it, but it is the kind of thing that can drive you insane if you don’t.

I’m noting it here because it’s obscure and easy to miss.

Learning resources

These were extremely helpful while setting everything up:

• https://www.youtube.com/@TheOpenBSDguy
• https://www.youtube.com/@chimera_dnb (rootbsd)
• https://www.youtube.com/@ZaneyOG

So… would I recommend it?

It depends.

If:

• you’re curious
• you like understanding your system deeply
• you enjoy simplicity and correctness over convenience
• you’re running a desktop or plugged-in machine

Then yes, absolutely try it.

If:

• you need good battery life
• you rely on laptop mobility
• you want things to “just work” with minimal effort

Then Linux is still the better choice today.

I’m really glad I tried OpenBSD as a desktop.
Even if I don’t daily-drive it long-term, I learned a lot - that alone was worth it.