OpenBSD seems to run even better in the 7.5 release

I am not sure if I’m imagining it, but OpenBSD seems to run better on my 2017 HP Envy laptop on the 7.5 release than it did on 7.3 and 7.4.

I don’t know if the project made improvements in the way it runs on my Intel Core i7 7th Gen CPU (and the on-chip Intel GPU), but it seems like things are quieter in terms of the CPU load as seen in htop, the frequency with which the fans spin up and how cool (to the touch) the laptop feels.

This laptop has two 1 GB hard drives. Fedora Silverblue runs on a Samsung 970 EVO NVMe SSD, and OpenBSD is on a SanDisk SD Ultra SATA SSD.

This is the only way I dual-boot — one OS per drive.

I finally figured out how to make Syncthing run well in OpenBSD on the 217 GB of data that I’m syncing across OpenBSD, Fedora and a third system running Debian.

With the help of OpenBSD users/experts in the Fediverse (where you can follow me at @steven@gts.passthejoe.net and/or @passthejoe@ruby.social), I really have gotten everything working: Wi-Fi, audio, video, camera, printing, scanning, suspend/resume.

Being a longtime Linux and BSD user is a lot of help. Things that you don’t have to configure in modern Linux — but once did — do have to be configured in OpenBSD, though a whole lot is automatic. Still, having the experience of manually adding and configuring printers, scanners and Wi-Fi networks makes it less of a shock to get things up and running.

This isn’t my first OpenBSD rodeo. But it has been a long time in between rodeos, let’s say.

Way back in the 4.4 days, I ran OpenBSD as my primary OS on a castoff Gateway laptop, and the difference between then and now is very much night and day.

So many more things work today. The improvements are slow and steady, but they do come. I think a lot of it is due to OpenBSD developers using the OS on their laptop/desktop workstations — dogfooding it. They are NOT using MacOS or even Linux to do their development. They use OpenBSD. They want it to work.

I’m going to save the why of running OpenBSD for another post, but for now just wanting to do it — to do something different and learn new things — is enough for me. It might be enough for you, too.