"I installed OpenBSD 5.6 on my old Thinkpad x201 and much to my surprise, it just worked. [...] WiFi required a firmware update [...] I won't cover how to burn an ISO to a CD. [...] the various tweaks to config files in OpenBSD in my 'configs' github repo [... etc...]"
Is this a joke?
"Just worked". I don't think those words mean what you think they mean, even with the backtracking at the end of the post.
Marcellus Wallace would have something to say about how near "just worked" that is.
So I'm the author of the linked post. I hadn't ever used OpenBSD seriously in a desktop setting. I've installed it for servers to play around with.
And to answer your question "Is this a joke?", my writing is partly in jest and partly in seriousness. The fact that I had the laptop configured in about 45 mins (still faster than setting up Windows) was a surprise to me. It's faster than attempts at setting up Linux on it. Exception might be Debian but I've slept since then.
Regarding configs, those are just preferences. With the exception of the trackpoint middle click button, I don't actually need any of the other things as some nice OpenBSD devs have informed me. For example, the PF settings I included aren't necessary.
I would say that to really use OpenBSD as a desktop OS, the login.conf tweaks are non-optional. Otherwise you will find "big" software like browsers with more than a few tabs open, Office suites, etc. being killed due to the default memory limits.
Minor correction: firefox (at least) isn't "killed" due to memory limits. firefox segfaults because it tries to allocate memory and doesn't check for null. chrome in effect works around the memory limit by using one process per tab.
What does "configured" entail that it takes you more than 45 minutes to get Windows up and running? The Windows 8 install is less than 15 minutes start to finish even from a USB dvd drive. Your options are: select the drive, put in a license key if you have it, pick a username and password. Windows 10 is faster still.
If you're talking about changing settings or installing apps after the fact, that can all be slipstreamed.
In Linux-land, you can do all of the above as well with kickstart/derivatives.
I use the same laptop (Thinkpad X201) as my daily driver. It's got several generations old Intel wireless and video, which is supported out of the box just about everywhere.
When I installed OpenBSD on it, I could get Gnome 3.10 working but I was unable to find a good way to use the wireless working without having to use the console.
Yes, unfortunately there is no tooling for configuring wifi graphically. The existing tools from Linux land are tightly coupled with frameworks that don't exist on OpenBSD (network manager, linux mac80211 ioctls, and probably systemd in the near future). That's not a blocker in principle since we could patch the software, but it takes some effort. It would be great if someone could get this done.
Yeah, I couldn't tell whether the author was being honest or mocking it.
I use Ubuntu on my home laptop, and I agree that it doesn't quite work 100% yet compared to OS X (or, uh, Windows), but it does have the most user-friendly installation of the Linux systems out there.
It looks like the only foothold you have here is WiFi? Burning an ISO to a CD is elementary school difficult and tweaking your configs to suit your preference isn't part of a working system. WiFi is consistently a problem on all operating systems, too.
I have not needed to fuck around with wireless drivers on a Thinkpad x300 (around the same era as the 201) for Fedora, Windows, or, heaven help me, Haiku. It is not "consistently a problem on all operating systems".
As for burning CDs - CD drives are becoming a legacy technology.
OpenBSD doesn't presume to know how you'll use it. That said, it's understandable to be surprised when things 'just work' with very little configuration.
Is this a joke?
"Just worked". I don't think those words mean what you think they mean, even with the backtracking at the end of the post.
Marcellus Wallace would have something to say about how near "just worked" that is.