That grumpy BSD guy: The Impending Doom of Your Operating System Going to or Past 11, Versus the Lush Oasis of Open Source Systems
Field notes and occasional musings by Peter on Stuff that happens, from a free software perspective, mainly OpenBSD, FreeBSD.
Will the uncertainty over forced obsolescence of fairly recent hardware force Microsoft and Apple users to switch to open source alternatives?
During the last few weeks several items of computing hardware in our household had reached the point in their lifetime when it made sense to trade in for upgrades.
I've written articles about my last two major laptop upgrades and each time detailed (in 2010 and 2017, respectively) how to deal with hardware that was new enough that I had no way to be certain it would work optimally with my chosen operating system, OpenBSD.
I have tended to jump from snapshot to snapshot, generally following whatever was -current on OpenBSD/amd64. There were other upgrades during that time, but those were straightforward enough that I did not see a need to write about them.
This time around, even though the process involved interactions with OpenBSD developers via the bugs@ mailing list and even trying two separate models from the same manufacturer before settling on what I wanted, I considered just letting this upgrade round just pass relatively undocumented. There was simply not enough drama involved in the process to make for interesting reading or an inspired writing process.
