# General purpose Old Notebook: FreeBSD or OpenBSD?



## mbzadegan (Oct 27, 2015)

Hi everybody,

I have installed FreeBSD on more PCs and it's worked excellent on them. But now, I found an old Notebook [1GB RAM + 80GB HDD + AMD1800]. What's the best OS selection for *general purpose* between FreeBSD, DragonFlyBSD, OpenBSD?

I want to install Xfce or Openbox with general tools like firefox, libreoffice, vlc,...

Best Regards.


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## Oko (Oct 27, 2015)

mbzadegan said:


> Hi everybody,
> I have installed FreeBSD on more PCs and it's worked Excellent on them.
> BUT Now, I found an old Notebook [1GB RAM + 80GB HDD + AMD1800]
> What's the best OS sellection for *general purpose* between FreeBSD, DragonFlyBSD, OpenBSD?
> ...


FreeBSD with UFS should run fine. DragonFlyBSD is probably no go because it is very likely that your notebook is i386 while DF has only amd64 version. OpenBSD would work fine. NetBSD probably. I am using FreeBSD only on servers so I am not sure how Firefox, libreoffice, vlc works on Free but based on my experience on DF which uses FreeBSD ports three you will be OK with Firefox, libreoffice, vlc (There are some FreeBSD ports which don't compile on DF but over 90% of software is OK).

OpenBSD desktop is rock stable. You can't go wrong with it.


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## mbzadegan (Oct 27, 2015)

Oko said:


> FreeBSD with UFS should run fine. DragonFlyBSD is probably no go because it is very likely that your notebook is i386 while DF has only amd64 version. OpenBSD would work fine. NetBSD probably. I am using FreeBSD only on servers so I am not sure how Firefox, libreoffice, vlc works on Free but based on my experience on DF which uses FreeBSD ports three you will be OK with Firefox, libreoffice, vlc (There are some FreeBSD ports which don't compile on DF but over 90% of software is OK).
> 
> OpenBSD desktop is rock stable. You can't go wrong with it.


Yes.
I have installed openbsdOpenBSD but I sensed that it was so slow when running Firefox and then I decide to install FreeBSD but still I'm waiting for other suggestions.
Thanks again for your hint.


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## Oko (Oct 27, 2015)

mbzadegan said:


> Yes.
> I have installed openbsdOpenBSD but I sensed that it was so slow when running Firefox and then I decide to install FreeBSD but still I'm waiting for other suggestions.
> Thanks again for your hint.


Slowness has nothing to do with OpenBSD. It has everything to do with Firefox and its memory footprint. Unfortunately I have no choice but to use it myself. 

The choice of web browser has been small since the dawn of the Internet but the field is crazy small right now. The choice is either Gecko (Firefox) or WebKit (Chromium and alike) web engine has never been worse. 

For such old hardware I would recommend using the last Opera 12.16 with Presto engine. You can use it on OpenBSD 5.7 with Linux emulation (it is no longer available) or you can try KDE 3 which comes with KHTML engine based Konqueror.

Other more radical option is using NetSurf which work in many but not all situations. Dillo is supper fast but it is almost not usable.


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## drhowarddrfine (Oct 28, 2015)

Oko

Chromium hasn't been webkit for a couple of years. It now uses Blink, a fork of webkit with a lot of old cruft taken out to the point that it's unrecognizable from webkit.

The problem with that version of Opera is that it's so old, we developers don't write or test markup that works in it anymore and I'm not sure when it will break, if it doesn't already.

You need to double check that memory footprint claim for Firefox.


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## Oko (Oct 28, 2015)

drhowarddrfine said:


> Oko
> 
> Chromium hasn't been webkit for a couple of years. It now uses Blink, a fork of webkit with a lot of old cruft taken out to the point that it's unrecognizable from webkit.
> 
> ...



WebKit or not I am using neither Chrome (which is not available on OpenBSD anyway) nor Chromium or open source browsers built around WebKit (Midori, Xombrero, and alike come to mind). I don't use KDE3 nor KDE4 for that matter so for me Konqueror is not an option.


I am with you about Opera (this forum is unusable from it anyway due to the old SSL layer). I stop using Opera (which was for a long time my default browser) about a year ago. I still have it on a very old ThinkPad X21 running OpenBSD 5.7 at work which I like to carry around because it is so light (the fact that it has no batter is also helping).

I honestly didn't want this to become any kind of browser war.

I am just stating the the fact that even 15 year old notebooks (mine has 384 MB of very old and slow RAM) are still pretty usable (TeX-ing, e-mail, scripting, OpenNX to my computing nodes, OpenVPN, IPSec and similar) as long as the hardware can tolerate a web browser. I wish NetSurf was little bit just a little bit more usable because it would fit the bill perfectly.


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## drhowarddrfine (Oct 28, 2015)

Oko said:


> I honestly didn't want this to become any kind of browser war.


Not my intention. Just wanted to point out some things.


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## ANOKNUSA (Oct 28, 2015)

mbzadegan: The setup you're looking at is pretty much what I have, albeit on a much more powerful machine. Xfce with some lightweight applications should work just fine; I'm sitting at ~600Mb of RAM actively used with Firefox, Emacs, a couple terminals, every LibreOffice application, the Parole media player with a movie playing, and the Audacious music player all running at the moment. Most of that RAM is used by Firefox, so you may want to consider a simpler/lighter browser. Granted, I have about a dozen browser tabs open at the moment, and my little test is certainly not scientific.


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## kpa (Oct 28, 2015)

I recently tested both FreeBSD and OpenBSD on a rather old Lenovo SL300 laptop. FreeBSD provided better desktop performance  especially on playing HTML5 videos because of native Xorg drivers for NVidia cards. Overall OpenBSD was easier to set up and didn't exhibit any strange issues that I encountered on FreeBSD such as boot time wireless configuration timing out and printing out cryptic error message even though the setup actually worked.


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