I installed OpenBSD on a gaming computer. I didn't actually intend to, and how I
got here isn't really that interesting of a story. I'm going to write it down
anyway, though.

I'll start with some context (don't worry, this isn't going to be one of those
things where I run down every computer and operating system I've ever touched in
some kind of effort to establish my 'geek cred' (i.e. 'I've been into computers
since I was -6 months old and my mom accidentally swallowed an AS/400 during her
second trimester')).

I like video games, and have for as long as I can remember, but I didn't really
do much with PC games for a long time because the kinds of computers that you
would use to play PC games (i.e. a computer that didn't plug into your
television), were just not easily accessible to me, so I mostly concentrated on
consoles. I did eventually get a computer of my very own, which I purchased from
someone who I won't name here. He configured it to dual-boot Windows 3.something
and Slackware Linux. 

Since that computer, I got bitten by the upgrade bug, and I started on the
upgrade treadmill. Nearly every time I built or rebuilt a computer, I
dual-booted whatever version of Windows I was running and whatever Linux
distribution I was trying to figure out. 

As time went on, though, I booted into the Linux install less and less and then,
eventually, I was running some version of Windows on my desktop and some version
of Linux on my laptop(s). There was a brief time of about six months or so where
I made Gentoo my main operating system, but that's an article for another time.
The point is that I went back to Windows primarily because that's where the
games are. I tried things like Wine, and proprietary Wine offshoots like Cedega
and Crossover, and they generally worked pretty OK, but we fast forward to a few
years ago, and I was running Windows 8.1 on my main computer, and some version
of *buntu with Steam on a second computer purpose-built for the task. In
practice, I never really used it much, and was seriously considering tearing it
down and selling the parts.

But then Windows 10 happened. 

I resisted for a while, but I eventually acquiesced and installed it on my
computer. I knew about all the security things. I knew about all the privacy
things. I knew about Microsoft updating your operating system and removing
programs that it didn't like. I knew about it deciding what drivers you could
and couldn't install. I knew about it forcing you to install updates on its
schedule instead of your own.

And I installed it anyway.

Humans are really good at justifying anything. I needed it for my job, I
convinced myself. I need to keep up with the latest version of Windows to
support the latest version of Windows. And playing games on it was an added
bonus.

I had Windows 10 installed for a few months, and one day I was cleaning out my
Start Menu of all the crud that Microsoft decides to shove in there. In
particular, I had deleted shortcuts to Word and Excel, two programs that I
didn't buy, and would probably never buy. The computer rebooted by itself that
night to install updates (of course it did), and not only did I lose some
documents that I had opened but had neglected to save (which is my fault,
really), but I found that the two shortcuts I had deleted had come back. 

That was my tipping point. 

My computer is my computer. I should be the one to decide what goes on it, not
someone at Microsoft. My computer is not a node on their global domain for them
to manage for me. I went out the next day, bought a couple of new hard drives,
pulled out the old ones and started the process of putting not-Windows on my
computer, full time.

The obvious solution would have been some flavor of *buntu, since it had the
widest distribution, was (and still is) pretty easy to set up and to maintain,
and has support for games (i.e. Steam), but I didn't want to do that. Mostly
because I already had a Linux-based gaming computer, but mostly because the
SystemD thing was in full-swing, and I didn't want to mess with it (I'm not
going to get into the philosophical or technical issues with SystemD here), and
I eventually settled on FreeBSD.

FreeBSD was a breath of fresh air to me. It took some fiddling to get it to work
the way I wanted it to, but with judicious use of some online tutorials, I
managed to get a decent system up and running, with my gaming-class video card
to run some of the games that ran under Wine.

But, an odd thing happened. After a while, I found out that Wine was still kind
of awful at running games on Steam (and I didn't bother trying much else), and
after a while, I stopped trying to play games on FreeBSD. I moved back to my
long-neglected consoles and the *buntu machine that I had laying around. The
FreeBSD machine became just a computer that I used to do a lot of stuff, but not
for playing games.

I maintained the status quo for a while, but then I came into posession of a
decently-powered Thinkpad, and Ideas(tm) started to swirl around in my head.
After two years or so of running FreeBSD as my main full-time operating system,
I'd try my hand at OpenBSD. There were some other reasons at play, too, but I
won't go into them here, because they don't really matter to this narrative.

I installed OpenBSD on the laptop and used it as my 'daily driver' for about six
months. I read some books, I read some docs, I did some fiddling, and I
generally got it set up the way I wanted it. After a while, though, I could see
that there were things that I wanted to address. Firefox liked to start running
away with CPU usage and try to overheat the laptop, for example. It also turned
out that I didn't take the laptop with me and use it out in the wild like I
thought I would (I had, in fact, started using a different laptop for that
purpose), and since using a laptop that never moved off of its dock seemed like
a silly thing to do I decided that I should use a desktop system again.

It had been some years since I had last built a computer for desktop use, and I
decided to go all in, sort of. I won't bore you with the specs of the hardware I
chose, but I spent a few more dollars than I really wanted to, thanks to RAM
costs spiking in recent years, but after eBaying some old components that were
cluttering up my computer lab, I got something I could play with.

But I made my decision and I installed FreeBSD. It took a couple of evenings to
get everything working (compiling ports takes a long time, even with a
fancy-pants new processor), but I kept getting these weird USB errors that were
filling up my logs.

After twiddling with my BIOS I decided that maybe FreeBSD didn't play well with
the chipset in the motherboard. It was pretty new, after all, and I decided that
since Linux distributions have more mainstream attention, that they might have
better luck with the chipset. 

They didn't.

It turned out that I had a bad USB controller and had to RMA the whole
motherboard. But at this point, I already had a functional Kubuntu install with
some games that I forgot I bought installing through Steam (thanks, Humble
Bundles), and I figured I'd give it a try and see what I thought about it. 

It turned out that I didn't like it.

After using KDE on FreeBSD and various Linux flavors for a lot of years, when I
went back to it I decided that I didn't like KDE5. Again, the reasons aren't
really all that important, but the gist is that I didn't like that it got
more... bloated yet simplified. It tries to do everything and abstract away
all of the computer bits so that you don't really know that you're using a
computer. (See also that ridiculous iPad 'What's a computer?' ad), and the whole
thing just didn't feel right to me. It's hard to quantify. I figured that I
should just try the other desktop environments instead, so I installed XFCE,
which is what I had been using on my old Linux 'gaming' computer anyway.

And that didn't help.

The desktop environment was OK, but the underpinnings were still *buntu, with
all the baggage that entails: SystemD is a thing, Canonical farts out a kernel
update seemingly every few days that requires a reboot (yes, I know about the
livepatch service; no, I'm not interested). I tried to install Arch, but after
the initial install (which went fine), and when I got to the part where I had to
actually start configuring everything, I got tired of it. I saw the hours and
hours of fiddling around and trying to get all the pieces to play nicely
together, and decided that it wasn't worth it. I could go back to FreeBSD again,
but that would be more of the same. 

Doing lots of fiddling around until I got a useable system was more fun when I
had lots more free time, but somewhere along the line I decided I wanted to
actually *use* my computer for computing tasks instead of spending all night
trying to get my computer to use the native resolution of my monitor or to play
sound or whatever.

So I decided to ditch *buntu and Linux completely from my brand-spankin' new
machine and reinstall OpenBSD on it. Well, after I raided the junk pile for a
supported video card, that is.

And it does seem weird to me that I'm using a system purpose-built for playing
games and then installing an operating system that won't run most of them. And
I'm still not entirely sure what I'm going to use all this computing power for,
but that's part of the fun.

Last updated 11 July 2018