Simplicity, an important value

I have a little sub-notebook (a Dell c400) that I love to take with me to coffee houses in Midtown. It's lightweight, has decent battery life, and is fairly durable. It also has gone through about 3 different incarnations of linux without a stable wifi connection.

I finally got pissed off enough to go back to OpenBSD. Actually, what got me going back to OpenBSD wasn't anything new with the project itself. They have been plugging along nicely, adding new features that I salivate over, and otherwise doing a good job. No, the problem had been that my wife wanted to run flash movies from YouTube on the box, and OpenBSD did not have flash that worked worth a damn for that purpose. I tried WinXP, but that was like trying to swim through a pool of molasses on a summer day in San Francisco. I went through Ubuntu, ZenWalk, and PcLinuxOs, and all failed to run the well documented but poorly implemented rt61 based wifi card in the laptop.

Since then, the wife has started using my "main" laptop, and "the little subnotebook that could" was abandoned in the corner. I took it out to coffee every so often, but the unreliability of the wireless interface under Linux just drove me to distraction. Finally, the wife confirmed that all of her stuff was off the box... and I immediately installed OpenBSD 4.3! I guess the final push was that Adobe opened up their formats to the public, so gnash and swfdec at some point will have stuff compatible with the latest flash out there.

The bonus of finally moving back to OpenBSD is that I am being more productive in just one day than I have been in months on that box. Having something reliable with a really simple interface is worth so much more than all the eyecandy in the world. Well, unless it is eyecandy that I build- my next thing to do is to make an adesklet that will serve as a blood sugar tracker for my undead diabetic ass.