Another six months have passed, so it’s time for a new OpenBSD release: OpenBSD 7.7 to be exact. Browsing through the long, detailed list of changes, a few important bits jump out. First, OpenBSD 7.7 adds support for Ryzen AI 300 (Strix Point, Strix Halo, Krackan Point), Radeon RX 9070 (Navi 48), and Intel’s Arrow Lake, adding support for the latest x86 processors to OpenBSD.
There seems to be quite a few entries in the list related to power management, from work on hibernation and suspend, to more fine-grained control over performance profiles when on battery or plugged in. There’s also the usual long list of driver improvements, new drivers, and tons and tons of other fixes and changes. OpenBSD 7.7 also ships with the latest GNOME and KDE releases, and contains fixes and improvements for a whole slew of obscure and outdated architectures.
One sysupgrade on an existing system, one new installation for testing and fun. Smooth as always, and just as refreshing!
For what’s now probably a niche OS, I’ve found OpenBSD surprisingly functional for workstation/laptop use as long as you’re picky about hardware. Going to upgrade when I have some free time.
Apart from a few newer wireless chipsets on laptops and of course Nvidia GPUs, I’ve found each release to be more widely compatible across the board. It’s not as fast as Linux to pick up newer hardware, but it’s typically only one or two releases behind the curve these days. OpenBSD devs really do dogfood their OS and it shows.
And of course the support for much older hardware remains intact; I’ve installed it on a 25 year old laptop and gained better performance than any Linux distro.