So what? You have simply stated that jerks exist.

True, but what you have ignored is that jerks exist equally on all sides of any CoC.

It's just as often as not that the producers and promulgators of some CoC are the jerks. In other words CoC's don't fix anything by merely existing. A few lines in a charter or mission statement already does the same to have something to point to just for formality and documentation sake.

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[edit to expand or re-state a little...]

It's not that there is no problem and everything is fine already. It's that CoC's are almost always a thoughtless and ineffective, even actively counter-productive response to the problem.

A coc is an attempt to make an easy solution for something that there probably IS no easy solution for.

The problem takes the form of a continual fresh stream source of problem. IE a forever stream of new jerks, and existing jerks who dodn't just do one thing today but continue to exist tomorrow and the next day.

And so the solution can only be a matching continual case-by-case counter-effort, from intelligent insightful people who have good judgement.

Yeah, that doesn't scale and isn't easy and only some people do even a half-way good job of it.

It's just not a problam that you can bash script away.

But trying to do so is an example of being just a different color of jerk making life worse for others, but just in a different way and employing different mechanisms.

> I think that the goal of any code of conduct is to prevent any semblance of arbitrary and whimsical punishment, which can kill entire communities.

Quite ironic then that CoCs overwhelmingly lead to arbitrary and whimsical punishment.

> A code of conduct is a form of checks and balances, and code of conduct violation processes serve as processes to collect and present objectively verifiable paper trails of exactly when snd how those maintainers failed to human, and how bad at it they were.

That's the opposite goal; the CoC is to be as broad as possible while still being as vague as possible.

It's a tool that has been repeatedly weaponised against the out-group by the in-group - there is never any sense of even-handed usage of a CoC against the community.

Failed to human is an odd phrase as humans are always just that. I prefer "don't be a dick" but I guess it is less civil.

You can bind the command to a key on your keyboard easily. And I believe there are similar utilities in DEs (I use cwm).

Hello! Here are my thoughts on your totally valid concerns of using OpenBSD on a laptop.

> IDE support is an issue still

Yes, I agree. I enjoy using VSCode for most projects and there is no native support today in 2025 as far as I know. It is possible to use the web version (vscode.dev), but naturally, this lacks some features of the desktop application.

Typically I use some lightweight editor like Leafpad which has some basic IDE features. Not a replacement for a real IDE, but just an idea.

> Filesystem challenging when using a laptop that runs out of battery

Yes, OpenBSD uses FFS2 as the default file system. It's a solid filesystem with extensive history and testing, but it's not particularly tolerant of sudden power loss. In my experience most OpenBSD systems will come back online automatically after power loss, but there is a risk it will drop into single user mode if `fsck` wants a human in the loop.

There are some things one can do to help mitigate this, granted it's not very appealing coming from a more fault tolerant journalling FS: automated backups, using the `sync` option on your main data partitions (can affect performance), and of course monitoring power as mentioned.

IMO, this is a bit easier to manage on desktop or server roles where one can put everything behind a UPS.

> MATE lacking volume and WiFi controls

I haven't used MATE on OpenBSD. It's possible it's a combination of hardware + OpenBSD + MATE if it's not working. I know I have had working media controls on OpenBSD laptops in the past but I tend to stick with older laptops, Thinkpads, etc.

There are some in-base utilities to probe media keys and hook into X etc. if you're open to scripting a bit on your own hardware.

But yeah, after using Linux on laptops, it would be annoying for media keys to not Just Work after installation.

> This one is just me being picky but a GUI to help me gain a better understanding of the security settings or alternatively more up to date books.

Fortunately, there aren't too many security settings to change on OpenBSD. The most common one for laptops would be to enable SMT, e.g. enable hyperthreading on CPUs that support it. It is disabled by default as SMT is difficult to secure properly, but it does naturally improve performance. The command is `sysctl hw.smt=1`, or `echo 'hw.smt=1' >> /etc/sysctl.conf` to make it permanent.

> I am not exactly sure on how to correctly use virtualization and I need it to support docker workloads at work

Virtualization is a little unusual on OpenBSD. It's not quite as flexible as qemu, FreeBSD jails, bhyve, KVM, etc. The `vmm` and `vmd` systems were built in-house by the OpenBSD team. It is currently limited to just one core per VM the last I checked, and only supported serial and not VGA, so no way to run Windows under it for example.

I have had great success running Alpine Linux under OpenBSD and then running Docker on top of that, which opens the door for many tools and apps to run under an OpenBSD hypervisor.

There are also some VPS providers out there that fully dogfood OpenBSD and run their entire VM architecture on OpenBSD, such as OpenBSD Amsterdam, so it is totally viable depending on what one needs to virtualize.

Of course, one can run qemu on OpenBSD and virtualize whatever the heart desires.

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That said, while OpenBSD can be a great laptop OS, it can require a bit more setup and understanding compared to a mainstream Linux OS. IMO it's still worth playing around with, even in a VM or on different hardware (desktop, Raspberry Pi, etc.) just to see the OpenBSD way of doing things, because it is truly a wonderful OS to use and learn. Other OSs start to feel a bit clunky to me after using OpenBSD for a while. :)

You only need an IDE if you’re dealing with lots of symbols and a complicated module system (Java, .Net). That’s when you need a code indexing tool. For a lot of language, a text editor is enough.

Vim with ale is pretty great in any language with a language server that I've tried.