This has long been my experience with BSD (back before jumping to OSX for some years, and now back to OpenBSD). There is a willingness to update core pieces of functionality where needed to reduce inessential redundancy.
Another example: console / keyboard config. In OpenBSD, I set this up through wscons. If set here, my keyboard settings get propagated in a robust, non duplicative way to X11. Contrast this with Linux, where you need to set up your keyboard config in at least two places to have, say, Dvorak in X11 and the console.
It's a minor thing, and one that Linux distros "solve" during installation by setting up the relevant configs. But it's more elegant in OpenBSD. Maybe that's because OpenBSD writes documentation that answers questions like, "How do a change my keyboard layout?" In OpenBSD, it's a simple answer. If the situation were the same as Linux, the answer would be longer. Maybe seeing that inessential redundancy in print is what spurs the project to action.
This is indeed annoying; fortunately David Herrmann is working on a new user-space terminal emulator for Linux called KMSCON which uses the same keyboard input code as XOrg (libxkbcommon) so there is hope for improvement.
Ok, looking at the recent activity (or the lack thereof) in the github repo lets me be somewhat less enthused... but what's your objection to "KMSCON"?
Another example: console / keyboard config. In OpenBSD, I set this up through wscons. If set here, my keyboard settings get propagated in a robust, non duplicative way to X11. Contrast this with Linux, where you need to set up your keyboard config in at least two places to have, say, Dvorak in X11 and the console.
It's a minor thing, and one that Linux distros "solve" during installation by setting up the relevant configs. But it's more elegant in OpenBSD. Maybe that's because OpenBSD writes documentation that answers questions like, "How do a change my keyboard layout?" In OpenBSD, it's a simple answer. If the situation were the same as Linux, the answer would be longer. Maybe seeing that inessential redundancy in print is what spurs the project to action.