I'm currently a very happy OpenBSD user. I've stuck with Thinkpad laptops because I know they are well supported (sleep, hibernate, etc). OpenBSD does everything I want to do - I'm running a couple/few web browsers for different occasions, claws-mail, I've got my music collection (with a small usb bluetooth dongle), podcasts, camera and favorite paint program, voip, programming environment, other things I use less often like audacity, gnumeric, some astrophotography software I got from github, video editing, etc. I run fvwm as my desktop, which is included as part of the base system.
I tend to eschew software that requires proprietary operating systems or drm. I've grown more opinionated on that as time goes by and proprietary and coprorate software gets more and more user hostile. I don't have a problem finding alternatives for myself.
Over the past couple decades I've switched from Windows to Redhat to Debian to FreeBSD before settling on OpenBSD. I appreciate how stable OpenBSD is over time. I appreciate that it's a very consistent and well documented OS. I got really tired of having to fiddle and fix stuff that gets moved around with system/gcc/gettext/python/java/gnome/etc updates, over and over and over again as the years go by, and OpenBSD does a good job of avoiding that. I'm sure it helps that I've become more of a minimalist, too. It's nice to have a pc that runs the way I want it to, and stays that way. I can't get back all the time I spent tweaking systems that no longer exist.
I've setup my current OpenBSD system with a shell script that I can run after a fresh install to put in place all my system, user, and website configurations (I also run OpenBSD on a vps, an extra beater/travel laptop, and an old desktop I use for backups). This works out nice, I can document all my config settings in these shell scripts, why I did certain things, document dependencies, future enhancement ideas, etc.
Comments
I'm currently a very happy OpenBSD user. I've stuck with Thinkpad laptops because I know they are well supported (sleep, hibernate, etc). OpenBSD does everything I want to do - I'm running a couple/few web browsers for different occasions, claws-mail, I've got my music collection (with a small usb bluetooth dongle), podcasts, camera and favorite paint program, voip, programming environment, other things I use less often like audacity, gnumeric, some astrophotography software I got from github, video editing, etc. I run fvwm as my desktop, which is included as part of the base system.
I tend to eschew software that requires proprietary operating systems or drm. I've grown more opinionated on that as time goes by and proprietary and coprorate software gets more and more user hostile. I don't have a problem finding alternatives for myself.
Over the past couple decades I've switched from Windows to Redhat to Debian to FreeBSD before settling on OpenBSD. I appreciate how stable OpenBSD is over time. I appreciate that it's a very consistent and well documented OS. I got really tired of having to fiddle and fix stuff that gets moved around with system/gcc/gettext/python/java/gnome/etc updates, over and over and over again as the years go by, and OpenBSD does a good job of avoiding that. I'm sure it helps that I've become more of a minimalist, too. It's nice to have a pc that runs the way I want it to, and stays that way. I can't get back all the time I spent tweaking systems that no longer exist.
I've setup my current OpenBSD system with a shell script that I can run after a fresh install to put in place all my system, user, and website configurations (I also run OpenBSD on a vps, an extra beater/travel laptop, and an old desktop I use for backups). This works out nice, I can document all my config settings in these shell scripts, why I did certain things, document dependencies, future enhancement ideas, etc.