I love OpenBSD and have 5.0 installed on a router. But man they are old-school. Just looking at the upgrade instructions[1] brings me back to the time before package managers and makes my long for a nice "apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade".
The last successful ubuntu upgrade I did was 10.04 (9.10 on my laptop), I think. 10.04 - 11.10 all broke (on multiple computers, in different ways) eventually requiring a liveboot and significant skill. (I'm now running arch, with significantly better results - but not perfect.)
I've never had an openbsd upgrade break, even when I do it the ninja way (which I often do, being a reckless fool).
Despite the longer setup time, I've found that openbsd servers end up needing far less maintenance than any others. It works well as a "fire-and-forget" operating system, a quality that seems to be lacking among the larger players.
(EDIT: not disagreeing that apt-get, yum, and pacman/yaourt are nice. Just talking about how awesome OpenBSD is.)
The upgrade procedure takes but minutes in itself. The time you take to save and then write your old configuration files back to /etc and whatnot is on your hands :) Sure, upgrading OpenBSD's core system files isn't as smooth as doing it on f.e. FreeBSD via its package manager, but it's definitely not about hours.
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I love OpenBSD and have 5.0 installed on a router. But man they are old-school. Just looking at the upgrade instructions[1] brings me back to the time before package managers and makes my long for a nice "apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade".
[1] http://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade51.html
The last successful ubuntu upgrade I did was 10.04 (9.10 on my laptop), I think. 10.04 - 11.10 all broke (on multiple computers, in different ways) eventually requiring a liveboot and significant skill. (I'm now running arch, with significantly better results - but not perfect.)
I've never had an openbsd upgrade break, even when I do it the ninja way (which I often do, being a reckless fool).
Despite the longer setup time, I've found that openbsd servers end up needing far less maintenance than any others. It works well as a "fire-and-forget" operating system, a quality that seems to be lacking among the larger players.
(EDIT: not disagreeing that apt-get, yum, and pacman/yaourt are nice. Just talking about how awesome OpenBSD is.)
Note that apt-get isn't a supported way to upgrade in Ubuntu. You are supposed to use "do-release-upgrade" (or "Update Manager" in the GUI).
do-release-upgrade is how I did it - but it really just does apt-get underneath.
Awesome, isn't it. It's transparent and works every time. Not something you can say about apt-get...
"Awesome", yes. It's also going to take about an hour of my full concentration to accomplish. That's also not something I can say about apt-get...
The upgrade procedure takes but minutes in itself. The time you take to save and then write your old configuration files back to /etc and whatnot is on your hands :) Sure, upgrading OpenBSD's core system files isn't as smooth as doing it on f.e. FreeBSD via its package manager, but it's definitely not about hours.
It is in my experience.
I think Theo actually encourages clean installs. It's no surprise the upgrade procedure would leave something to be desired.