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OpenBSD does well for the areas it focuses on. It's easy to admire a project that has a narrow focus. The accolades always appear to come from those with the le

OpenBSD does well for the areas it focuses on. It's easy to admire a project that has a narrow focus. The accolades always appear to come from those with the least amount of experience with it however. "I use it for a high performance firewall for my mom" "It's great as a desktop on my old laptop, that I do nothing with." It's like hearing someone praise Steve Jobs for inventing Photoshop, merely because they use it on a Mac. Fire up a high performance database on OpenBSD that uses a production equivalent of modern data. Setup a fileserver on nfsv3, use sshfs, or run the latest Linux version of <insert anything here>. Then talk about your experiences. "We are secure because we don't support firewire/bluetooth" is an invalid argument.

dwc 11y ago
You're implying that OpenBSD is a toy OS. It's not. There are people using it for real work under real load. Is it the fastest? Nope. If you're spec'ing out a server and cutting edge performance is your major concern then you should pick something else. But that's not the only criterion in real production environments. There are roles where OpenBSD is not only an acceptable choice, but the best choice. As always, it's about the best tool for the job. No tool is the best for every job.
- akkadmed 11y ago
  Have you ever used it in any of these roles you speak of? What was your experience?
  - dwc 11y ago
    Yes, I have. My experience was good. It's easy to install, configure, and maintain, and it's rock solid. But it's not the only tool in my toolbox.
SixSigma 11y ago
Jack-of-all-trades is not everyone's metric. Not all software works on whatever system you run, does that make that OS not worthy of whatever accolades it gets ?