The first time I used it was for my personal mail & web server. I did a little research and found OpenBSD's reputation for having some of the cleanest code out

The first time I used it was for my personal mail & web server. I did a little research and found OpenBSD's reputation for having some of the cleanest code out there, as well as the project's focus on security and correctness. That sounded like a good fit for the application. A year or two later, I bought a netbook so I could unload and process photos from my camera while travelling. I had no idea what to install on it since I didn't really want to spend all the time Gentoo required, and I knew I wouldn't be updating the system regularly, which could result in a lot of pain on Gentoo if you ever needed something new. And I had too many bad experiences with all the other Linux distros I'd tried. So, just for the heck of it, I tried OpenBSD. Ten minutes later I have a working system and GIMP one pkg_add away. As for the desktop.. well, I didn't switch from Gentoo directly. I had been running Debian for a short while. I can't remember why exactly. Could be that I had a hard drive break and I didn't have the time for Gentoo. Unfortunately Debian had been a pain from the start and one night, in a bad mood I was, for some reason I had to reboot. Which I couldn't, because apparently in some routine round of package updates Debian had messed with the bootloader. By that time I was just so sick of it, and didn't really want to look for yet another distro. I went to bed, and next morning installed OpenBSD, which had already proven painless so far.