I've run OpenBSD for a few years. Before that I ran Debian for many years. I prefer OpenBSD for most purposes. OpenBSD's base system is really nice. It truly i

I've run OpenBSD for a few years. Before that I ran Debian for many years. I prefer OpenBSD for most purposes. OpenBSD's base system is really nice. It truly is a complete system. It has everything I need: text editors, build toolchain, version control, openssh, tmux, etc. And all of this is built together and configured with sane defaults. By default sudo insults you if you type your password wrong. If you have a key in your .ssh dir and you launch xdm it automatically runs ssh-agent and ssh-addkey and so on. Everything in the base system is documented and documented very well. The OpenBSD man pages are incredible. They are so good I use them even if I am currently on a linux system. Nothing is allowed in the CVS tree if it is not documented. OpenBSD has fewer drivers, certainly, but the ones they do have are excellent quality. Check out the driver for a device supported by both sometime. Often the OpenBSD driver will be 3-5x smaller and far clearer to read. This is especially the case with wifi drivers. The userland is simpler too. To setup a wpa connection on OpenBSD I just type: # ifconfig wpi0 nwid my_net wpa wpapsk \ `wpa-psk my_net my_passphrase` On linux you'd have to call ifconfig, iwconfig, and run wpasupplicant after configuring it. I've never been able to get my 3945ABG to work under linux but it works out of the box with OpenBSD, etc. > Linux just feels more open to ideas, more open to anyone playing around and crazy having ideas that I don't know about that. Do you really have enough experience with both communities to make such broad statements? If you want a great example of a walled garden check out GLIBC sometime.