I have had good experiences with both of them. In my fairly limited experience with both of them on the same laptop, OpenBSD worked better with the hardware. AC

I have had good experiences with both of them. In my fairly limited experience with both of them on the same laptop, OpenBSD worked better with the hardware. ACPI, battery, graphics, and a few other things worked much better than with FreeBSD (less tweaking for basic hardware stuff). From a philosophy perspective, OpenBSD seems to prefer sane defaults and a complete base system. For the laptop, I needed to install no packages to get a fully functioning system (minus a web browser; that was the first and only thing I installed). I had to do more “basic” configuration on Free than on Open, but I ended up doing quite a bit on both. OpenBSD has a somewhat strange update system, where patches to stable packages are not provided, requiring you to either build updated packages yourself, follow —current, or use a third party (M:Tier, for instance). My recommendation is to try both and see which works better on your hardware and which philosophy makes more sense to you. They’re both great operating systems.