Using it "on the desktop" is quite vague. What would you use your computer for? Somebody who wants a computer for checking email, shopping on ebay, and playing

Using it "on the desktop" is quite vague. What would you use your computer for? Somebody who wants a computer for checking email, shopping on ebay, and playing flash games is going to have different requirements than somebody who wants to make electronic music or do heavy video editing. Have you looked at the FreeBSD Handbook? (http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/ http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/) That will probably answer many of your questions. Also, the OpenBSD FAQ: http://openbsd.org/faq/ http://openbsd.org/faq/ I've used OpenBSD on the desktop and servers for over five years. I mostly use it for programming (Emacs), playing music (mpd: http://mpd.wikia.com/ http://mpd.wikia.com/), and nethack. I use Firefox and w3m for web stuff, dwm as a window manager, mercurial for vc, etc. OpenBSD's focus on security keeps the core system simple, well documented, and straightforward to configure, so as to minimize the amount of obscure things that could lead to vulnerabilities. FreeBSD is also an excellent OS, but OpenBSD's clean and minimalistic design is more my style.