OpenBSD

Reader supplied reviews for OpenBSD Average rating 8.7 from 48 review(s) Please select a rating in the range of 1-10. Please write at least a few sentences about the distribution while limiting your review to 4080 characters. What are your thoughts on OpenBSD? Please include a few pros and a few cons, along with your overall impression of the operating system. Our FAQ page has tips on writing a good mini-review. Version: -- 7.87.77.67.57.47.37.27.17.06.96.86.76.66.56.46.36.26.16.05.95.85.75.65.55.45.35.25.15.04.94.84.74.64.54.44.34.24.14.03.93.83.73.63.53.43.33.23.13.02.92.82.72.6 Rating:    -- 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 out of 10 Your review (minimum 250 words): Past reviews - sort by: DateVotes Version: 7.8 Rating: 10 Date: 2025-12-23 Votes: 5 I used it for routers for the longest time and it's the best thing out there in terms of simplicity and security. It works great and is super stable. I used it as a desktop also and it was great until i coludn't install software i depend on for work (i had to go to nixos instead). I would say OpenBSD is best when you need predictable behavior and something that double checks what you do in a sense. The documentation (man) is very helpful in any situation. It is a bit my dream os, it's the computing quality i wanted when i first dived into distros and such. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 7.8 Rating: 10 Date: 2025-12-15 Votes: 20 Patching xenocara for using TearFree with intel cards is what made OpenBSD way better than anything else for my use case. I've been using OpenBSD for the last 5 years, I'm pretty used to it, I even use stock fvwm and twm, and the ed text editor (because vi and mg don't support utf-8), but this version is by far the best one. Also, I like simple tools, my "office suit" is just groff, grap, aspell, mupdf, and ghostcript from ports, and awk, ed, fold, less and many other text processing tools from base. With minidla from ports I can stream my media collection to my phone, tablet and tv. With mpd, mpc, and mpv from ports I enjoy media in my computer. My everyday tools are from base: xterm, tmux, ed, dc, ksh, find, xargs, fvwm, xclock, xbiff, xconsole, xload, with the exception of mutt, lynx, transmission, and firefox which are from ports. OpenBSD just works, and is not so difficult to configure (just read the fantastic manual). I remember using linux and having to uninstall and configure a ton of things, removing systemd, removing pulseaudio and pipewire, removing wayland, it was a PITA even with the ease of configuration of gentoo. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 7.8 Rating: 9 Date: 2025-11-22 Votes: 17 I am running OpenBSD 7.8 on a low end Intel CPU with 32 GB RAM. Installation is straightforward although partitioning the disks might be a challenge for users coming from a Linux distribution where everything goes into a single partition. Extra software can be easily installed via its package manager. Compared to Linux it is noticably slower when using a graphical desktop, but still perfectly usable for web/mail/office even on my low end machine. I am running i3 window manager, firefox, thunderbird and mpv as media player. Everything worked out of the box including sound and hardware video acceleration in mpv (but not in firefox, this uses software decoders). It comes with some software preinstalled that you would not necessarily expect, like a firewall, web server, email server, ntp, and of course ssh. A big plus for me is that it recognized my Eaton UPS out of the box with no extra software needed, simple shell scripts can be used to react to various events regarding power (and its absence). And the best is that it is rock solid, my desktop runs 24/7 with zero problems so far. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 48 reader reviews of OpenBSD...