OpenBSD

Reader supplied reviews for OpenBSD Average rating 8.8 from 51 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: 2026-02-07 Votes: 5 Let me start by saying that very often people comment that OpenBSD is not for beginners. That is only true if you are the kind of beginner who doesn't enjoy the challenge of learning something new and who gives up easily. If all you have ever done with a computer is switch on the power and hope that Windows or Android or iOS boots up so you can login, and you really aren't interested at all in how it works but rather just prefer to get things done, then yes, I agree that OpenBSD is not for you. If you are curious about how it really works, though, then time spent learning to install and set up a usable OpenBSD system is well worth it. I learned coming from Windows back in 2008 or so, and yes, it was initially difficult and sometimes frustrating, but I wouldn't trade it for just staying put on Windows and now feeling trapped 20 years later, as so many do. OpenBSD was my daily driver for about five years until the mid-teens. At that time I moved to Linux because there was some functionality I needed that was difficult to impossible to get working on OpenBSD at the time. I eventually ended up using MX Linux, which is an excellent distro. I still have it on a USB stick just in case, and with the persistence tools, I can keep it up to date very easily. If you are a beginner to using an operating system that you install yourself and this seems too hard, I would highly recommend looking at MX Linux. I decided to go back to OpenBSD for several reasons. I missed the simplicity of being able to configure pretty much everything using human-readable text files. There's some learning curve, sure, but it is not that difficult and the man pages are second to none. Also, there are a few good guides online to help if you're brand new to OpenBSD. (Calomel is to be avoided at all costs btw.) The base is very clean and has useful programs to do every essential administrative task. Everything is built with security in mind. It is not an afterthought that involves hardening some processes and settings or even substituting a chunk of the codebase that was secured by the NSA. (SELinux makes me laugh every time I think about it. You're trusting the U.S. government agency whose sworn duty is to spy on all communications to secure your operating system? I suppose if I had the ability and time to audit the 2,000,000 lines of code in the kernel, I might think differently -- but I don't, so it is all based on trust.) The kernel and userland are developed together on OpenBSD. This means that no one outside the dev team can decide to change the way all the various processes are initialized and controlled, and again, the settings are all available with text files, rather than trying to tweak the obscure internals of something as opaque as shoggothd. Hardware support on OpenBSD has improved to the point where everything works great on my two-year-old laptop and there is a package for anything I need to do with a computer so the problems I was facing with using OpenBSD as my daily driver ten years ago have vanished. Lastly, there is no cancerous copyleft code in base. It's all under the ISC / BSD / MIT / Apache licenses. The longer I do this, the more I realize how beneficial that is, if only to avoid the continuous preaching about how great the GPL and its variants are. There is an underlying ideological bent to everything done and said in Linuxland that becomes very tiresome if all you want to do is get something done with a computer. (I can already hear the reply that "not choosing a side is in itself an ideological position!" Please, stfu and go get a haircut instead.) dislike the direction that Linux Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 7.8 Rating: 10 Date: 2026-02-07 Votes: 1 Let me start by saying that very often people comment that OpenBSD is not for beginners. That is only true if you are the kind of beginner who doesn't enjoy the challenge of learning something new and who gives up easily. If all you have ever done with a computer is switch on the power and hope that Windows or Android or iOS boots up so you can login, and you really aren't interested at all in how it works but rather just prefer to get things done, then yes, I agree that OpenBSD is not for you. If you are curious about how it really works, though, then time spent learning to install and set up a usable OpenBSD system is well worth it. I learned coming from Windows back in 2008 or so, and yes, it was initially difficult and sometimes frustrating, but I wouldn't trade it for just staying put on Windows and now feeling trapped 20 years later, as so many do. OpenBSD was my daily driver for about five years until the mid-teens. At that time I moved to Linux because there was some functionality I needed that was difficult to impossible to get working on OpenBSD at the time. I eventually ended up using MX Linux, which is an excellent distro. I still have it on a USB stick just in case, and with the persistence tools, I can keep it up to date very easily. If you are a beginner to using an operating system that you install yourself and this seems too hard, I would highly recommend looking at MX Linux. I decided to go back to OpenBSD for several reasons. I missed the simplicity of being able to configure pretty much everything using human-readable text files. There's some learning curve, sure, but it is not that difficult and the man pages are second to none. Also, there are a few good guides online to help if you're brand new to OpenBSD. The base is very clean and has useful programs to do every essential administrative task. Everything is built with security in mind. It is not an afterthought that involves hardening some processes and settings or even substituting a chunk of the codebase that was secured by an agency of the U.S. government. The kernel and userland are developed together on OpenBSD. This means that they are well-integrated. There are no surprises because some dependency broke upstream. Hardware support on OpenBSD has improved to the point where everything works great on my two-year-old laptop and there is a package for anything I need to do with a computer so the problems I was facing with using OpenBSD as my daily driver ten years ago have vanished. Lastly, there is no copyleft code in base. It's all under the ISC / BSD / MIT / Apache licenses. The longer I do this, the more I realize how beneficial that is. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 7.8 Rating: 10 Date: 2026-01-26 Votes: 5 Gradually moved from Devuan Linux to OpenBSD. The transition took nearly a year because I needed things to just work, reliably. It's well worth the time and effort. Settled on OpenBSD's own CWM + Alacritty + Tmux an on a 6 year old AMD system with 32G RAM. Linux is faster, that's for sure, but out of the box, the default OpenBSD install is just much more secure. Now I've been with OpenBSD for a while and am familiar with the environment. I'd say it's actually the simplest to install and config, easier than Devuan and very straightforward. Things here do just work, minimal tickering is needed except those to make thing run smoother, such as increasing datasize-cur in /etc/login.conf On laptop, OpenBSD runs significantly hotter and consumes more battery than Linux, even when apmd is set to -A. It's not a problem with modern hardware, but on my old 8th gen intel i7, it burns my legs. Nah. I've also managed to run OpenBSD on Microsoft Surface Pro. It's usable, no touch-screen support. With the latest AMD laptop, heat is a non-issue. I get about 3-4 hours of use per charge which is typically enough. Overall, OpenBSD is fantastic for me: *Pretty hardened out of the box *very straightforward installation once you get the hang of it. *Once configured, it just works and runs really well, even as a daily driver, not just a server. The only con I can think of is the Filesystem is susceptible to corruption with sudden power loss, so make sure to use a UPS or on a laptop with battery. I am tired of chaos and constant changes in the Linux world and I have found calm and satisfaction with OpenBSD. I also tried every other BSD, Open is the best for my needs although FreeBSD is the fastest of all, even faster than Linux, but it requires manual hardening. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 51 reader reviews of OpenBSD...