OpenBSD

Reader supplied reviews for OpenBSD Average rating 8.8 from 53 review(s) 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: -- 7.97.87.77.67.57.47.37.27.17.06.96.86.76.66.56.46.36.26.16.05.95.85.75.65.55.45.35.25.15.04.94.84.74.64.54.44.34.24.14.03.93.83.73.63.53.43.33.23.13.02.92.82.72.6 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: 7.9 Rating: 9 Date: 2026-06-18 Country: United States Votes: 0 OpenBSD 7.9 has a long list of improvements, and an upgrade that's been painless. During this upgrade cycle I tried something new. The cwm window manager has been a defining part of OpenBSD that has existed since OpenBSD version 4.2. After ignoring it for far too long, I have become hooked on its keyboard driven user interface. Its absolute lack of window decorations go a long way in keeping the user interface from getting too busy. If you only need a window manager, you may find it to your liking. You may want to add xidle(1) for screen locking, and xcompmgr(1) for compositing. The .cwmrc [cwmrc(5)] can be adjusted to add menu items for your favorite applications. See the excellent man pages for more information. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 7.9 Rating: 9 Date: 2026-05-25 Country: United States Votes: 1 I use OpenBSD for all my personal/friends/family web sites, hosting email, and virtualization. The laundry list of used services include nsd, unbound, httpd, and smtpd. Its built-in network facilities are especially capable. OpenBSD is modern, but not overly complicated. That's why I like it. The upgrade to OpenBSD 7.9 was uneventful. The only item that took a little extra time was the major version upgrade of PostgreSQL from 17 to 18. This was easily accomplished using the 7.9 upgrade guide and the postgresql-server pkg-readme. If you are already familiar with Linux and the shell, some places to familiarize yourself with OpenBSD are service management (rcctl) and package management (pkg_info, pkg_add, and pkg_delete). It's going to be a bit different from systemd and Linux package managers. Using the OpenBSD filesystem needs some adjustment too. You have to consider that fsck will run if there has been a power interruption or crash, so using giant file systems can cause extended filesystem repairs. Specialized, smaller file systems will be more resilient. It also gives you some additional options for using mount options to tailor security (nodev, noexec, nosuid, etc.) Look at the automatic disk allocation section of the disklabel man page. It gives you a run down on how the automatic disk allocation works, and a typical OpenBSD partioning scheme. It's really helpful to read package readme's when they are available. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 7.8 Rating: 10 Date: 2026-02-07 Votes: 18 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 See all 53 reader reviews of OpenBSD...