OpenBSD

Reader supplied reviews for OpenBSD Average rating 8.8 from 54 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: -- 7.97.87.77.67.57.47.37.27.17.06.96.86.76.66.56.46.36.26.16.05.95.85.75.65.55.45.35.25.15.04.94.84.74.64.54.44.34.24.14.03.93.83.73.63.53.43.33.23.13.02.92.82.72.6 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: 2026-07-21 Country: United States Votes: 1 OpenBSD is so solid and reliable I can rest easy. Truly great for network gear like firewalls, load balancers, routers, and web servers. Just don't forget to raise the max file handles! While OpenBSD is a rockstar for servers, it is also usable as a desktop. I recommend customizing the desktop away from the default X gui if used as a desktop though. Customizing is pretty smooth though. I do wish the installer had the wifi firmware bundled within, that is the only thing that holds OpenBSD back from being super easy for more people and use cases like laptops. OpenBSD as a server 10/10 OpenBSD as a desktop 8/10 Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 7.9 Rating: 9 Date: 2026-06-18 Country: United States Votes: 4 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: 7 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 See all 54 reader reviews of OpenBSD...