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Comment by pvdebbe | Hacker News Reader

Question that may be obvious for those who have experience on the matter: is OpenBSD for server use a nobrainer? It's not that popular on that section even though everything looks so good, so well suited for serving.

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I've had no issues serving with OpenBSD, but have gravitated towards FreeBSD myself due to the availability of ZFS and dtrace on that platform.

Both are stellar operating systems, and you'd be doing yourself a disservice if you didn't at least try playing around with them.

It's good, but in my opinion, the fact that patches are not distributed in binary form is a bit of a problem. (Yes, I understand the reasons). With debian, I type "apt-get upgrade" and that's it. With openbsd it's more complicated.

OpenBSD binary patches: https://stable.mtier.org

Yes, but isn't it a bad idea to install binary patches from a third party?

This 3rd party is comprised by OpenBSD developers though. While not an official OpenBSD project, the people that provide these patches are the same people that have built OpenBSD packages in the first place. So if you trust those binaries, you should trust these binaries too.

This is simply outdated and wrong information. M:Tier does not employ "the same people that have built OpenBSD packages in the first place." Last I checked, naddy@ built the AMD64 packages. He does not work there. In fact, I don't know if any OpenBSD developers still work there. Maybe one (jasper@) but you'd need to ask them.

Thanks for the important correction. It would be great if this were documented somewhere.

ajacoutot@ and jasper@ work for m:tier.

I basically go with OpenBSD unless I need a big file system (then I go with FreeBSD) or one of the infernal vendors we have (often a government contractor for a grant) requires something else (Windows or Red Hat (yes, Red Hat specifically, never any other distro)).

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