As for desktop, I love cwm on my thinkpads, but macbook touchpads have won me over. That said, if arcan gets to a usable state on OpenBSD, I wouldn't mind sinking a few weekends (and/or crates of beer) into helping with improving touchpad/gesture support. X11 is just too daunting to have me bothered.
I'm really curious what you see to like in this setup.
Agree available drivers/applications might be less than a mainstream linux, but for what is there, things work completely solidly and require basically negative fiddling
These do not reliably work in OpenBSD and will hang if you try to use it as a NAS.
Basically, I'm not sure there's enough of a difference to warrant someone who can already do linux to use openbsd. Diminishing returns if you're interested in hosting a media server or NAS or whatever people wanna do with home servers.
That said, I highly recommend running either Open or NetBSD for a while just to get the experience. For me, running NetBSD as my only OS on my laptop through my late teens gave me a great foundation for my professional life up till now in my mid twenties. Really pleasant and simple OSes, great for learning OS problem solving too.
I've used Linux for the past 20 years. I recently tried OpenBSD because I never used a BSD, so I thought I wanted to have a look and had a pet project building a home router. My experience of OpenBSD as a headless server is it's been an absolute joy to use. Simple, well structured and strong consistency with config and where files are placed, great man pages etc. From no experience at all with OpenBSD I had a fully functioning router with PF, multiple vlans, cross vlan firewall roules, mdns repeating etc etc within a few hours. Regarding fiddling with things, for a headless server, it's been the easiest server I've set up to date.
The only negative experience I've had is when not shut down properly I've had a few issues starting it. I think I could solve that if I wanted to. Using it as a router I can set up a read-only filesystem etc. The other drawback is it's not Linux and I use Docker daily for development so would need to do what Docker on OSX does and run Docker in a Linux vm.
I got to say though: PF, multiple vlans, cross vlan firewall roules, mdns repeating do not sound like something a home user should be setting up. The only reason one would play with these things in a home environment is because they want to. Which is fine... but makes it a toy/pet project and not something to recommend to others. My home router is Ubiquiti and it "just works" zero fiddling required. I'm not sure why one would want anything more complex for a home environment.
I guess we all have different preferences where we like to spend our time. I fiddled with things for decades, now I only want to fiddle for something really worth it.
EdgeOS is proprietary and closed source, and not updated as frequently as OpenBSD.
The reference to the router was in regards I used OpenBSD and found OpenBSD a great server OS.
I have multiple vlan’s as have a guest wifi for visitors, all iot devices like tv, soundbars on a private vlan with restricted network access, dns ad blocking, dns over tls, wireguard for remote access etc. I use ubiquiti access points/switches but run my own router for learning purposes plus the flexibility. To be honest, since I’ve set it up I haven’t done any fiddling, it’s been rock solid. I’ve had more issues doing updates on the ubiquiti devices dropping the wireless uplink I have then having to power cycle them to come back up.
That does sound really nice. Once the price on SSDs comes down a bit I'd love to replace my Dell PowerEdge T20 Plex/Time Machine box with a Mac mini with stackable TB4 enclosure containing a few M.2 SSDs. It'd take a fraction of the space and power while being much more responsive.