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Comment by cat199 | Hacker News Reader

Have you actually used OpenBSD?

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

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I love BSDs and try to use them personally because I like the experience, but as far as drivers go, I feel like Linux is generally on par with the BSDs. It's the userland which can be a PITA.

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.

If you have a mainstream motherboard, you'll likely have Realtek Ethernet drivers.

These do not reliably work in OpenBSD and will hang if you try to use it as a NAS.

I’ve found when shopping for a motherboard, it’s usually $10-20 more for intel ethernet, which is a much better experience under Linux and *BSD

Unless you want to build on the Ryzen platform for ECC support on the consumer series.

-Current works fine.

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