It’s really a shame that OpenBSD doesn’t have a good file system. Otherwise I’d use for my production systems (I could put it inside of proxmox, with a ZFS container outside for stability inside, but I like to run bare metal, no VMs)
I tried to install OpenBSD on three VM hosts, one Macbook Intel, one FreeBSD and one KVM. OpenBSD failed to install in all three environments. The latter two crashed just during the file system creation stage.
I run Void Linux on my laptop, which seems to exhibit many BSD-esque approaches (and lacks systemd), while also being a rolling release distro with fresh stuff usually appearing in a few days after an upstream release.
Pretty fine so far (about 6 years).
That’s my concern, the Debian experience is usually pretty lovely and I’d hate to leave it behind, but maybe there’s no point in fiddling with something stuck in trends.
Yes, Alpine is a good choice for small servers. I run both FreeBSD and Alpine for my homelab. Alpine feels very close to FreeBSD style. I still prefer pf over ufw/awall.