I love OpenBSD, but it really does need a modern filesystem. The current team might be to small or just not have the right people to do a new filesystem. HammerFS2 could maybe be ported (and one has to wonder if that's not one of the thing that would requires VFS layer updates). Much of the current work on filesystems are being poured into GPL licensed code or ZFS, which also have an unfortunate license, so OpenBSD either has to borrow HammerFS, or do their own thing, which they probably don't have the resources for.
1) https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20230706044554
BSD licenses were a thing before GPL lost the final battle, when linus accepted the tainted-kernel compromise. Now it's a relic of a bygone time, which show allegiance to a side on a war that no longer matters.
Data loss from a kernel crash or power loss, sure, have not seen that in some time.
However data loss from disk failure is something I've seen in the current century. I started using ZFS in my home network when I began to see that at home. I haven't had anything major that ZFS with redundancy couldn't recover since.
If you have SSD->LUKS->GPT->LVM->Ext4, then a bug on any of the (newer, buggier) components before your journaled FS means you lost data.
And yet it's never happened to me. Dozens upon dozens of systems. Linux or Windows or Mac for that matter.
I've toted around a laptop with whole disk encryption for > 15 years and never lost data. Not once. Even after a forced power off.
I have, however, lost data to major FS corruption on an OpenBSD system with no encryption whatsoever. More than once. Still using ancient MBR and legacy boot because, well, OpenBSD.
me too. Until I did. Negative anecdotes in a discussion about rare events are unhelpful.
My point is not that journaling is useless and should be dropped (I only use openBSD in things that are either readonly storage or virtualized on a host which does have proper FS). My point is that the "new setup" used by most distros introduced a lot of things that are above the journal. We have been rocking FDE for over 10yr, but the mass of people with crappy hardware and who just unplug their computers are only exposed to FDE for the past couple years.
All this does is tell me you're young for such a hostile tone towards recently dominant, mildly deprecated tech. It wasn't too long ago that UEFI didn't really work well. I did 3 BIOS to UEFI migrations in the last year or so, on Linux, FreeBSD and Windows, because those machines booted bios up to recently.
OpenBSD supports UEFI.