[silentbicycle]

First off: Use binary packages. The ports tree is for porters and people running snapshots or CVS head. (Also: Definitely use binary packages if you're installing something that depends on KDE, or you'll be building KDE from source as a dependency.)

My "desktop" is emacs, dwm, tmux, and firefox, so that hasn't really been an issue for me. The OpenBSD minimalism is very much my style. (I use mpd for music, by the way.) It makes a killer router too, though.

I've tried going back to Linux a couple times, just to see what new developments (and ports, etc.) I've been missing since I spend most of my time on BSD. (I used Debian for a couple years, then mainly OpenBSD for the last six or seven.) I've gotten really used to OpenBSD, though, and every Linux distro I've tried hasn't stuck around for more than a day or two.

[jrockway]

My Linux setup is like this, but it's nice to have the "long tail" readily available. Stuff like SBCL and GHC are a pain to manually compile (or get from ports), and this leads to a cycle where since there's no GHC, there's no GHC. Compare to Debian where the latest version is almost always available, and so building $latest + 1 is trivial.

[silentbicycle]

I know where you're coming from - trying to update a common lisp port years ago got me into porting stuff. I'm happiest with OpenBSD, and I've done a fair bit of porting. (Not everything made it into the tree, though.) These days I'm a bit wary of depending too much on anything I can't bootstrap.