[technofiend]

Same as others below I use it as a firewall and have used OpenBSD since it was available for my Sparcstation IPC.

Don't get me wrong - my lab desktop at work is Fedora 26, my little lab boxes are mostly running Debian Stretch and I'm an RCHE current on things like SystemD who has a ton of RH boxes I support day in and day out. But OpenBSD is very old school UNIX in its simplicity; there is no cruft in the base OS because it's really built for a few specific purposes.

There are downsides to running OpenBSD; it didn't win any packet shifting races versus other BSDs last I looked, but it is (arguably) the most secure of the BSDs and for a firewall it is undeniably otherwise fit for purpose. Any old $100 refurbished PC from Microcenter and a couple of Intel NICs are all you need to build a whitebox firewall with lots of interesting knobs.

Every time I upgrade I literally throw all my configs to a USB stick, put in a new hard drive and do an install from scratch. Copying configs back and looking for changes between the distributions is the relatively painless work of a couple of hours and forces me to make sure nothing major has changed either in behavior of or the software packages themselves.

If there's any downside to OpenBSD it is that it isn't newbie friendly... I call it a full contact operating system because some of the list members can be abrupt to folks asking questions found in the FAQ.

[ams6110]

sysmerge(8) will handle all that config file diffing and change reconciliation. Of course not a bad idea at all to back up important stuff before an upgrade.

[technofiend]

I'm aware but I built the habit before that was available.