[sliverstorm]

> the BSD systems are quite impressive in that regard, especially OpenBSD

From my experience with OpenBSD, this appears to be quite simply because things have been pruned so well, there's nothing to fail. What is there is well-designed, and IIRC my general purpose install was ~200MB.

The insanely lightweight and simple nature of OpenBSD is one of my favorite things about it, and probably one of the biggest contributing factors to its strengths.