[MisterTea]

You won't know until you try them out. My best advice is to download them all and fire up some virtual machines and get installing. Build each of the systems to meet your needs and see how you feel about the admin process.

For my more basic needs which is development I chose OpenBSD based on their simple, pragmatic design coupled with tight security practices in coding. Their documentation is excellent and their man pages are easy to grok and can get you 80% of the way to your goal most of the time without resorting to a search engine for help. Their FAQ pages are also full of simple, straightforward information and how-to guides that are very newbie friendly. I'm not an IT expert or unix admin, I do this for fun and as a semi serious hobby. So it's really comforting when you can type 'man networking' and figure out how to assign a static ip to an ethernet interface without having to resort to a search engine.

Hardware support is pretty good and I have it running on an older athlon x4 system, IBM T40 laptop, and my APU2 board from PC Engines (No problem installing to the SD card). Everything just works and I've yet to find a machine that can't properly run OpenBSD.

The rub is the system is more old school unix than "modern" Linux desktop. So don't expect things to be "Linux Gnome desktop easy". But it is by no means difficult to install, configure and use if you are somewhat knowledgeable with the comand line. If this intimidates you, perhaps you could go with a more desktop oriented BSD like TrueOS, a FreeBSD fork and start there. That's how I got familiar with the unix world; start with a hand holding distro and work your way down to the engine rooms ;-)

[JdeBP]

TrueOS Desktop has become Project Trident now.

* https://project-trident.org/