I might be lucky but my current installations of Arch are very bug-free. (except for a could bugs in the software, but I just report those to the upstream developers and they get fixed) I remember the last time my system broke, it was when they merged /bin and /usr/bin. I then proceeded to read the news posting wrong and break my system. Then it was up to me to fix it and it took about an hour.

On my other computer I correctly followed the post and had no issues.

https://www.archlinux.org/news/binaries-move-to-usrbin-requi...

I use the gnome offline updates with no fear, just whenever I turn off my computer I check the "Install Updates" options when it is available. It is all beautifully seamless.

Yeah, Ubuntu was never like that for me: every 6 months my system would break in a new and exciting way, and I couldn't fix it. But that's just me. FBSD is a bit more like Arch with a nicer installer, IMHO: minimal, text-based, highly configurable, and well-documented.

Nitpick: Arch mimics FreeBSD.

Or rather, mimics CRUX, which imitated BSD-style init scripts.

True.

Although Arch uses systemd now by default, which is bad. I've replaced it with OpenRC. http://systemd-free.org has instructions if you want to do it yourself.

Last month I installed OpenBSD on my laptop, and was frustrated with its boot time. I'm using an SSD. Debian 8 with KDE boots up in a matter of seconds. OpenBSD on the other hand needed at least 20 seconds to boot up.

I had done some research at the time, and came to the conclusion that it was systemd that allowed Linux to boot up so fast.

What is your experience with OpenRC?

IIRC, OpenRC supports parallel boot. s6 and runit definitely do. And none of those are Linux specific. In fact, there have been projects to run them on BSD.

Anyways, you don't need systemd for a fast boot.

Why do you care about boot time? I boot my laptop maybe 6 times per year or so, probably even less. I wouldn't care if it took even longer...

I guess you're probably right, I usually boot up just once in the morning. The truth is, being a performance freak, I expected OpenBSD to fly on my current hardware.

After much tweaking and struggle I couldn't get the DBus working, hence couldn't install GNOME.

i3wm as my window manager and manual configuration of everything especially the wireless connection were too spartan for me. So I switched back to Debian 8 + KDE.

I use i3 regularly, but I don't use wifi much. Honestly though, using netbsd with wpa or wpa2 doesn't look too hard, and you can write a script to automate the worst of it. It's by no means the horror that is iw/iwconfig and wpa_supplicant (insert ritual chants of horror and disgust).

hmm does suspend not work for you? OpenBSD is quite laptop friendly, more so than the other BSDs I'd say. If you're booting every morning then I can understand it being a bit annoying.

OpenBSD is probably the worst when it comes to overall performance of all the BSDs, and Linux.

During the day I suspend my laptop, but at night I power it off, out of habit I guess.

And I have this superstition that if I leave my laptop plugged-in to any sort of cable at night, it might get hacked while I'm sleeping.

I'll try suspending the next time I install OpenBSD.