The way I like to explain it is. if you like the unix operating environment, It is hard to do better than openbsd for a desktop system. If you are expecting something more like a mac or windows environment, there are options, but I suspect you would be better off with linux(or mac or windows for that matter).
Openbsd is comfortable in a way that is hard to explain. While largely this is just what what a person is used to. with obsd I have a good feel on how it works and goes together. something I never really felt with linux. however you do lose a lot of the network effect advantages that linux has.
MacOS?
These days it’s a lot more Linux-y though.
The different BSDs aren't distros, they are different kernels that are developed in parallel. Obviously there's shared history there, and some shared userspace, but FreeBSD and OpenBSD aren't just two different BSD distros of largely the same software.
If you're curious about what unix is and what a bsd is, I would recommend netbsd or openbsd in a vm.
Besides GhostBSD, looks like there's also Lumina, MidnightBSD, FuryBSD, and TrueOS/Project Trident?
yes, i would define them very much as experimental
It was a neat experience and worth doing.
I can't even fathom how many times I've made a mess from my impulses to tidy up my system and it just manages to "fix itself".
There are also a lot of neat things, like being able to use multiple versions of GCC side by side. Not every distro behaves well on that regard.
Pfsense is ok, but CE went a year without an update while they worked on other branches. Most recently their switch to kea dhcp broke some minor things like mapping static DHCP addresses to DNS entries. I believe that's fixed now, but need to confirm you can also still specify a DHCP option which some network devices need.
Opnsense is also decent and has the advantage of a regular update cadence, but I believe the UI is less newbie friendly. Fedora has the advantage of a UI to let you quickly review firewall rules, although the cli is perfectly workable once you get the syntax down.
Honestly I like OpenBSD's pf too but it couldn't keep up with a one gigabit network connection on your typical AliExpress firewall appliance, and I couldn't get it there virtually on an HP 360 Gen 8 or Gen 9 with decent Xeon CPUs and network cards. Probably a limitation of the network drivers for the network cards emulated by ESXi. I resisted being nerd sniped by that because my wife needs reliable Internet so there was no time to putter.
What are you using that lets OpenBSD achieve better than gigabit speeds?
tl;dr: For now I'm using PFSense because I have a friend I supply with tech support and he uses whatever I use and it's safe for him to play around in PFSense on his own.
A lot of the security of the default install comes from minimizing the attack surface by having very few services running. So you do not need to be tech-savvy to make it secure, but you might need to be tech-savvy to turn it into a usable system for your use case.
mail, web, routing, tunnels, bgp, dns, hell there is even an ldap server in there for some reason. but no ldap client, which kind of sucks.
Are you doing over 10Gbps? A lot has been done in this space.
For example, Googling things are easier since the tools don't change much over the years, so an answer from 10-15 years ago still works. Besides that, I could find most of my answers in the very well written man pages. There's also just fewer things happening so there's not much clutter to distract me finding the answers I need.
I'm still a beginner of course, but I feel like OpenBSD is good for any application where you need to run something and then "forget about it" - be it a server or maybe even a "kiosk"/informational screen.
Here's a breakdown of some technical differences between the two, but really if you want to explore alternatives to Linux or even Linux alternatives I highly recommend you do so, even OpenBSD, but I respectfully suggest you have a use case in mind first.
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/difference-between-linux-and-o...
The security first/secure-by-default mindset in OpenBSD means the core distribution is very locked down. By that I mean there's very little in the base OS in terms of services. OpenBSD had a robust "ports" selection for things you may need to add.
My use case for OpenBSD was as a firewall, but it was eventually retired because it just couldn't keep up with my network speeds. It still is a secure unix server for things like radius authentication of wireless clients.