OpenBSD

OpenBSD is a Unix-like computer operating system descended from Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD),a Research Unix derivative developed at the University of California, Berkeley. It was forked from NetBSD by project leader Theo de Raadt in late 1995. As well as the operating system, the OpenBSD Project has produced portable versions of numerous subsystems, most notably PF, OpenSSH and OpenNTPD, which are very widely available as packages in other operating systems.

The OpenBSD project follows a 6-month release cycle, with the most recent release being 6.9, released on 1 May 2021. This release celebrates being the 50th release from the project.

Features

• High security in default install
• Xorg Just Works (TM)
• PF upstream
• Release music
• Comprehensive documentation for the base system
• More unixy than Linux, if less so than Plan 9
• Good support for archaic hardware used by WUVT, such as sparc64, ppc, and ppc64

Anti-Features

• Kernel not multithreaded
• Network stack not multithreaded (Changed with 5.9 to support limited SMP)
• Doesn't effectively manage more than 4 GiB RAM on platforms other than AMD64
• Has limited support for modern wireless hardware

Notable users

This is a list of people who won't answer your questions about OpenBSD, and will instead tell you to RTFM.

Use often

• via
• jpo
• waves

Use for routers and not much else

• ackthet
• telnoratti
• echarlie