I just bought a new, larger hard drive and have installed OpenBSD 4.3 on my desktop. Still updating but my kernel was ready this morning. (Shots taken while shelled in on laptop.)
The rest of the system is compiling now. I opted to initially use a combination of packages and source while I weigh using OpenBSD’s ports or pkgsrc. I’ve installed only console things for now. I should have time this evening to set up X (not my priority since I’ll mostly run ratpoison, screen, and console apps anyway).
Here’s a sign of OpenBSD’s low initial resource demands — and this is with several things already running (including an IRC client and a text browser).
One of the things I love about OpenBSD is that it ships without every possible daemon and process running in the background. While that’s primarily for security reasons, it also makes OpenBSD ideal for older hardware and for users who don’t want to have to go through default install values and turn off a bunch of crap. While that may not seem like a big hassle for most users, try using a low-resource computer that’s swapping or about to once X is started.
I raise the last point because most Linux distros — there are notable exceptions that give users more control over defaults or that don’t cater to the “bloat is good” mentality — have become nothing but a dick-measuring contest with who has the “biggest” version numbers and what’s the “easiest” to run out of the box. The result too often is buggy and insecure and bloated installs that cripple a computer. And that’s not even touching on the slavish devotion to aesthetic appeal, all of which clogs RAM for nothing more than a beauty contest.
The problem is, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and this beholder doesn’t care to devote half his RAM to shiny fonts, big-ass wallpaper, or animated desktop effects.
