I love OpenBSD as a piece of software, but I don't understand it's developers or community at all.
Why would anyone even have them be two separate machines with the same content?
I'm not sure that matters either. It's not really a priority and I respect that.
Apparently the cited excuse for why they don't support USB bootable media is because it's hard because some computers only support floppy emulator or don't support it, and there are many bugs in USB boot for older BIOS.. But that doesn't keep every other operating system of this day and age supporting it
There is nothing quite like OpenBSD out there. Thank you OpenBSD developers!
Canned 6 Ubuntu machines (servers) and replaced with OpenBSD 5.3 recently. So much goodness ships with openbsd it's unreal. Bar Theo's sharp tongue (which is usually spot on), you get pf, opensmtpd (so much cleaner than postfix), nginx in base, miles better manual pages than Linux, no horrid gnu info, small and simple base system, absolutely no surprises, no bloated crap like dbus/upstart, tmux in base and what I can only describe as a warm fuzzy "why the hell isn't everything like this" feeling.
Also, it's just about the only thing I've found that can work adequately entirely offline without having to use google to fix obscure problems and decypher documentation.
I've got a bootable USB stick that contains the base packages, entire FAQ (main documentation source outside manpages), all normal binary packages I use, WiFi firmware and its less than 2Gb.
Thanks as well.
Plus, every release includes a song: http://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#54
[edit] I should point out I've had a box running it before release to make sure that any changes are accounted for.
OpenBSD 5.5 will be year 2038 ready, but this requires a change to a 64 bit time type. This results in a "flag day" event, where old binaries will not run on the new kernel, and the new binaries won't run on the old kernel, and some file formats will be changing. A remote, no-console process will be provided, but it will be a more touchy update process than usual.
My favorite OpenBSD features:
-Awesome documentation (FAQ & Man Pages)
-Small installation media (amd64/install54.iso - 232MB)
-OpenBSD developers eat their own dog food
-Just works philosophy
Aside from being easy to work with when you don't have internet, the other upsides are the small footprint and light resource requirements, built in VMWare support, transparent and simple configuration and system initialization, and overall Just Works factor. The package repository has the things I generally want, and it's easy for me to set up my preferred development environment (xmonad, vim, firefox). As far as actually doing development, it's much like on any other *nix (xterm, vim, ruby, python, etc.).
If you're an OS geek, I don't see why you wouldn't want to have a look. I don't know if you'll prefer it over Gentoo, but you may be pleasantly surprised by the functionality and simplicity of the system. I find it a bit of a breath of fresh air when I get to it after time spent on Linux or OS X.
http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi
I moved from using Gentoo for 10 years to OpenBSD and have not looked back.
Edit; You gain quite a bit of time moving from Gentoo to OpenBSD because there is no requirement to compile or fix your operating system.
I use Xombrero (formerly called xxxterm) for browsing, or Chromium from packages if I'm working with anything on Google.
https://opensource.conformal.com/wiki/xombrero
I use Emacs as my editor and email client, and do pretty much everything else in a terminal.
That awesome looks um.. awesome. Never come across it before. I have an old netbook here that has a broken trackpad. I might be tempted to give it a go with that.
If you limit yourself to the package repository (about 10K packages) everything just works. Compiling things from source often doesn't, (not different than many linux distros). Tip: use the binary packages.
Also it can't run virtualbox or any other virtualization software, so sadly had to switch to Linux again. Soon...
Yes, I love both Operating Systems, I love that they are integrated and somewhat less retarded than Linux, I also like their community and development team and OpenBSD's focus on security and code-correctness.
But they are not yet "there" for Desktop use, many applications won't work or will be difficult to set up, and driver compatibility is way worse.
So maybe in a couple of years I'll switch to FreeBSD as a desktop, but for now Funtoo is still fun and somewhat usable.
You are really encouraged by the communtiy to use packages over the ports system, but you'll find everything you listed in both.
I hear pf firewall is awesome.
I also wonder if carpd is usable with a DHCP connection.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856205...
M350 enclosure is popular and cheap.
It goes without saying such box will smoke anything you can buy of-the-shelf. Hell, even the anemic ALIX Geode gave a nice boost to my home network over the crappy Linksys I had previously (things are now snappy and 100% stable).