After ~20 years of using Debian, I switched my desktop PC to OpenBSD about a year ago due to concerns about the direction Linux has taken (eg. systemd).
It was easier to set up the kind of minimalist desktop I like than on Debian, where I have to change a lot of defaults (eg. switching to sysvinit). The package manager is great, and there are ~10k packages available for 6.4. I'm now looking at switching my server to OpenBSD. I'm keeping some dedicated audio workstations on Linux for now (need the raw performance and drivers), but my impression of OpenBSD so far has been very good.
OpenBSD caveats: Video and audio can be a little glitchy. Releases are only supported for one year. ABI can change between releases. There's no filesystem journal. The only non-BSD filestems supported are msdos and ext2fs (and read/write speeds on those are slow).
That's one that has been sticking out to me lately. Both NetBSD and OpenBSD, as much as I like them, lack a modern filesystem..
On the other hand, if it's the lack of journaling that's a turn-off, seriously consider soft updates (softdep). Despite being seemingly an evolutionary dead end due to implementation complexity demands (basically, it's only feasible to implement at the level where it's possible to diagram out implied dependencies between all primitive operations), it is still in some respects superior to the journaling approach.
In any case, I find that, from reading the design, it feels more elegant and fundamentally right.
http://static.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/us...
I see systemd as a framework to define and control services that is much more robust than the old system that relied on scripting conventions. Why the hate? What's people's ideal here?
Fuck that. In the last two years, they have changed at least three times the way that the option to delete the /tmp dir is specified. I understood the configuration, edited it so that it did not delete the /tmp dir automatically; and then, upon an innocent update the old config is overridden and the /tmp dir is magically cleaned! This is infuriating. I have never felt actual, physical, rage against any software in 25 years of using computers. That is, until I met systemd!
I do not really care whether the init system is written in C or scripts. But please, allow me to follow a simple logic. Scripts maybe are not very elegant, but I can follow the init process end-to-end and understand where it does that. I have honestly tried to do that with systemd and it is impossible. And I am quite proficient in reading C code and bash scripts. I have a lot of patience and I am willing to spend a few hours of my free time to understand how a program is configured, by reading code if necessary. But this stuff is just batshit crazy.
I can hear in my mind the smug voices of systemd developers saying "but why do you even want to not delete the tmp files". That's not the fucking point motherfuckers! I just want to control my computer.
Why do you say that? You can even use gnome without systemd, but there are still other desktops.
Beyond that, systemd's extensive scope creep makes the system less robust and more complex than it could be, compared to predecessors which some of us have been working with over a decade, such as the daemontools family (runit, s6, nosh &c.) of supervision systems.
However, I have doubts about Devuan as a long-term solution, and it's a long-term solution that I'm seeking.
I had some reservations about what seemed to be an "angry" fork and its longevity, but so far, Devuan's been up to date, and last I heard most of the acrimony has dissipated up to the point where Devuan was about to get involved in the sysvinit maintenance of Debian itself.
So I don't know about the real long-term, but it appears they are serious about producing and keeping up a distribution.
I use daily two fine linux distributions that do not have systemd: void and slackware. It is a real pleasure to run htop and see that all the running processes do not even fill a 25-line terminal.