I recently switched my router from pfsense to OpenBSD. I wanted a “vanilla” OS as opposed to a specific router OS like Opnsense.
The setup on openbsd was very straightforward. I had to read up a bit and claude helped getting ipv6 and vlans up. Had I ignored ipv6 it would have been ready in half an hour from just reading man pages and official docs. The only reason ipv6 took longer is because I had no idea how it works.
I researched the equivalent setup on linux and it was much less straightforward. In openbsd I only used software in the base install. For linux there were a lot more choices to make, which for me just made setting it up more difficult. I don’t want to pick a firewall, I just want to configure the simplest possible one.
The only issue I had was the system hanging when no monitor was connected to the hdmi port. I use an old apollo lake mitac pd10ai itx board. Displayport worked fine during install but black screened before I got a shell and crashed. Tried setting some kernel options to disable some display driver without success. Opted to get a dummy hdmi plug instead for reboots without a monitor.
Running my firewall on nixos these days and honestly I havent felt the need to have to make many decisions. You dont have to pick a firewall on linux, nftables is standard pretty much everywhere. Most the software outside of that is the same you'd be using there, but dare I argue often far more optimized on the linux side of things. Drivers especially so.
Far easier to have declaratively configured and services all meaningfully isolated. Miss me with dozens of root scripts integrated in some web ui or updates that can break the system the moment you step outside their basic expected workflows.
The setup on openbsd was very straightforward. I had to read up a bit and claude helped getting ipv6 and vlans up. Had I ignored ipv6 it would have been ready in half an hour from just reading man pages and official docs. The only reason ipv6 took longer is because I had no idea how it works.
I researched the equivalent setup on linux and it was much less straightforward. In openbsd I only used software in the base install. For linux there were a lot more choices to make, which for me just made setting it up more difficult. I don’t want to pick a firewall, I just want to configure the simplest possible one.
The only issue I had was the system hanging when no monitor was connected to the hdmi port. I use an old apollo lake mitac pd10ai itx board. Displayport worked fine during install but black screened before I got a shell and crashed. Tried setting some kernel options to disable some display driver without success. Opted to get a dummy hdmi plug instead for reboots without a monitor.