Pour yourself a cup of coffee.

IN GENERAL: You will encounter much more friction in dealing with certain day to day tasks (until you configure everything) but unlike Linux you will find that the system is much easier to understand and therefore the fixes "stick" in your head a bit easier.

Overall, Linux is like going on a pleasant hike that has occasional 120° cliff faces you need to climb. OpenBSD is like hiking a mountain where you are at a consistent 45° angle. You'll face challenges but the resolutions are understandable and internally consistent with each other, and you will find you're own understanding of the system improves much more consistently through use.

USER EXPERIENCE: Desktop: You will be using X11 for the forseable future, particularly OpenBSD's security oriented fork of Xorg. For the most part any knowledge of setting up an Xorg desktop will transfer with little issue and the applications one would expect to see in such a desktop are present. OpenBSD comes with a few built in window managers which all ere on the "classic" side of the house. Most notably is cwm (Calm Window Manager) which is somewhat inspired by plan9's Rio.

Wayland is still experimental but there has been a good deal of progress here, DWL is at a point where it "mostly works" though it is far off from being the default. It is important to note that "being the default" actually means something in this space. The OpenBSD developers pride themselves on having and extremely secure and well maintained "base system" so the OS and it's surrounding ecosystem encourages users to not deviate from defaults as much as possible. That being said Wayland will likely, eventually, become the default.

Applications: The ports tree is less comprehensive than FreeBSD and certainly less than Linux but there is a surprising amount of less commonly used software in there. Case in point, Librewolf is in the ports tree as of 8.0 current. For the most part you will find the tools you need with little issue though; Krita, Kicad, Emacs, etc. There is generally a tool to match your need, though you may need to adapt your workflow to the OS from time to time.

System Administration: This is where she really shines. OpenBSD is understandable; it presents a clean and comprehensible computing experience that invites you to fully grasp how your operating system works. Unlike Linux, which has to cater to a wide variety of use cases, OpenBSD's tooling is simple and focused on a few specific tasks. In general OpenBSD leans heavily on being a UNIX-like and as a result understanding of Unix is directly transferrable to understanding of OpenBSD.

That being said, OpenBSD also suffers somewhat from being tied closely to its Unix roots so certain aspects of the base system can seem a bit "dated". A few notable examples being limits on shared memory and concurrent processes being low by default and the default partitioning scheme not fully utilizing very large SSDs. Important to note here; all of these can be easily configured so it's not that much of a headache.

Another area where OpenBSD is a bit behind, though it has not negatively impacted me, is its file system. FFS is serviceable but it is not a featureful or performant as the "cool kids" of FreeBSD and Linux (ZFS, btrfs). This is being remediated though (see below).

SECURITY: OpenBSD doesn't have namespace or chroot based process isolation the way Linux or FreeBSD does. Instead it uses a novel approach in the form of two simple syscalls, pledge and unveil.

Pledge is used to limit the specific syscalls a process is allowed to make and when, unveil limits the portions of the file system that are accessible to the process.

Despite seeming less powerful than things like a Linux container these two primitives have proven to be remarkably capable of isolating and securing software used in OpenBSD.

That being said they do take some getting used to and can create certain headaches if you are not familiar. In general, whenever you download a package there will be a message about a new file in /use/local/doc/pkg-readme/; read it.

THE FUTURE: OpenBSD's development is best described as communal. Users are somewhat tacitly expected to contribute in some way (bug reports, write ups, etc). Personally I like this as it creates a more tight knit and supportive community.

As a direct result of this, and the simplicity/understandability of the system there is a lot of "low hanging fruit" being attacked right now. As mentioned above Wayland is close to being stable and one of the developers for 9front (Ori Bernstein) is working on porting GEFS (the Good Enough File System) to OpenBSD which should bring OpenBSD much closer in performance to its peers in terms of file system. Vmm (the native hypervisor) just got multi-vcpu support in 8.0 and there are a slew of other minor improvements that are accruing.

THE COMMUNITY: The most concise way I can describe the OpenBSD community is "they respect your intelligence." It is expected that you have read the man-pages and readmes for the software you are using, it's expected you have an understanding of the guts of the system. This can seem gatekeepy or a bit conceited but allow me to present a counter argument. They don't think you're an idiot by default.

The community, as a result of its proximity to other areas in the "indie" computing scene, tends to carry a certain set of cultural markers. There is a lot of cross pollination from the 9front and Suckless communities and as a result you'll interact more with that computing philosophy. In general the community appreciates simplicity, comprehensibility, and hackability.

CONCLUSION: It is fun, satisfying, comfy and, most importantly, AI free. Learning how the system works feels good partly because the barrier to learning the system and contributing to it is actually much lower than in other systems. I have come to love it, principally, because it has a certain degree of "humanity" that makes it a joy to use.