Pufferfishery

OpenBSD is nice, really nice. It represents sense in a sea of unreasonable distributions and derivatives. The install was painless, the default setup sound.

Being ignorant, of course, I know not the preferred method for keeping the system updated. The various forms of binary patching sound nice, snapshots are also frequently recommened. Anoncvs is out for now. It could be the drive is the bottleneck and mounting /usr (and /home) on a newer drive will result in considerable performance gains. Earlier it took ~40 minutes to untar ports.tar.gz and another 1h30m to update the ports tree to -stable with cvs. [I've since junked the old Quantum Bigfoot 5.25 drive and things have much improved.]

The faq recommends packages over ports, which seems sensible enough to me (one make versus thousands). Moreover it states:

The OpenBSD ports team considers packages to be the goal of their porting work, not the ports themselves.

A philosophy that seems to elude those pesky Mandrake Expatriates.