I'm always experimenting, and I'm running FreeBSD instead of OpenBSD at the moment. The purpose of this rant is to say "bah, humbug" to the added benefits that FreeBSD claims to offer.
PerformanceFreeBSD is faster based on the default settings, since OpenBSD is fanatical about security and stability, but there are many things you can do to equalize the playing field. I'm not saying that OpenBSD can be as fast as FreeBSD, but the gap isn't as wide as most people think. Network performance, for example, can be
significantly improved with some tweaking. Other performance differences come as the result of memory management - you'll notice OpenBSD frees up as much memory as possible, which has certain security advantages. Having to say NO to copyleft and proprietary code in the kernel did reduce OpenBSD's performance a bit, as did the focus on source code readability and simplicity. And then there's proactive security, crypto, etc...
You must remember that CPU cycles are just a commodity, like the fuel efficiency of a car - Gentoo Linux is a Prius, Fedora is a Honda Civic, FreeBSD is a minivan with half a Honda Civic strapped to the roof, and properly set up OpenBSD is a Hummer with a 5 tons of missile launchers attached. Sure, the latter is more expensive, but which would you rather drive?
So, yes, I would be willing to pay more for CPU to run a "Copyfreer" and more secure OS, and those added CPU cycles will also benefit the things where OpenBSD is just as fast. Given enough CPU power, all things are possible - even lighting-fast
Windows 7/8 with all the graphical bullshit running in virtualization on top of OpenBSD!
But one thing that isn't a commodity is security - once your secret data leaks, you're screwed for good! Code auditing and security will become increasingly important as operating systems come to control things like home intrusion detection systems, self-driving cars, robots, medical devices, cyborg implants, holograms / virtualization suits that offer real physical stimulation (and could thus hurt the user if they malfunction), etc, etc, etc.
The Klingons don't care how fuel-efficient your starship is, but whether they can hack past your shields could be a matter of life and death!
Alleged Desktop Advantages of FreeBSDOn my computer being able to use Nvidia graphics drivers offers a significant performance advantage in Windows and Linux, and that is also one of the advertised benefits of FreeBSD. Unfortunately I can't seem to get the Nvidia drivers working right at the moment - they cause flickering and some other weirdness in X. I've spent over an hour trying various compilation and xorg.conf settings, then gave up. Being
banned from the official FreeBSD forum sucks ass, and even if I wasn't banned the fact that it's run my such total fascist assholes is a major turn-off from using FreeBSD. Once again, if you have enough CPU power you don't really need
GPU, and GPU is just a waste of money if you don't waste your time on games.
FreeBSD's Adobe Flash support is another benefit and it works fine, but it requires Linux virtualization and a fuckload of Linux components, which is also a major turn-off. I think it's better to do without Flash, using work-arounds like
youtube-dl (which can be integrated with an RSS-reading script to pre-download all your favorite channels), as well as certain browser plug-ins and Web-based features that
convert Flash to HTML5. Not having Flash most certainly
makes things more secure! And, once again, it's better to emulate / remote connect to a Windows machine if you really need to use a Flash feature, or any of the other things you can't do in a pure Copyfree software stack.
More Web browser choices (ex. native Opera) under FreeBSD is certainly a benefit, but much less so now that it looks like serious work will soon be done to stabilize Chromium under OpenBSD. You only need one browser for surfing, and if you're doing Web design testing then you need access to a Windows box anyway, so you could also test under Internet Explorer (which looks like it's about to regain some market share thanks to the just released v9), real Silverlight, etc.
Server VirtualizationOpenBSD is alleged to have a very serious virtualization disadvantage, which is becoming increasingly important. NetBSD's support for
Amazon's EC2 just became official (though I was able to play with it many moons ago), and FreeBSD is getting there quickly as well. But OpenBSD does run well on cloud providers that use full virtualization like VMware, and prices of real dedicated servers are dropping as well. I think real servers are still a better solution, because security of virtualization is not bulletproof, and also because there are some freedom advantages to dealing with many small competing dedicated hosting providers (especially those that allow
BitTorrent seedboxes) rather than mega-corp cloud giants that are more susceptible to government pressure.
Just
compare the Basic package from ServerPronto ($69/month) to a
Small EC2 instance using Amazon's
calculator. (Note that Amazon's Small instance gets you 0.2 GB more RAM, while the "1 compute unit" is "equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor", compared to AMD 2000+ you get from ServerPronto.) You'll pay $62.22/month for the Amazon instance (or significantly less if you reserve the instance for a long period of time), but the 7 TB of transfer that ServerPronto includes for free would cost over $1000 with Amazon! ServerPronto does charge an even more ridiculous $0.89/GB if you go over the 7 TB, so it could actually be more expensive if you overblow your limit significantly, but very few sites would need that much bandwidth and there are many things you can do to offload extra bandwidth to a cheaper host if you ever get close to the limit.
Amazon's data transfer (especially if you use CloudFront) is certainly faster than ServerPronto, but I think the best way to host a site is to mainly use static files, so you could use one "processing server" (ideally hosted in your home if there are no bandwidth constraints, or using something like ServerPronto) and to have multiple mirrors on cheap shared hosts in different countries. For example, this forum could have all the threads as static HTML files, which would load more quickly, and the comparatively rare occasion where someone posts would trigger a server-side script to regenerate the thread HTML file and push it to all the mirrors. Use of richer client-side technologies like AJAX can make this process a lot more effective and efficient. You can use some server-side (ex. GeoIP) or client-side (ex. HTTP ping) tricks to route the user to the fastest mirror, or let them pick one manually. You can also offer your larger downloads via
Metalink and/or BitTorrent with
HTTP seeds, which, given enough mirrors / seeders, can offer even faster performance than any single CDN, but more resilient and significantly cheaper! And, of course having multiple mirrors in multiple countries is also the most effective anti-censorship precaution - never forget how Amazon gave WikiLeaks the boot!
SummationFreeBSD's advantages over OpenBSD are rather shallow. OpenBSD's supposed limitations actually encourage you to do thing right - invest in CPU power, use scripting, avoid cloud giants, avoid Web server inefficiencies, avoid GNUshit, maintain
a rational attitude toward Microsoft, etc.
(EDIT: this post was modified a zillion times, because I can be very disorganized sometimes, but I eventually decided that I wanted to make it good enough to cross-post on other forums.)