Well after dealing with NixOS (missing nixos directory and other problems after it was created manually) and being the impatient person that I am right now, I’m thinking of changing away from Linux on my server. As you would have read in my sadly unfinished and deleted post which was due too Mac OS X freezing up (not to mention that I accidentally erased over half this post a this morning with no hope of retrieving those lost words): 1) How easy or hard is it to acquire and burn to installation image as well as installing the software? Is like trying to acquire and install Solaris 10 (6 months ago) or OpenBSD 4.0? Or is it like trying to acquire and install PCLinuxOS 2007? 2) How easy or hard is it going to be to maintain the OS once its installed? Will it be like Linux From Scratch where you must find some way of manually upgrading the packages and software or will it be like Ubuntu with a simple command or a click of the mouse? 3) How easy or hard will it be to lock down the OS once its installed? Will it be like Arch Linux and many other Linux as well as FreeBSD where much work has to be done to harden the system (this excludes the server oriented Linux) or will it be like OpenBSD and NetBSD where they are already locked down and thus must have certain services, ports and daemons activated? Am I biased against Linux and FreeBSD in general? No, but I want something that is secure, and easier to maintain than some (Linux From Scratch, NixOS) and so I’ve decided to use OpenBSD.