The first time I used it was for my personal mail &amp; web server.  I did a little research and found OpenBSD&#x27;s reputation for having some of the cleanest code out there, as well as the project&#x27;s focus on security and correctness.  That sounded like a good fit for the application.<p>A year or two later, I bought a netbook so I could unload and process photos from my camera while travelling.  I had no idea what to install on it since I didn&#x27;t really want to spend all the time Gentoo required, and I knew I wouldn&#x27;t be updating the system regularly, which could result in a lot of pain on Gentoo if you ever needed something new.  And I had too many bad experiences with all the other Linux distros I&#x27;d tried.  So, just for the heck of it, I tried OpenBSD.  Ten minutes later I have a working system and GIMP one pkg_add away.<p>As for the desktop.. well, I didn&#x27;t switch from Gentoo directly.  I had been running Debian for a short while.  I can&#x27;t remember why exactly.  Could be that I had a hard drive break and I didn&#x27;t have the time for Gentoo.  Unfortunately Debian had been a pain from the start and one night, in a bad mood I was, for some reason I had to reboot.  Which I couldn&#x27;t, because apparently in some routine round of package updates Debian had messed with the bootloader.  By that time I was just so sick of it, and didn&#x27;t really want to look for yet another distro.  I went to bed, and next morning installed OpenBSD, which had already proven painless so far.