My biggest turnoff with OpenBSD is the more complicated package management if you want to have new versions and security updates beyond the versions packaged with the release. As far as I know you either have to stay on the bleeding edge with -current, build packages yourself, or trust a third party (M:Tier) to build for you, who last I checked were behind on firefox builds. I'd love to someday run it on my laptop though.

The best part of OpenBSD (to me), as opposed to say, FreeBSD is that pkg -u only brings in security fixes, instead of unrelated crap I don't want.

When I want new packages, I'll upgrade the operating system. I very much appreciate the stability of packages during a release cycle.

This is very probably because you have

    url: "pkg+http://pkg.freebsd.org/${ABI}/latest",

in your configuration file instead of (say)

    url: "pkg+http://pkg.freebsd.org/${ABI}/release_3",

    url: "pkg+http://pkg.FreeBSD.org/${ABI}/quarterly"

This is the default configuration.

Not originally it wasn't. That was a change in 10.2 .

* https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/a-mini-faq-on-pkg.49694/p...

* https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-ports-announce/2...

It's the default now, and 10.2 was released over three years ago. What exactly is your point?

That your configuring your system to be on these update cycles is very probably why your system is on these update cycles. This should have been abundantly clear.

For firefox at least, I don't think security patches are backported for OpenBSD, nor are newer versions. As the browser is the main way I view remote content, not being fully patched there is important to me.

You can patch the system and update all binaries with two commands:

  doas syspatch
  doas pkg_add -u

As far as I know that will update to the latest packages built for that release, but those are not the latest versions of those packages. OpenBSD doesn't have the resources to rebuild every port as a package for -stable.