[chrissmithuk]

Similar story. Signed up to post this :)

In 2009, our development team lost a whole 10 hours to a degraded Linux mdadm RAID1 that wouldn't rebuild due to an obscure error after a digger severed our power and internet connection. No internet access as power came up first so no access to online help. mdadm is buggy. Documentation sucks. Error messages suck. Only recourse was a full restore from tape which took a long time. This was the last straw after over a decade of dealing with this crap from network dropouts, laziness, half-arsed features, distro wars, politics and churn.

Some previous Unix experience in the late 1990s with OpenBSD on an old SparcStation 5 (the only thing that would run on that machine nicely) jumped into my mind on the way home. It had that warm, fuzzy, well-engineered, well-documented feeling about it, like an old HP RPN calculator. Got home, downloaded it and installed it on my laptop, replacing Ubuntu.

4 years down the line: one happy person with the same laptop running 5.4 still with that warm, fuzzy, well-engineered, well-documented feeling.

Not once has it let me down. Not for a minute in the 4000+ hours I've been using it. It just works.