I think it depends greatly on your use case. Mine has been OpenBSD on a bare-metal server, VPS, old laptop (N3540), and underpowered desktop (x7425E). For day-to-day desktop work, even the old laptop keeps up and the underpowered desktop feels snappy at most times.
You might think that OpenBSD on its own incurs a massive performance hit (at least I used to think that), but when I compared it against Alpine Linux on that underpowered desktop it was really not different enough for say video playback/encoding that I could tell much of a difference. Yes, OpenBSD is slower, but I would guess the margin is maybe 5% which is certainly not what I expected. Maybe for other workloads it is very different from my experience, but I am a user and not expert benchmarker so I can not give a better answer.
Where there is a difference is when you have multiple jobs hitting syscalls hard. Say, heavy disk access. On Linux this will not cause your cursor to freeze momentarily, delay the launch of other programs, or your audio playback to halt or distort, but on OpenBSD this happens even on something as powerful as a 3950X when I tried it. I am not enough of a kernel hacker to tell exactly what the issue is, but I suspect it is that OpenBSD's kernel has very limited preemption. This is not great, but it is not enough of an annoyance to deter me from using it on some of my desktops.
Other than the above, the experience of maintaining a server or desktop with OpenBSD is amazing. Top-notch documentation, everything is a flag in rc.conf.local or text file in /etc, and the base system is capable enough to run all the services I need and for my other uses ports has me covered. Plus, it gets better with every release. 7.7 comes with massive improvements to the USB video subsystem that has fixed every device I had that previously did not work with OpenBSD.
My annual donations will keep coming, but I wish I was rich enough to fund or good enough of a kernel hacker to work on whatever it is that the kernel needs to address the last few snags and I would happily run OpenBSD on every box I have.
You might think that OpenBSD on its own incurs a massive performance hit (at least I used to think that), but when I compared it against Alpine Linux on that underpowered desktop it was really not different enough for say video playback/encoding that I could tell much of a difference. Yes, OpenBSD is slower, but I would guess the margin is maybe 5% which is certainly not what I expected. Maybe for other workloads it is very different from my experience, but I am a user and not expert benchmarker so I can not give a better answer.
Where there is a difference is when you have multiple jobs hitting syscalls hard. Say, heavy disk access. On Linux this will not cause your cursor to freeze momentarily, delay the launch of other programs, or your audio playback to halt or distort, but on OpenBSD this happens even on something as powerful as a 3950X when I tried it. I am not enough of a kernel hacker to tell exactly what the issue is, but I suspect it is that OpenBSD's kernel has very limited preemption. This is not great, but it is not enough of an annoyance to deter me from using it on some of my desktops.
Other than the above, the experience of maintaining a server or desktop with OpenBSD is amazing. Top-notch documentation, everything is a flag in rc.conf.local or text file in /etc, and the base system is capable enough to run all the services I need and for my other uses ports has me covered. Plus, it gets better with every release. 7.7 comes with massive improvements to the USB video subsystem that has fixed every device I had that previously did not work with OpenBSD.
My annual donations will keep coming, but I wish I was rich enough to fund or good enough of a kernel hacker to work on whatever it is that the kernel needs to address the last few snags and I would happily run OpenBSD on every box I have.