OpenBSD
I installed OpenBSD last night. Not a first, but it’s the first time I actually spent effort trying to learn how to get things working.
It seems OpenBSD is quite lacking in the UTF-8 department, and also in the translations department. It’s list of locales (/etc/locales/ or something like that) didn’t have most locales in UTF-8 (i.e. there was an en_US.UTF-8 but no en_GB.UTF-8 or ja_JP.UTF-8). And when I mounted my media drive it didn’t display the names (yes, many of my files and directories contain non-US-ASCII characters) correctly in most places (although some GUI tools got it right, mlterm looked like it was using some other encoding).
I did, however, like it very much. I like the way everything is switched off until you switch it on (unlike Debian, which adds things to /etc/rc?.d willy-nilly).
It also comes with things a lot of base distributions are missing, like ssh (which Debian doesn’t come with for some reason) and lynx. If I’ve just installed a distribution for the first time and I don’t have a Web browser how am I expected to find the documentation which tells me how to install a package for a Web browser? I also like the way it comes with Apache in the base install (and how it can be turned on by editing one line). It’s not a lot of binary, and it means if the machine’s to be a Web server (a very common use case for an OS like OpenBSD) it doesn’t require much setting-up.
As a desktop (what I want, at least on this machine at the moment), it didn’t fare too well, as I like a system which can be up fairly functional in an hour or so with the latest version of certain applications (since things like Gajim, ROX-Filer, and Xfce weren’t too good not so long ago - and I don’t like compiling my own stuff - although Gentoo is fine, because it grabs dependancies).
As a server I think it would be fairly good to work with, although I expect the UTF-8 problem might be problematic (at least to me - I use no other encoding and tend to ditch software that can’t be set to use UTF-8 by default). I’m sure to any experienced user there’s a simple solution, but I couldn’t find anything with a quick Google search.
OpenBSD = +++. If I’d managed to get UTF-8 to work, it might have been rated as +++++++ or even FTW. I’ll research it though.