On Thu, 8 Feb 2018 13:41:20 -0800
> Does the difference boil down to one's > definition of free software, and then compliance with that definition? There is a huge difference. Arch is at the whim of Linux which is far behind even the Windows kernel in mitigations (which is far behind OpenBSD) because it doesn't really care about security but only uptime and OpenBSD base is also a very tight and secure implementation that beats putting Arch packages together hands down. If you care more about uptime than secure uptime then Arch may be a good choice though in my experience a number of years ago were that their updates were unreliable and I knew I could do a better job myself. That has never happened on OpenBSD. So perhaps another distro even, in that case!
