In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part II — OpenBSD or Debian?

I've been using OpenBSD 4.2 for a few months now on the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt), and I'm leaving it on the hard drive for now. It does run better with 144 MB of RAM. I may even upgrade the OS to the current version 4.3.

OpenBSD with X is nowhere near as fast as the fastest Linux systems, but the added security and overall quality keeps me using it.

However, I'm considering swapping out the hard drive (to retain my OpenBSD installation) and trying Debian again.

Back when I ran Etch on this laptop, I remember it being slower than Puppy and Damn Small Linux, especially when it came to refreshing the screen. That was with 64MB, and I think Debian deserves another try in 144MB.

I have to gauge how important it is to have a traditional, easily updatable hard-drive installation vs. the live CD environment of Puppy and DSL. In many ways, live CDs are ideal for older machines like this one. The way they mostly run in RAM speeds things up considerably, and "upgrading" is as easy as using a new CD.

I have upgraded OpenBSD from 4.2 to 4.3 on another one of my boxes. It wasn't impossibly hard. Still, it was nowhere near as easy as using apt to upgrade a Debian install, and when it comes to binary-package updates to OpenBSD's stable releases, there aren't any between releases.

My feeling after using OpenBSD for six months is that daily updates a la Debian aren't as necessary as any of us might think, and updating the box every six months is a reasonable solution.

And here I am using Puppy 2.13, which is well over a year old but has nice-looking desktop wallpaper and a bunch of apps that work very well.

Previously:

• In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part I — Puppy or Damn Small Linux
  

Coming up:

• In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part III — Browsers and wireless
  
• In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part IV — Wolvix Cub is surprisingly strong
  
• In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part V — Where I'm headed
  
• In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VI — Younger Puppies
  
• In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VII — Debian with Xfce and Fluxbox calls
  
• In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VIII — Final thoughts (aka "Why?")