A company helps bring OpenBSD to corporate desktops (yes, I said DESKTOPS)

A very interesting article in Undeadly — the OpenBSD Journal tells the story of m:tier, a London consultancy that works with Fortune 500 companies to equip them with OpenBSD firewalls, servers and desktops.

For such a short article, there are about three good ideas per sentence for just about any OpenBSD user:

• They deploy GNOME with LibreOffice and allow users to automount and encrypt USB drives
  
• They set up automatic backups for /home directories
  
• Puppet takes care of system maintenance
  
• Updates are done with signed packages (which they create)
  
• Snapshot-style desktop backup with backintime
  
• Server backup with bacula

I can totally see this working, especially as you scale up to dozens, hundreds or thousands of desktops. Full system upgrades can be done over the local network. Admins can watch ports and create packages between releases for users when updates are available (and have those updates installed via scripts).

In my view, OpenBSD is both forward-looking and conservative at the same time. Change is constant yet incremental (no huge surprises), the "bones" of the system are extremely solid, port/package quality is generally very high, and everything is locked down in the default.

I've said it before: Somebody way smarter than I am should do this as an OpenBSD distribution optimized for the desktop. Like PC-BSD. But with OpenBSD.