You do have to buy more powerful hardware than you otherwise would. I find it worth it to run code I can more easily understand. I agree on Debian as well. My router and laptop are OpenBSD but most vms on my proxmox are Debian.
Agreed. I run my OpenBSD firewall on my odroid h4 - it's relatively cheap and plenty powerful to route gigabit+. I prefer pf and the simplicity of OpenBSD over Debian for such a purpose-built application. For my other "home servers" I simply run Debian as I believe it to be one of the more sane Linux choices for a server-type application.
