Great pick! This is a great operating system. But not for the faint of heart.
I have been daily driving it for nearly three years now. Here is what I found has been helpful for me.
Official Documentation
So, first things first. You should read the docs. OpenBSD has a very RTFM attitude (as in: Read The Fucking Manual). You will only get out what you put in. Put on that learning cap, and get hacking s0n!
- Install Guide - Each platform that OpenBSD supports has a plaintext install guide. This is the first place you should go for a new install. It is in the
/<Release>/<Platform>/INSTALL.<Platform>file in the mirrors. Check the CDN mirror to find your architecture. - The F.A.Q. - This is the Holy Grail of documentation. It serves as the main guide for all things OpenBSD. From ports, to managing Virtual Machines with
vmm(4) - The Manpages - These are a bit less intuitive. But good to use to reference config file formats, or command-line switches. you can access them with
man(1)orapropos(1). They also are the primary mode of documentation for OpenBSD. The assumption is that you read the relevant man page before asking for support. - afterboot(8) - after install, type
man 8 afterbootin your shell prompt to see what steps you should take on your fresh install.
Small Tips
I recommend that you hook your machine up to ethernet for the install. Why? Lots of Wifi drivers need firmware and as per licensing law they can’t distribute that so it gets downloaded from the mirrors during the install process. If you have a network set up for the install, the system will also attempt to download and install them during the first boot too. The drm firmware for your graphics hardware, cpu, & virtualization hardware also likely need firmware too.
Use a SSD.
OpenBSD’s filesystem, ffs, can be pretty slow. From my experience, it clocks somewhere slightly behind ext4 on linux. Use a SSD and thank me later. Its not unusable, but its a noticeable hit in performance if you're used to something like XFS on linux.
Conclusion
Happy Hacking!