What is Reddit's opinion of GhostBSD?

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I spent a little while on this same question before I just installed to an extra hard drive. None of the major BSD derivatives (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonflyBSD) have live media with out of the box graphical desktops.

• GhostBSD is based off FreeBSD and has a live medium, but it doesn't keep up with its upstream and I haven't had good experience with it.
• FuguIta is based off OpenBSD and claims to be very similar to a hard drive install, I have not tried it.
• Jibbed is a NetBSD derivative, also says it is very similar to its upstream, and I haven't tried this either.

Your answer depends on your hardware and exactly what you are looking for out of a desktop. If you are looking for something "full featured" I don't think you will be satisfied with any of those options, you will need to install to a hard drive, I would recommend FreeBSD altho others will say PC-BSD.

> which BSD should I use - I like Gnome which I understand is available.

GhostBSD is a preconfigured FreeBSD desktop OS with a GNOME-like (MATE) desktop. Other than that, please list your requirements first. Do you need more (NetBSD) or less (OpenBSD) technical details during installation? Do you want security (OpenBSD) or performance (FreeBSD)? How important is Linux or Wine compatibility (FreeBSD)? Et cetera.

> why will I like BSD over Linux?

No systemd!

Try the dd commands shown here

http://www.ghostbsd.org/11.1_beta1

Make sure the of=/dev/sdX part of the command is the usbdrive, because you will irreversibly change whatever you use for /dev/sdX

More than just FreeBSD with a preconfigured GUI (akin to GhostBSD or the retired TrueOS), NomadBSD is the FreeBSD equivalent of a Linux live disk (i.e. Debian/Ubuntu live disk installers, TAILS, Puppy Linux, etc) but with persistent storage (also achievable with many Linux live disk distros).

You can image NomadBSD to a USB device, and effectively take it to whatever computer you want to boot from (that allows USB booting), and run it on said hardware. Portability is an asset, while USB performance would be a compromise from internally-booting SSD/NVMe devices.

another good contender for a user-friendly BSD is ghostbsd http://www.ghostbsd.org/ it automates install and has a lot of goodies per-installed such as media codecs etc. I have run PCBSD before and I prefer GhostBSD.

here's a good one:

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/

(not really)

i'd go with something cleaner than linux, like ghostbsd. if you don't know unix, then you might as well get closer to the source to begin. i know this won't be a popular opinion, but that's the type of guy i am.

And they say it's not embedded based on OpenRC? In intertet there is information.

Submitted by ericbsd on Wed, 05/02/2018 - 11:44 You might have seen the discussion about this subject on the GhostBSD forums. So yes GhostBSD will release a version in the future with TrueOS as the base system. We have not yet decided if we will continue releasing a version with FreeBSD as the base operating system. For some time we have discussed problems that GhostBSD is facing in the long run. Some of our community have asked for improvements including a better rc such as OpenRC. We all have thought of OpenRC, but for a small team, it is a hard thing to do on our own as a project. After a lot of discussions, we decided to join TrueOS effort. Since then it is now making more sense as both of the main developers of GhostBSD work for iXsystems. TrueOS is becoming more mature as an appliance building platform making it appealing for the goal of creating reproducible builds of GhostBSD. Security-enhancing features such as LibreSSL integration and improved service management with OpenRC are just a few examples of some the improvements the switch will bring. http://www.ghostbsd.org/GhostBSD_is_switching_its_system_base

by ericbsd » Fri May 25, 2018 10:07 am TrueOS will no longer offer a Desktop, TrueOS is becoming an embedded, system that we can build quality appliances with and systems like GhostBSD and new projects that will emerge of that change. GhostBSD will stay about the same it has always been, but we will have a comfortable way to upgrade from version to version. The significant difference will be the boot time compared to the current release, OpenRC will be in base, Software wise it will be similar to the previous version.

If there are any other Linux users who decide to read this I'd encourage you to check out GhostBSD. It makes use of the FreeBSD userland, and it's still makes it dead easy to create a ZFS partition (doing it manually still alludes me). You can have your fancy tiling window managers (i3, bspwm, etc) or lightweight floating/stacking window managers (XFCE which comes standard in an .iso, Fluxbox, etc).

The only think I can see anyone gripe about is "no gaemz" but you could setup a virtual machine of some Linux distro and play the "gaemz."