What are your thoughts on GhostBSD? reddit / BSD ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Aexas · 2015-08-20 12:14 It sounds like an easier to use version of FreeBSD but it's not talked about much on here. Any opinions? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- phessler · 2015-08-20 12:42 Honestly, I don't see the point. pkg_add mate ---------------------------------------------------------------------- daemonpenguin · 2015-08-20 15:13 I've tried it and, if what you want is a lightweight installation of FreeBSD with the MATE/GNOME2 desktop, then GhostBSD is okay. It has rough edges, but it works okay. However, if I want a desktop flavour of BSD I'm more likely to go with PC-BSD. It has more desktop options, more admin tools, nicer package manager and ZFS built in. PC-BSD is more geared toward admins and workstation jobs while GhostBSD is more for the lightweight, just want to browse the net and check e-mail crowd. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- SolomonKull · 2015-08-20 16:12 Waste of time and resources. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- lua_x_ia · 2015-08-20 17:58 It would be more useful if they spent more effort on their installer and documentation and less on their desktop environment. If you're installing a BSD in this day and age, you're necessarily the type of person who wants to modify their system. It's trying to be a Linux distribution but small Linux distributions work because they can piggyback off of the wealth of documentation and introductory information available from the major players. In other words GhostBSD is a bad introduction to BSD because in the process of installing it and doing all of the "easy" things a user does not end up learning how to really use their system. It would be nice for BSD to be more self-documenting, versus the hours that today must be sunk into reading the handbook, but neither GhostBSD nor PC- BSD really makes much progress towards that goal IMO. (For example, IIRC Gnome/KDE on FreeBSD do some evil stuff to make WiFi work nicely from the desktop. The user never really learns how to deal with this.) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- byuu · 2015-08-20 23:19 Every time I see these "FreeBSD made easy for the desktop!" forks, I can't help but wonder if the authors ever bothered to talk to FreeBSD devs about just integrating their desktop improvements into the official distro. If so, I'd love to hear why they were shot down. Because there's a whole lot of really easy wins. Like including consolekit.pkla when you install Xfce, so that the shutdown/restart buttons work. Or shipping with a fontconfig file so that Helvetica is actually anti-aliased out of the box. Or creating a .xinitrc file for the first desktop environment you install. Maybe even ask the user if they want these things during the package installs. It's good to know how to do this stuff yourself, but there's no reason to force a new user to learn it all right upfront. Still, I don't mind it that much. I don't want to be dependent on a smaller team's fork, and have to trust them *as well* that nothing shady has been added to the system (eg Ubuntu and its desktop search spyware), so I learned to do this stuff and just use the official FreeBSD. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- earlof711 · 2015-08-20 23:45 I tried to use FreeBSD as a desktop workstation and in terms of performance with Firefox, and not having libvirtd, I ended up replacing it this week. I still love FreeBSD on the server but for the desktop I have other preferences. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- strngsvlmstng96 · 2015-08-21 12:03 How do you learn all that stuff about BSD? I installed Arch the old- fashioned way and I never remember having to worry about all those minor nuances, especially just to get a software button to work. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- daemonpenguin · 2015-08-21 13:01 I have tried to have that conversation with the FreeBSD devs. They aren't interested in making FreeBSD easier for desktop use. Things like integrating parts, graphical installers or even friendly package managers seem to fly in the face of the FreeBSD way. They're even against meta-packages that would make installing desktops or service stacks easier. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- byuu · 2015-08-21 18:36 For the most part, "pkg install foo" prints out a lot of what's needed as friendly notes. What's particularly silly is installing the xfce package not only tells you about consolekit.pkla, but gives you the full example file. I can't help but wonder, "why not just make the file for me, then?", and assume it has something to do with some logic of strict separation of package files and install locations. For most of the remaining things, I just Google search what my problem was, and will usually find someone else's tutorial on how they fixed things (like the fontconfig trick.) Only once or twice did I have to solve problems entirely on my own. The worst was libvte-based terminals (gnome-terminal, xfce4-terminal) will sporadically close immediately after you open them. Sometimes it'll do it 10x in a row, sometimes not once in a full week. I traced it back to a bug somewhere between libvte and FreeBSD's /bin/sh. Only thing that works 100% of the time for me is to change my shell to bash. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- byuu · 2015-08-21 18:43 Oh, I see. That's really disappointing to hear, then =( I get that it's intended as a server OS, but if someone's giving you a free and easy fix to improve your software, then it's fairly childish to just dismiss it. Those users could turn into contributors that improve your server-side stuff, too. Although I'm actually happy *not* to have a graphical installer. Maybe if we had a modern VESA replacement that worked on all cards. Text installer is also more useful for installing over TTY. I guess having the option for both would be nice, but I can see why they wouldn't want to maintain that, since that would necessarily have to be part of the base, unlike smarter packages. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- strngsvlmstng96 · 2015-08-21 19:58 Oh OK. Looks like BSD's documentation is really good AND really accessible. I heard someone say that a *BSD's documentation is much better than Linux's docs. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- lovelybac0n · 2015-10-01 19:37 Just passing through here as a arch linux user curious about bds, but that cannot be true. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- strngsvlmstng96 · 2015-10-01 20:16 Why would you say that? I'm pretty sure the fact that BSD is a cohesive OS makes it much easier to document.