Just a post to say I'm happy!

le-zap

I've been a FreeBSD user for many years, but haven't used it (much) on desktops.
Well, I had an Intel Core i7-4770K with an NVIDIA GTX Titan around, and I decided to try out GhostBSD on it.
Works like a charm! Graphics, Sound, WiFi, and all... so I thought I'd drop by to say how pleased I am with it all.
Loads of thanks and best regards to the GhostBSD team!

vimanuelt

le-zap Thank you so much for your kind words and for taking the time to share your experience!

wb7odyfred

Glad you are Happy to have all your devices work, and thank you kindly for reporting back this Great News! We are glad that GhostBSD operating system is validated on your PC hardware. Could you share an Inventory or Catalog of your working hardware? sudo pkg install hw-probe && hw-probe -all -upload
http://bsd-hardware.info or http://linux-hardware.org to view that catalog of your PC devices and the device drivers software.

How long of time did it take you to download, write the http://ghostbsd.org/download .iso file to a USB flash drive stick ( what size stick ? or did you test boot using a Virtual Machine, like Virtual Boxes or Gnome Boxes?) How many minutes or hours for this process to be completed to have a working desktop environment? MATE or XFCE
Again, Happy for your good experience with GhostBSD Desktop. Thank you for your time spent reporting back your good news and a follow up questions, I posed above.

What advertising, website reviews, or other information, caused you to spend the time to start testing ghostbsd.org/download on your PC hardware? http://distrowatch.com has a ghostbsd entry and 100s of other operating systems to chose from, why download and test GhostBSD operating system? I am interested in what advertised feature or use for GhostBSD Desktop operating system, individuals are attracted to use GhostBSD desktop operating system.
Is it 15 minutes to a BSD desktop using a USB flash disk drive stick? (yes, you can use http://ventoy.net to boot GhostBSD.iso file with a 8GB dram memory machine.) Is it the live media mode image of the USB flash disk drive stick? One that you can boot the live media mode , without changing the previously installed software, installing software or changing settings on the previously installed operating system?
Is it rock solid stability of the base FreeBSD operating system that is inside GhostBSD?
Is it the FreeBSD documentation? Is it a use goal of running webservers (like apache or nginx ) or Next Cloud or OwnCloud. Is it the wealth of packaged software and easy of installation using GhostBSD tools like software-station, update-station (creates a boot environment BE snapshot before updating software, so that you might go back to a working system BE before the update, using the BE snapshot feature of the ZFS zettabyte file system?
What features are important to you in a Desktop BSD? UEFI booting? Device Drivers? Wealth of software ( 30,000 packages) available for a quick download and install anywhere in the world? Office applications? Web browsers? Creative tools? Development tools and environment?
I am sure I missed some feature that is important to you. Please comment back. Share your thoughts. others welcome to comment here also.
Fred L. Finster, wb7odyfred at yahoo dot com.
been using GhostBSD since December 2016 glad you are using ghostbsd for your purposes
Future idea: Working on creating a GhostBSD-Arm64 raspberry pi 4B hardware; bootable ghostbsd-arm64 image file. Read at https://ghostbsd-arm64.blogpost.com https://ghostbsdarm64.hopto.org/packages

le-zap

Greetings,

Glad you are Happy to have all your devices work, and thank you kindly for reporting back this Great News! We are glad that GhostBSD operating system is validated on your PC hardware.

Could you share an Inventory or Catalog of your working hardware?

Yes, I just ran hw-probe and uploaded the info.

How long of time did it take you to have a working desktop environment?

I tried a couple of times recently, even tried desktop-installer on a FreeBSD installation, but in the end installing GhostBSD onto a USB key, booting, and then installing onto the main SSD drive just worked like a charm.

MATE or XFCE?

MATE. I had tried the XFCE build last week, but it didn´t catch my older NVIDIA graphics card (GTX TITAN) right away, so I retried with MATE and it worked right off the bat.

What advertising, website reviews, or other information, caused you to start testing ghostbsd?

I've been a FreeBSD user since 1993, but I've not used it much in a desktop environment. I've read about GhostBSD in The Register and Ars Technical, so when I had some hardware lying around, I decided to try it... so far, I've been impressed with the simplicity of installing it.

I'm interested in the ability to run a fast O/S on older hardware and keep it usable. The ability to run Firefox, Thunderbird and some of the useful applications might cause me to actually use GhostBSD for real :-)

Thank you and best regards,
Le Zap

vimanuelt

le-zap Yes, the shortcomings of desktop-installer do push many newcomers toward GhostBSD over FreeBSD. But the desktop issues with FreeBSD go deeper than just the installer. Thankfully, GhostBSD resolves many of these user-facing problems before they even appear. On FreeBSD, I often encounter screen freezes with no keyboard or mouse control, an issue I've never experienced with GhostBSD. Honestly, I’d rather use a Linux desktop than deal with the constant breakage on FreeBSD. If GhostBSD didn’t exist, I wouldn’t be using FreeBSD as a desktop at all.

le-zap

vimanuelt
Granted. Now, I don´t know much yet about all of the additions to FreeBSD that make up GhostBSD, but I am glad it uses FreeBSD as a base, as I've always known it to be a realiable O/S.
Looking forward to learning more about what makes GhostBSD tick and even contributing where I can.

vimanuelt

FreeBSD is raw ore. GhostBSD is the sculpture; shaped by Eric Turgeon and others who saw more than just stone.
The sources reveal the refinements.