One Month on GhostBSD!

zephyrus

Time flies. About one month ago, I installed GhostBSD on a DELL Precision workstation. An hour earlier to installing it, I wanted to install Ubuntu which, if I remember correctly, had just been released. While Ubuntu booted, the installer spun. Next. Then, I installed openSUSE Leap 16. I didn't like the new direction they are going and the installer not respecting my choices, was the end of that experiment.

Then I searched for some odd OS I could play with as my last PC was meant to play around with and no longer for work. Downloaded GhostBSD XFCE, remembered how i used to use XFCE until about 2018ish and liked what I saw. So, I installed. My thinking was that after a few hours, I'd pack up the PC and put it away for a rainy day.

A few days ago, I have removed homebrew from my new Mac Studio because I prefer GhostBSD for programming and web design. Runs like a clockwork!

Robin

It's been one year since I first booted up GhostBSD (Xfce).

The only troubles I've had have been sound issues (easily resolved) and applications are slow to load, which is no big deal. While I have learned a little here and there, my experience has been trouble-free enough so far that haven't needed to "learn BSD" the way I had to "learn Linux" when I first used it.

Ethics is what brought me here. I wanted to get politics and corporate creep out of computing. GhostBSD fits the bill for that, and I'm willing to put up with slow load times and stuff just for the sake of keeping it "clean," unsullied (as much as possible anyway) by crazy ideological agendas.

zephyrus

Robin haven't needed to "learn BSD" the way I had to "learn Linux" when I first used it

Hi Robin,
You are right. The learning curve, for those who come from Linux, is indeed a small one.

When I moved from Linux to macOS, things weren't smooth but thankfully, GhostBSD came out of nowhere which meant that I can keep doing things as I know them. Now let's hope that they find an XFCE guru soon. 🙂

brianthehughes

Well over a year on GhostBSD now…

Started with a box to run a web application at work, but wanted a desktop for local testing. Wanted FreeBSD alignment/upstream. That machine has been running since Aug 2024.

Fast forward through an array of low end 0-$20 boxes to a couple of HP Z series towers as my daily homelab supporting systems.

HP Z4 - 8 core, 160gb ram, 512gb & 1tb nvme

8-12 VMs
primary everything desktop
GhostBSD MATE

HP Z240 - 8 core, 32 gb ram, 512gb nvme,3x1tb zraid SATA

Nginx, Jenkins, plex media server
GhostBSD XFCE

zephyrus

brianthehughes

Hey Brian,
I don't know how you manage that many VMs! When I realized what it means to "deliver work on time", I bought more computers for redundancy. Eventually, I discovered virtualization and just about when it was all set up perfectly, kernel regressions ruined everything.

I went trough a very frustrating time BECAUSE I bought DELL computers which, so I expected, would give me the least issues. For many years, that was true but after kernel 6.12 and Dell's latest BIOS updates, things started to crack.

So, I bought a Mac Studio, moved everything to macOS (huge job) and while I was impressed by the hardware, the user UX was never as good as Gnome. Then, out of nowhere came GhostBSD and about 10 days in, I knew that I had found my new dev setup. Another 10 days of actually working, I was confident enough to delete homebrew and everything it installed.

Working on GhostBSD is a joy. These days, I am a bit amused by Backup Station. NO Linux distro, by default, has anything close to it. TimeShift needs to be configured and sadly, is mandatory because sooner or later, something will happen. So far, GhostBSD had 3 updates and all of them went well.

A few days ago, I installed GhostBSD as a VM and now, I am contemplating to not just write tutorials, but also make videos that would be helpful for Linux users to understand that there is something else out there. 🙂

P.S. I'll try to be on IRC ₄:30 PM Pacific time.