My BSD machine is a home built system using a ten-year-old Asus M2N-MX mobo, a socket AM2 Athlon 64 processor, 250GB/2GB, an nVidia GeForce 210 video card, GBD 10.3, and MATE. This afternoon, I found a leftover 2 GB DDR2 stick in my RAM box, and put it in the system. Although System Monitor shows it only using 827 MB of RAM, I'm surprised at how much noticeably snappier it seems with 4 GB than with 2. I know that Apple's partly-BSD-based OSX really, really likes RAM; is this a BSD characteristic in general? Just wondering.

Late reply?
Oh, you can't compare the current versions of macOS with any BSD, even though macOS uses components from the Darwin project which in turn is based on FreeBSD, the projects have strayed so far apart that the only thing left are the names in the history books.

I personally use both macOS on a brand new $3000++ MacBook Pro and FreeBSD with XFCE on an old Lenovo L series, cheap laptop that had a price tag pretty accurately ar 1/10 of the MacBook. around $300. It has 4 GB of RAM, but on day-to day stuff, like writing and compiling code, surfing the web, even watching full resolution videos on an 55" 4K TV using a DisplayPort cable, the Lenovo is snappy and fast, and I never get annoyed over its performance!

That's pretty wild. So, wouldn't worry about BSD derivatives getting "tainted" the same way macOS has gotten.
The reason why I'm joining this forum / community is to test out installing GhostBSD on the Lenovo, and on another Lenovo (a touch more powerful than the old L series).

Until now I've steered clear of the "Desktop BSDs" as I didn't see the point when it is so easy to get a regular FreeBSD up and running with a window manager / server and a desktop environment like XFCE. I've used XFCE for many years, and in some ways I prefer it over most other desktop environments, commercial or not.

I actually taught OSX at a local technical college for a while, and did some digging into mach kernels and bsd stacks. I agree with you that OSX is not all it's cracked up to be; my favorite flavor was OSX 10.4 on an old Power Mac. Without iTunes, I really have no reason to run Macs any more. I have had trouble using bsd with music download sites, which is why I still have other OS's. My older bsd mother board died, and I'm now running Ghost on an ASUS F1A75-M with an AMD8-3870 CPU, 6 GB of RAM, and an SSD. It still boots in less than 60 seconds, and for most purposes, it's great.