[talk] Project Trident vs. GhostBSD

[Charles Sprickman]

Hi all,

The closest I’ve come to desktop *nix that’s not OS-X for the last decade is occasionally peeking at a random Linux distro in vmware fusion…

I’ve got enough spare junk around to put together a Core2Duo desktop (8GB RAM, Nvidia 7500-series video) with a decent monitor in my workshop area. I have so little desire to learn Linux systemd stuff at this point, so I thought I’d check in to see what happened to PC-BSD (it’s dead, it seems).

My very brief Googling suggests that “Project Trident” and “GhostBSD” are the two FreeBSD-based desktop options out there.

Any feelings on either? I want simple, all binary packages (do NOT want to build Chrome or the latest CLANG on a Core2Duo), and that’s about it. Both seem to offer non-KDE, non-Gnome desktops so they both win there. I think easy and up to date package management that does not require futzing with dependencies too much is way up there too.

I’ll throw this in too, since I spend a fair amount of time in vmware, which open source option for virtualization of windows is preferred these days? I’ll probably wedge a Win 7 VM on there because I’ll at some point need some weird piece of windows-only hobbyist software…

Any advice appreciated!

Thanks,

Charles