[talk] Project Trident vs. GhostBSD

[Brian Reynolds]

Charles Sprickman wrote:
> 
> My very brief Googling suggests that 'Project Trident' and
> 'GhostBSD' are the two FreeBSD-based desktop options out there.

Although recently I've been using a MacOS laptop at home, I ran a
FreeBSD desktop using packages (or packages from a local poudriere
server) at work for many years.

Now that contractor work at my house has died down, and my wired
network is pretty much done, I'm about to build a "new" (old hardware)
desktop using FreeBSD and binary packages.

Getting X up and running by following the instructions in the FreeBSD
Handbook isn't that big a deal.  The only issues I foresee are the
Intel graphics (my last machine predated good support for them), and
possibly getting olvwm working.

At this point I expect the Intel graphics support to be pretty good,
and I'm using old enough hardware (wikipedia tells me I have a Haswell
i5 with HD Graphics 4600) that I shouldn't have to deal with a cutting
edge driver.  If necessary, I can go get a small (the case is SFF),
cheap discrete graphics card.  I'd be sure to pick one with good
FreeBSD driver support.

I last used slim (login manager) with some lightweight desktop
(xfce?).  I'm not a fan of desktops, but I also haven't run olvwm on
anything except Solaris.  I'll have to convert my start-up files from
Open Windows to either xinit or xsession.  This also shouldn't be a
problem, but I'll have to dig through my old archives to find my
preferred start-up files.

I played with PC-BSD quite a while ago, but I didn't see much
advantage compared to just running FreeBSD.  The whole
PC-BSD=>TrueOS=>GhostBSD,Trident thing hasn't left me with much
confidence in their stability.

> 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'

I've run Virtualbox from ports/pkg on a FreeBSD host.  Usually it's to
try out some software temporarily.  I've used various Linux distros,
the *BSDs, and Minix as guest hosts.  I haven't run MS Windows.  I
never had a problem with it.

-- 
Brian Reynolds -- reynolds at panix.com
"Long ago, it was the way of my people to travel to the Moon.  My people
travelled to the Moon in a ship called 'Apollo.' I tell the story of Apollo
in the hope that some day, my people will again travel to the Moon." P. Alway