A New Year’s Eve resolution about BSD from one FOSS Force writer inspires a BSD‑flavored response from another.
Sometimes things change drastically while you’re not paying attention and by the time you notice, that area is a whole new ballgame.
Take desktop BSD, for example. The last time I paid it any mind, it was still a big thing — sort of Linux’s smaller but older sister. Practically every Linux user I new had either tried BSD, or were planning on giving it a try when the right time arrived.
For some reason — and without cause — I still figured that status quo remained the same, without thinking that nine years down the road, nothing stays the same.
Last January I wrote an article on GhostBSDCon, an online conference focused on desktop BSD. It never occurred to me as I wrote the article that the BSD landscape might be drastically different now from how I remembered it. The same would also be true as I prepared Larry Cafiero’s review of GhostBSD for publication. As I edited, I caught myself wondering whatever happened to PC-BSD, however, forgetting that about four years ago I’d mentioned its demise in writing.
I’m not alone. On Wednesday Jack Wallen listed “give more love to BSD” as one of his New Year’s resolutions.
“For years, I’ve ignored the BSDs… all of them,” he wrote. “The only explanation I have is that they aren’t Linux, and Linux is my main beat as a writer. I have, on the rare occasion, reviewed a BSD here and there, but beyond that, not much else. I’ve not written about BSD news, BSD tutorials, or BSD opinion pieces.”
Through the Past, Darkly
Back before Covid, when I was flying willy-nilly back and forth across the continent to attend Linux and open source conferences, desktop BSD was still more of a part of the open source desktop users’ world than it is today. It stood in a netherworld, with one foot firmly in the Unix camp, because despite of what it wasn’t, it was 100% bone fide Unix — and the other in the Linux, which despite its aspirations was only a “Unix-like” operating system.
It had a place at about every Linux-focused event I attended, that included BSD booths with volunteers handing out installation CDs and talking up BSD on the desktop. This included the only event where FOSS Force actually had a booth — SouthEast LinuxFest 2016 — where PC-BSD had the booth next to ours, squeezed against the wall in a hallway at the Sheraton Charlotte Airport Hotel in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Joshua Smith, a long‑time PC‑BSD contributor and community advocate, was one of the people handing out CDs, demonstrating PS-BSD in action. He was also showing off the operating system’s new Lumina Desktop, which was all the rage at the time, but which has now not seen a new release since 2021. Some BSDs still make the DE available, however, as do some Linux distros.
Later in 2016, PC-BSD changed its name to TrueOS and adopted a rolling release model. In 2018, the project dropped the desktop — including its Lumina DE — to focus on on server and enterprise. After that, two TrueOS developers — Ken Moore and J.T. Pennington — picked up True’s discarded desktop pieces to Project Trident. Eventually, Trident quit being a BSD and rebased on Void Linux, before shutting down entirely in 2021.
To my mind, all of this kinda makes BSD the Rodney Dangerfield of open source operating systems. If the example predates you, he’s a 20th century comedian who “couldn’t get any respect.”
BSD in the Second Quarter of the 21st Century
From what I’ve learned in the last couple of months from reading FOSS Force — and from the bit of research I’ve done for this article — desktop BSD is certainly occupies a smaller bit of open source space than it did nine years ago when I spent a couple of days rubbing elbows with the folks at PC-BSD. Although this automatically makes desktop BSD a bit less vital than it was, from a technical viewpoint, desktop BSD is ironically much improved.
Back in the days after Crunchbang Linux folded up shop, Cafiero — who was then known as Larry the Chrunchbang guy — spent some time investigating the possibility of making BSD his goto operating system. At one point during that period, he confided in me that BSD had a long way to go to catch up with Linux, which was something I’d already determined from poking around and seeing what people had to say online.
In his November review of GhostBSD something like ten years later, that no longer seemed to be the case. The operating system definitely wasn’t Linux — “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore,” he said — but other than that, there was no looking down on its capabilities.
“The truth is that GhostBSD performed as well as any Linux distro I’ve tried over the past several months,” he wrote. “In several cases, it performed better.”
In today’s BSD ecosphere, GhostBSD is the primary BSD project focused on the desktop — BSD’s contender for a mainstream desktop operating system, if you will. There are smaller, more niche projects such as MidnightBSD and NomadBSD, but GhostBSD is the main contender.
These days, most BSD developers are concentrating on BSD’s place outside of consumer place, primarily to fill architectural needs of enterprise. The largest project, FreeBSD put’s its place almost entirely in the enterprise filling a variety of roles, from servers to embedded system, although it remains the base for GhostBSD. Number two, OpenBSD positions itself similarly, but with a focus on security, so you’ll be more likely to find it driving firewalls, routers, VPN gateways, security‑sensitive servers and the like.
That doesn’t mean there’s not much interest in desktop BSD, however. On Wednesday, after I posted a link to Wallen’s column that included the BSD resolution on Mastodon, user @motang@fosstodon.org commented, “That’s awesome, I look forward to more BSD coverage. Will it be done on FOSS Force?”
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
Be First to Comment