Vaguely related, FreeBSD has a tool to generate custom small footprint variants, called nanobsd - https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=nanobsd&sektion=8&...

• paffdragon

  today at 5:52 PM

  Thanks for mentioning this, I am just beginning my FreeBSD journey and wanted to setup a small pre-boot env with mfsBSD[1], didn't know FreeBSD has a tool already to do something like that.

  [1]: https://github.com/mmatuska/mfsbsd

Do the same for X! Well.. a layered addition maybe. I've always felt it's bringing swags of stuff which never gets used. A non accelerated fb or vesa binding would do for a lot of things.

I liked this piece a lot. Nice write up of how you explored the space.

• vermaden

  today at 10:14 PM

  Thank You :)

      > Do the same for X!
  

  I kinda did ... but for RAM usage and not disk space.

  Details here:

  - https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2026/01/18/200-mb-ram-freebsd...

In there an “accessible” BSD on the level of live CD Linux distros, like Debian? Hey you can play around but also install it if you want right here right now with a DE

• dgxyz

  today at 10:42 PM

  I tried them all. Surprisingly macOS + homebrew feels more like FreeBSD with a layer of something else over the top that runs Photoshop. I am happy with that mid-ground.

  I ran FreeBSD on actual hardware doing mail/web from about 1997-2014 then quit trying.

• vermaden

  today at 7:30 PM

  GhostBSD is FreeBSD with GUI installer and MATE by default - it also comes with XFCE flavor.

  Highly recommended.

  • nazgulsenpai

    today at 9:08 PM

    I haven't checked out GhostBSD's site in a while, and saw they had a version with a DE called "Gershwin" I've never heard of before. It looks really cool for those Apple folk among us https://github.com/gershwin-desktop/gershwin-desktop

    • Forgeties79

      today at 9:35 PM

      Oh wow I love that look! Might have to check this out as well.

  • haunter

    today at 8:32 PM

    Thanks exactly what I was looking for

• seanw444

  today at 6:53 PM

  I'd be interested to know too. I haven't seen one, but that's probably because the majority of the BSD demographic is for servers and such, which are mostly all headless.

• paulryanrogers

  today at 7:01 PM

  Ghost BSD?

  • JPLeRouzic

    today at 7:23 PM

    I switched from Devuan (Debian without SystemD) to GhostBSD a few weeks ago. Until now it seems a very pleasant travel, even bringing back nice memories of Unix in the 1990 while using all the modern tools.

    • Zambyte

      today at 8:23 PM

      I suspect English is not your first language based on your profile and I'd like to give a tip: "until now" implies that what follows is no longer true, due to a recent event that changed it. "So far" is probably closer to what you wanted, which expresses that it's still true, but based on limited time / experience.

• today at 6:59 PM

> Also keep in mind that You have entire static FreeBSD Rescue System available under /rescue dir.

If you have ZFS with boot environments, how valuable is that?

• vermaden

  today at 7:29 PM

  I always like to have options - with /rescue you have statically linked bectl(8) and zpool(8) and zfs(8) commands - which help to manage ZFS and ZFS Boot Environments.

• cperciva

  today at 8:48 PM

  You can access /rescue without rebooting, for one thing.

Wait until you run `pkg upgrade` and it takes several times the 150MiB...

• vermaden

  today at 7:31 PM

  Please read entire article (or at least skim read it) because I also cover that part :)