Core strengths
My BSD is better than yours.
Before you earmark a machine for BSD, you should know the strengths of the candidates that are on offer and what makes them suitable as a desktop operating system. DragonFly BSD is a popular fork of FreeBSD that’s now developed in a direction of its own and is considered one of the main BSD distros. The OS has diverged significantly from FreeBSD and is popular for its implementation of virtual kernels and a feature-rich 64-bit filesystem called HAMMER, which has built-in mirroring, instant crash recovery and historic access functionality. It’s also popular for its Sun ZFS-like features but with a friendlier licence.
MidnightBSD also owes its origin to FreeBSD and in its decade-old existence has imported features from DragonFly BSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD. Its goal is to create a system that appeals to both beginners as well as more experienced BSD users. The OS targets 32-bit and 64-bit computers and supports all hardware supported in FreeBSD 9.1. MidnightBSD has also created its own custom package management system known as mports.
NetBSD is without a doubt the most portable BSD that you can use on virtually all kinds of hardware: from a toaster to the International Space Station (ISS). NetBSD’s rock-solid foundation and portability were a big draw for NASA, which used it for a project on the ISS. Thanks to its extensive hardware support there’s also a good chance you can run a NetBSDbased desktop on the oldest computer in your attic.
GhostBSD and TrueOS are often pitted against each other because of the pair’s similarities: They are both BSDs derived from FreeBSD and provide a graphical desktop straight out-of-the-box. GhostBSD is built with C, Python, GTK and BourneShell (sh) while TrueOS is built with C++ and Qt. However one key difference is that GhostBSD is distributed as both 32-bit and 64-bit while TrueOS is 64-bit only. GhostBSD also has minimal requirements compared to TrueOS which needs at least 4GB of RAM since it uses ZFS. To offset this hardware requirement, TrueOS users benefit from its support for newer Intel graphics chipsets and hardware. It also outscores its peers with unique features such as PersonaCrypt, which allows for the encryption of a user’s home directory and carrying it to other TrueOS machines along with GELI full disk encryption.