Ease of installation
What does it take to get them up and running?
When you do finally decide to try a BSD-based desktop, you’ll be well advised to test the OS inside the comforts of a virtual machine before subjecting it to a physical disk. DragonFly BSD has a menu-driven text-based installer. Like the others, you can install it without much effort on a machine where it’s the sole OS on the hard disk. In fact, we’d advise you to not install any of these OSes on a multiboot computer without first getting comfortable with their jargon. You can use the default options to successfully install any of these BSDs onto the disk. However, they all offer the flexibility to enable you to make informed choices especially if you’re familiar with the BSD filesystems.
Similarly, installing MidnightBSD is a laborious task unless you are planning to let it take over the entire disk. The OS calls on a post-installation script to earmark services to start at boot and to create users.
NetBSD uses an ncurses- based, menu-driven installer that’s fairly verbose compared to the others. Just like the others, the partitioning steps are particularly cumbersome to navigate. At the end of the install, you’ll be asked to configure some essential aspects of the installation. Also, while the full installation scheme installs the basic X window system components, it doesn’t include a graphical desktop.
Once again, TrueOS and GhostBSD stand apart in that they both employ graphical installers. Like their peers, both offer automated partitioning schemes assuming you’d want them to take over the entire disk. GhostBSD’s GBI installer uses the pc-sysinstall back-end developed by TrueOS.