Midnight BSD 1.2
His soft spot for lone warriors lures Mayank Sharma to the land of Midnightbsd, but he doesn’t escape completely unscathed.
Mayank Sharma finds himself in the land of Midnightbsd and he doesn’t escape completely unscathed…
Midnightbsd isn’t the only project that’s working to help BSD get to the desktop, but it’s certainly one of the oldest. While it’s only at v1.2, the project has been in development for well over a decade. The project also differs from the other efforts such as Ghostbsd and Trueos in that it isn’t a derivative of FREEBSD but is instead a fork.
Midnightbsd has several customised utilities and infrastructural components, most notably its package manager called
mports. Midnightbsd’s home-brewed package management system works in a similar way to DNF and APT to search, install and upgrade apps. It shares similarities with Freebsd’s ports system and also borrows some ideas from the OPENBSD project. But since the project is essentially a oneman show, the mports collection is fairly limited and bundles some very outdated apps. For instance, the main office suite isn’t Libreoffice but an outdated version of Openoffice 3. Similarly, the version of
Firefox in the mports collection was released in 2015. However, the developer suggests using the Midori browser, which is up to v8.0, released earlier this year.
On the plus side, despite its manpower limitations, we are impressed that the OS supports a number of desktop environments, including Gnome 3, Xfce 4, Lumina and Gnustep in addition to popular window managers such as Enlightenment, ICEWM, Openbox and more. Both KDE and MATE are conspicuously absent.
Step up?
Unfortunately the lack of software isn’t the only issue with the project. Despite its focus on the desktop, the OS isn’t very approachable. On paper, Midnightbsd ships as a Live installable medium, which is a really good option as it helps new users get acquainted with an alien environment. But in reality the option to start the graphical desktop on the Live CD errored out on all of our test machines and also inside Virtualbox. The release notes acknowledge that there are unresolved issues with the Live environment and recommends installing the OS inside Virtualbox before deploying it on bare metal.
Add to it the fact that Midnightbsd uses an ncursesbased installer, and you have further narrowed down the list of potential users. The rudimentary installer isn’t a pain to navigate through, but the partitioning can be laborious unless you plan to let Midnightbsd take over the entire disk. Upon installation, you are brought to a console instead of a graphical desktop. It turns out you have to pull one from the repository, much like Linux distros designed for advanced users that ask you to build the installation from the ground up. The process isn’t convoluted and is documented, but it really hampers Midnightbsd’s chances as a desktop BSD, especially when combined with its other shortcomings.
And there’s more. For a project focused on desktop users, you don’t get much help from documentation. That said, the developer engages with the community via Youtube and is very active on the forums as well.
It’s incredible that the project’s developer is still labouring at the OS and continuing to push out releases. But when it comes to the goal of the project to provide a desktop OS for everyday tasks, you can’t sugar coat the fact that the project is quite some distance from that objective. Given its shortcomings, we can’t recommend Midnightbsd for general consumption.