I’ve written a lot on here about running FreeBSD on my laptop, but after moving to full-time work from home in March, I wanted a stand-alone desktop system to work from for ergonomics and to free up my laptop to be my portable system since my docking / undocking experience wasn’t great. In the beginning of May I made the trek into the office for a day to exchange some hardware, and one of the things I borrowed was a desktop for home office use. The box was a Dell XPS i7-4790 @3.60Ghz with 16G of RAM, so it was also about twice as powerful as my T450 (not that the T450 isn’t plenty zippy for my usage under FreeBSD)

At work I had been using it as a Windows system to test some software for an old project, but it had been sitting turned off in the corner for a few months before I stopped going into the office in March. First thing upon getting it set up that night in my home office was to install an OS that wouldn’t make me miserable.

My first idea was, of course, to put FreeBSD on it, but I wanted it up and running the same day, and my experience with getting FreeBSD running smoothly on my T450 was that it took a bit of time to get it installed and configured to my liking and everything running smoothly. I briefly installed Void Linux on it, as it was a distribution I had been reading about and was interested in trying it out, but I ran into issues immediately with my SmartCard reader, which I couldn’t quickly resolve, and moved on. I hope to go back to Void Linux one day and either resolve the issue, or gather enough information to file a bug report, but I was looking to have everything ready for work in the morning so I moved on.

I knew everything I needed to use worked under FreeBSD, but didn’t want to take the time to configure it, so I decided to try GhostBSD. GhostBSD’s website claims it as “A simple, elegant desktop BSD Operating System”. GhostBSD seems to consider itself as its own OS “based on FreeBSD”, but I tend to think of it as FreeBSD preconfigured for a good desktop experience. Even ‘uname’ seems to agree with me, and reports the OS as FreeBSD.

I chose the community driven Xfce Desktop environment instead of the standard Mate edition, since I tend to use Xfce/OpenBox everywhere these days. I burned the ISO to a USB drive, booted from it, and installation was smooth. In short order I was booted into the X GUI, and everything seemed to be configured and working out of the box including my nvidia graphics card and ZFS. I spent some time installing packages I knew I would need and copying over configurations and customizations from my laptop, and before I went to bed, had a quick set up that would serve as my ‘work from home’ computer for the forseeable future.

My GhostBSD desktop isn’t quite as customized as my laptop, I left a lot more of the default Xfce stuff the installer had set up for me in place, but almost everything works fine. I’ve had a couple of strange issues with it which I haven’t dug into enough to resolve, but they’re pretty minor:

  • My Xfce theme oddly doesn’t seem to apply to my Panel. It works everywhere else, but the panel usually remains the default colors. A couple of times after a reboot it actually came up correct, but 90% of the times it doesn’t
  • I’ve found an nvidia-settings command that lets me stop screen tearing, but it only works on one or the other monitor, if I run it for both, it doesn’t work
  • USB Hotplug seems tempermental, If I remove a USB device, the USB subsystem sometimes gets angry and stops detecting devices. Even ‘usbconfig’ hangs when run.
  • I did have one ‘hangs on boot up after applying updates’ problem which was quickly fixed by the developers in the next set of updates and which I’ll post a separate post about in the future. Thanks to ZFS and Boot Environments, I was able to keep using my system while waiting for a fix.

In summary, I recommend GhostBSD for anyone who wants a BSD Desktop system and wants it now, with a minimum of twiddling with software configuration and settings.