If you're interested in trying out BSD on the desktop vs in a server or through some other BSD-based appliance distro (projects like OPNsense or TrueNAS Core wh

If you're interested in trying out BSD on the desktop vs in a server or through some other BSD-based appliance distro (projects like OPNsense or TrueNAS Core which build on BSD but are mostly intended to be used from a Web GUI) you could take a look at GhostBSD [0]. It's a vastly more polished and desktop focused project that takes off many of the sharp edges of a plain vanilla FreeBSD install. Of course, "more polished" for BSD is still going to be a ways behind Linux these days. There just isn't the same level of hardware support, eyeballs and companies working on it. But it's not 00s era either, it's a pleasant functional experience. If one wants to test the waters a bit in an easier way it's an option worth considering. Ars did a decent little initial experience run through [1] a few years back (though since it is under active development a lot has changed since then) you could check out if interested. As demoed there it's very viable in a light VM so one doesn't even need to dedicate any hardware for a first try. That review also lists some of the other more GUI focused BSD distributions left out there. Anyway, there are some options to ease into it more. I find some of the ancient FreeBSD-isms a bit grating on occasion but overall I'm glad it's part of the mix. ---- 0: https://ghostbsd.org/ https://ghostbsd.org/ 1: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/not-actually-linux-distro-review-deux-ghostbsd/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/not-actually-linux-d...