20-100 Well, I've tried GhostBSD and was very disappointed. In the same evaluation conditions, it appeared to be even slower than OpenBSD. Furthermore, it was impossible to create an account on their forum and the forum admin has never replied to my email. I'm not the only one in this case, people giving GhostBSD a try occasionally try and find help on FreeBSD forums for the same reasons. :/
Wow, sad to hear GhostBSD is still that far from being what it pledges itself to be, would have never expected that to be the case.
20-100 Having tried the 3 main BSDs recently, I think NetBSD is - by far! - the more appropriate as a base for a desktop OS.
Of course, it requires some post-installation tweaking (e.g. audio), but compared to FreeBSD:
it handles graphics adapter firmware seamlessly
What do you mean practically by handling firmware?
TBH, NetBSD is the one with the most dated drm code (even though it boasts the great advantage of supporting nvidia graphics via nouveau(4)), albeit a major update is said to be in the works. Normally users with recent hardware would rather complain for their GPU not being supported on NetBSD as opposed to Free/OpenBSD. I tell this even as a NetBSD user, for the sake of coherence and completeness. But, hey, glad it worked out so well for you! PS: mind sharing what sort of hardware are you running NetBSD on? 🙂
20-100 X runs much faster
X has no refresh glitches and other strange behaviors
I suspect this to be an issue limited to your machine, possibly a bug in their drm-kmod, as FreeBSD on amd64 would normally perform better (performance has always been a primary goal for the project). This is common knowledge and also aligns with my own experience. In the end, well known companies would be using NetBSD instead of FreeBSD if the opposite were true.
NetBSD, nonetheless, has great performance overall, and has been improving a lot in this regard withing the last few years (and it paid off!). It's particularly suited for older or low-end hardware with limited specs, due to its remarkable lightweight, and I've seen it shining on ARM64 and SGImips.
20-100 Because of FreeBSD's release cycle and support policy, plus the fact it focuses on servers, I doubt they'll be able to overcome their handicap.
Fair statement, I agree with you; a standard FreeBSD installation just feels so much tailored, modeled after and tweaked for, server use. It does take a lot of time to adjust it for desstop. The project, the core team and the foundation, do not appear to care much about desktop either, while the official freebsd-desktop mailing list is dead. I'm under the impression that whenever something good happens in regard on FreeBSD desktop support, it's mostly the results of developers and smaller contributors willing to get the OS running on their hardware and committing their effort in return (like it often happens on BSDs). On the plus side, FreeBSD is often criticized for the fact their developers do not actually using it on desktop, preferring proprietary OSs. I'd like to stress that there's nothing here to blame those people for: nobody should ever feel forced to use an OS for a said purpose if it doesn't cut out for them, nor shall one ever feel guilty for not using FreeBSD on desktop if all they care about is server and all they work on and contribute to is the TCP stack. Contributing to FOSS for free as a spare-time activity is a praiseworthy act of volunteering, anything but taken for granted, and FOSS is no religious cult.
20-100 If such my initiative were welcome, I would be willing to work on NetBSD's installation script, taking inspiration from FreeBSD, Void Linux and Devuan's: they're in text mode (which is essential), but nevertheless make things as easy as possible for the non-expert user.
I have old shell scripts to perform custom installations with encrypted root/swap, or to set up the disk layout for GPT/UEFI and extract the bootstrap code, or to strip down the GENERIC kernel config of unneeded options depending on underlying hardware (have to clean them up and test them on 9.0, but can share), but never actually cared to write any to take care post-install tasks and tweaks (which can indeed turn out tedious at times), hence I would be interested in such a 'configurator', and I'm positive many would benefit from it. As @Jay underlined, you might as well contribute to his os108.org initiative, which is close to where you seem to headed and 2 brains is always better than one 😃. I confess having stolen few bits from Jay's already XD.
That said, I'll be off for a good while, good luck with your project, and take care
