GhostBSD Project

Simplicity, security, flexibility. With the gnome desktop and a number of tools to make the user's life easier, this distribution provides a complete, customizable and powerful desktop. The package manager is extremely easy to use, the installation is easier than on any other *nix distro, configuration - almost never needed and with all that it uses nothing from original FreeBSD's usability and power. The best choice for a BSD desktop.

Easy install, though it had a few quirks when I ran it. Once running you get gnome 2.32 and NOT gnome 3, so a GIGANTIC YAY for THAT one (I do _NOT_ want gnome 3!). I'm a long time BSD and gnome user, and I was happy to see the setup work this well out of the box. A few missing things (kernel source, ports collection) required me to grab them from the corresponding FreeBSD release. Unfortunately 'custom partitions' was broken and the install b0rked shortly after starting, with NO WARNING AT ALL THAT IT HAD FAILED, and a prompt to reboot as if it had actually worked. Additionally, UFS journaling is NOT enabled by default (which SHOULD be the case for 'use entire disk'). Also I had to run tzsetup to update my time zone, as it was incorrectly set to 'Africa time' (AST). It seems to run about as well as the beta installer for FreeBSD 9, so I'd give it a 'B' for not breaking using the default settings. An experienced FreeBSD user could easily fix anything that is broken. An inexperienced user may have a few serious questions.

Tried the Live DVD... nothing but error message after error message. Finally got to the Desktop... no dock, no icons, no nothing -- stopped dead in the water. This is on a 4-5 year old laptop, with anything but cutting-edge hardware. Current Linux distros recognize the laptop's hardware flawlessly (to be expected). The fact that GhostBSD failed so spectacularly was a very unpleasant surprise. Needless to say, I'll be looking elsewhere for something to run on my main box.