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Comment by Apocryphon | Hacker News Reader

Just trying to identify what's the Mint/Ubuntu/Zorin/elementary OS equivalent of BSD in terms of ease of use.

The point is that they're not really comparable. Mint/Ubuntu/etc all ship the same Linux kernel, that's why they're called distros. They're different distributions (distros) of the same software (Linux kernel, etc).

The different BSDs aren't distros, they are different kernels that are developed in parallel. Obviously there's shared history there, and some shared userspace, but FreeBSD and OpenBSD aren't just two different BSD distros of largely the same software.

I'd say that if you're trying to find the Mint/Ubuntu/Zorin/elementary of BSD, then it's not really for you. The BSD ecosystem isn't really driven by ease of use, today they're more interested in various niches - hardware appliances, OS research, etc.

If you're curious about what unix is and what a bsd is, I would recommend netbsd or openbsd in a vm.

Well of course they're not trying to replace macOS, for instance, but when an OS gets big enough to have offshoots and different front-ends and desktop environments and so forth, one would assume there are at least experimental attempts emphasizing ease of use, just like there are experiments to develop offshoots for any other purpose, from power users to pen testers. At least like, someone's toy project on GitHub or SourceForge. I just assumed BSD was big and well-established enough to have such efforts.

Besides GhostBSD, looks like there's also Lumina, MidnightBSD, FuryBSD, and TrueOS/Project Trident?

https://lumina-desktop.org

http://www.midnightbsd.org

https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=furybsd

https://itsfoss.com/trueos-bsd-review/

They're definitely trying to replace MacOS: https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/

> experimental attempts emphasizing ease of use

yes, i would define them very much as experimental

Sure, but that does mean that there are BSD projects driven by ease of use as their niche.

I installed NetBSD in a VM last week, and it felt like I was using Linux from 20 years ago.

Is that a bad thing?

For some things I felt a bit nostalgic, but for other things, not so much.

It was a neat experience and worth doing.

Probably still FreeBSD, even though I'd claim NetBSD's documentation is a tad better. (And Ubuntu really does not stand out as beginner-friendly compared to e.g. openSUSE)

openSUSE is a gem.

I can't even fathom how many times I've made a mess from my impulses to tidy up my system and it just manages to "fix itself".

There are also a lot of neat things, like being able to use multiple versions of GCC side by side. Not every distro behaves well on that regard.

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