Review: GhostBSD 24.10.1
Quoting: DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD. —
Evaluating GhostBSD is, for me, a tricky experience. On the one hand, I'd like to look at GhostBSD in a near-vacuum, examining what it adds to (or removes from) its parent, FreeBSD. GhostBSD is FreeBSD at its core, using a mostly-stable development branch which adds additional hardware support without sacrificing much in terms of stability. This gives us better wireless support and more up to date video drivers. GhostBSD does a nice job of taking the solid FreeBSD base and adding conveniences such as a live desktop environment, graphical system installer, a graphical package manager, and pre-configured MATE (or Xfce) desktop. In short, it takes a lot of work out of the experience of setting up FreeBSD as a desktop operating system. Apart from limiting users from installing GhostBSD on UFS volumes, I failed to find any limitations or downsides.
On the other hand, GhostBSD doesn't exist in a vacuum, it lives in a world with other platforms, like Linux distributions. While GhostBSD does a a great job in turning FreeBSD into an install-and-go desktop system, one can't help but notice little issues GhostBSD has that usually do not trouble Linux users. There were little hardware glitches, for example, with my touchpad and volume controls. Nothing show-stopping, but certainly a source of friction.
The package manager, Software Station, works, but it feels primitive compared to other software centres in the open source community. Likewise, while tools such as Backup Station are certainly helpful, they fall short compared to openSUSE's Btrfs snapshot manager. Maybe it's not a fair comparison, GhostBSD is younger and has fewer resources than SUSE, but I couldn't help but notice these little differences.
I was also disappointed that one of the highlights from the release announcement, the ability to stream Netflix, didn't work. This is one of those unfortunate situations where, since I don't stream much content, I probably wouldn't have thought to test the feature or noticed it didn't work if the project hadn't drawn attention to it.
Would I recommend GhostBSD? Possibly, depending on what the user needs. If a person is looking to jump into the BSD community, try something new, or if they already like FreeBSD and want to run it as a desktop operating system - then yes, I'd definitely recommend GhostBSD. It is, without a doubt, the most beginner-friendly, easiest to use, complete desktop-oriented platform I have used in the BSD sphere. The project represents an impressive effort to turn the usually-server-focused FreeBSD into a plug-n-play desktop operating system.