Comparing the different desktop-oriented variants of FreeBSD, how do they differ? I was originally just going to install GhostBSD as the default newbie “batteries included” flavor but I learned that it requires 8 GB of RAM which while my old ThinkPad has does have, gives me pause about whether or not it has all that many performance benefits over say running a Linux like Pop! OS or elementaryOS. So I’m curious how the lightweight NomadBSD is like for desktop users or the other one that exists but people don’t talk much about.

Please excuse anything wrong in this post feel free to correct me but I'm very new and have been forced into MidnightBSD for a project.

do I need to rehash at all?? I'm following a digital ocean tutorial on FreeBSD hoping this will work. Step 3 is where I'm running into problems. Any Ideas?

Some of you may know that MidnightBSD was named after my cat Midnight. Let me tell you a little about how that came to be.

I started using FreeBSD in 2003. I initially used it on a dedicated server with a provider in San Fransisco. It was the first time I successfuly used FreeBSD. I had used BSDi a little at a previous job and had run NetBSD on a sun sparc system for a bit. I had tried to install FreeBSD on my desktop a few years before but it couldn't handle my scsi cd-rom and ide hard drive combination at the time. ('m guessing around 4.3 or 4.4?) The first version I used was 4.7.

I started dual booting it on my PC so it was easier to test changes on the server before deploying them. Then I got interested in using it as a desktop. I worked on a project to update an existing HFS+ port to FreeBSD 6 current from a 5.x version. I didn't have a backup and lost it when the hard drive failed. That was my first development experience on FreeBSD. I then managed to get the SATA controller working on a nvidia nforce 2 chipset for my amd sempron CPU. I submitted the patch and it was applied! I was jazzed.

I started trying different desktop environments including gnome 2, KDE, windowmaker, and others. I then saw a thread in the FreeBSD mailing lists that was between folks suggesting desktop friendly changes and a lot of pushback. I realized that the community wasn't all ready for BSD on the destkop. So I decided to start my own project. I learned CVS in late 2005 and began working on a patchset in December 2005. I started looking at names and went through a lot. I thought of PC-BSD but the domain had been purchased already (not live yet). I kept looking and came up with some crazy ideas like SharkBSD and TigerBSD. I liked the latter but was worried apple wouldn't be thrilled as Mac OS X tiger was a thing at that point. So I decided to name it after our cat MidnightBSD. The first few logos were all cat designs. I had one that was based on some clip art that was a black cat face with some BSD daemon style horns. I was worried about copyright on that so I made another with midnight's eye. That stuck around for a bit. Then someone contacted me who also happened to be named Lukas (vs Lucas for me) and he designed the current MidnightBSD logo. He incorporated the moon in it because a lot of people didn't get the cat connection.

The first MidnightBSD servers were that old AMD Sempron box and a used dell server I bought for 50 dollars at the western michigan university depot. I started the project in Kalamazoo Michigan and was a student at WMU at the time. I upgraded the sempron to my then dell precision 650 workstation and bought a used Sun ultra 10 box to use for mail/dns. it died on me pretty fast though and I somewhat gave up on the sparc64 port then.

(this gets us through 2006)