Good morning,
This thread is more geared toward helping another user here who is eager to use a secure BSD OS over a Linux distro.
I scanned the forum up and down and I couldn’t find any mention of GhostBSD at all? I was surprised! https://ghostbsd.org/
Documentation also looks like it’s well laid out and in-depth: Welcome to GhostBSD’s documentation portal! — GhostBSD documentation
It seems something that deserves attention in this community!
Isn’t BSD too esoteric, even for Linux desktop users? Isn’t BSD a little difficult to use or would you say its as easy to install and set up as Fedora is? I haven’t looked into BSD too much myself but that’s the feeling I have from what I know about it.
If you know more, a community wiki post with a guide on how to install, set up, and ensure all the basic things are working (wifi, bluetooth, etc) would be great if you can make time and put in that effort. I’d love to try more Linux distros even though I have set up my home with Fedora.
I occasionally check up on GhostBSD and it has been making good progress, but the issue of hardware and application compatibility users struggle with on Linux is much worse on *BSD, so I doubt it’ll reach similar levels of usability in the near future.
However, poor usability alone isn’t a good reason to not make any mention of an operating system since Privacy Guides already recommends QubesOS which is widely known for being difficult. There are security reasons to not mention GhostBSD which can be inferred from the Desktop/PC criteria and the Linux Overview.
- Receives regular software and kernel updates.
- Doesn’t freeze regular releases for more than 1 year.
- We recommend against “Long Term Support” or “stable” distro releases for desktop usage.
I’m not familiar enough with GhostBSD’s release cycle and don’t have the time to research it, but this could be disqualifying.
- Avoids X11, as its last major release was more than a decade ago.
AFAIK MATE on *BSD does not yet have stable support for Wayland, let alone defaulting to Wayland and securing privileged Wayland protocols. Requiring X11 is definitely disqualifying.
- Supports full-disk encryption during installation.
From my memory, GhostBSD doesn’t do this which would be disqualifying, but I could be wrong.
- Supports a wide variety of hardware.
Unless there’s been some massive recent progress in the FreeBSD world I’m unaware of, GhostBSD probably struggles on a lot of hardware. But so does QubesOS so it wouldn’t be fair for this to be disqualifying on it’s own. Unlike the rest, this point isn’t security-related.
Preference towards larger projects.
- Maintaining an operating system is a major challenge, and smaller projects have a tendency to make more avoidable mistakes, or delay critical updates (or worse, disappear entirely). We lean towards projects which will likely be around 10 years from now (whether that’s due to corporate backing or very significant community support), and away from projects which are hand-built or have a small number of maintainers.
Again, I’m not super familiar with GhostBSD but given how niche it is, I assume it could be disqualified for this reason. By the time (if ever) they address all the other issues mentioned, they probably would’ve grown and established a good track record. To be fair, I’m not sure if Kicksecure, Whonix and Secureblue have what I’d consider “significant community backing” (unlike Fedora, openSUSE, or Arch) so again it might be unfair for this to be disqualifying on its own.
QubesOS has the same compatibility as Fedora. It just uses more resources, so wouldn’t recommend using anything with less than 8GBs. Having even more RAM (16 GBs) would provide a better experience.
Unfortunately not, QubesOS is a Xen distribution and its system requirements are much stricter than Linux distributions like Fedora. Most computers have moderate or major issues with running QubesOS as documented in their hardware compatibility list reviews. There is a very short list of community-recommended computers which largely consists of outdated laptops and unique (and expensive) purpose-built laptops specifically made for QubesOS compatibility.
I unironically prefer Qubes usability to Linux, to be fair.
Interesting, why is that?