Been using BSD stuff for literally decades (SunOS 1.4.x early '90s) - and in 1999 had a customer whose servers were all NetBSD (they used them for managing digital video storage)… Used FreeBSD (and sometimes OpenBSD) on and off - and of course my home NAS runs FreeBSD (FreeNAS - been using it over 10 years now) - and also supported m0n0wall and pfSense firewalls running FreeBSD (and I ran a pfSense firewall/router at home for a few months too). Occasionally tried out desktop “flavours” (like DragonFly)…
Couldn’t get TrueOS to boot on one of my Lenovo laptops (Thinkpad W500)… anyway - yesterday at work, between tasks, took a look at FreeBSD running in a VM (virtualbox) and was pleasantly surprised, so I checked out GhostBSD desktop, which runs Mate… pretty nice…
So last night I installed GhostBSD on the W500 - wow! Sure it’s slightly “beefed up” from a standard circa 2011/2012 W500, 8 GB RAM and 256 GB SSD (I did have to disable the discrete PCIe ATI/AMD GPU to get it to boot)…
I recently took a look at Mate (Ubuntu Mate) and kinda hated it 'cause I couldn’t figure out how to move the window control widgets to the left (something I liked from Mac - and got used to in Unity) - but it was piece of cake in Mate running on GhostBSD.
Bit of learning (e.g. there’s no systemd or init runlevels - so kinda tricky to figure out how to get sshd to run) curve, but I like it…
Anyway - the W500 has a lovely huge 15" 1920x1280 screen (i.e. 4:3) - and I used it to do some after hours work (basically a full screen terminal window with 4 tmux panes) last night - and it was great… those old school Thinkpad keyboards have been unsurpassed - I miss them…
— edit —
Probably won’t be a daily driver, as things like Chrome or Chromium are not trivial to install - but - I can always use it as an Xterminal and run GUI apps like Chrome from Linux machines (tunnel over ssh).