Vaguely related, FreeBSD has a tool to generate custom small footprint variants, called nanobsd - https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=nanobsd&sektion=8&...

Thanks for mentioning this, I am just beginning my FreeBSD journey and wanted to setup a small pre-boot env with mfsBSD[1], didn't know FreeBSD has a tool already to do something like that.

[1]: https://github.com/mmatuska/mfsbsd

In there an “accessible” BSD on the level of live CD Linux distros, like Debian? Hey you can play around but also install it if you want right here right now with a DE

GhostBSD is FreeBSD with GUI installer and MATE by default - it also comes with XFCE flavor.

Highly recommended.

I haven't checked out GhostBSD's site in a while, and saw they had a version with a DE called "Gershwin" I've never heard of before. It looks really cool for those Apple folk among us https://github.com/gershwin-desktop/gershwin-desktop

Thanks exactly what I was looking for

I'd be interested to know too. I haven't seen one, but that's probably because the majority of the BSD demographic is for servers and such, which are mostly all headless.

Ghost BSD?

I switched from Devuan (Debian without SystemD) to GhostBSD a few weeks ago. Until now it seems a very pleasant travel, even bringing back nice memories of Unix in the 1990 while using all the modern tools.

I suspect English is not your first language based on your profile and I'd like to give a tip: "until now" implies that what follows is no longer true, due to a recent event that changed it. "So far" is probably closer to what you wanted, which expresses that it's still true, but based on limited time / experience.

> Also keep in mind that You have entire static FreeBSD Rescue System available under /rescue dir.

If you have ZFS with boot environments, how valuable is that?

You can access /rescue without rebooting, for one thing.

I always like to have options - with /rescue you have statically linked bectl(8) and zpool(8) and zfs(8) commands - which help to manage ZFS and ZFS Boot Environments.

Wait until you run `pkg upgrade` and it takes several times the 150MiB...

Please read entire article (or at least skim read it) because I also cover that part :)