The plan for my BSD Journey series of posts is to explore the use of BSD, and primarily FreeBSD, as a desktop system. While I work in IT and am comfortable wiping my systems and installing all sorts of operating systems, that’s not something most people do. There are certainly some technical hurdles for your regular desktop user that would need to be overcome if they are not used to installing operating systems, but I’m putting that to the side. Let’s assume the user has a technical friend that can get them set up and they just went a system to do some common things. I’ll explore some more technical things like virtualisation as well.

For my own perspective, I am primarily a macOS, iOS, and iPadOS user at home. I’m perfectly happy in this world and take advantage of many of the services that Apple provides like photos in iCloud and Music. This isn’t a series looking at migrating away from such an environment, though I may look at what kind of options are out there if someone did want to move away (e.g. Nextcloud and similar things). I virtualise various operating systems. That includes Windows, and I also make use of CrossOver to run some things like games. I play about with other OSes too. The quality of software in macOS and Windows is generally high. There’s usually a few stand out options for a particular category of software. I’ll personally be more familiar with the Apple side of things.

Typical use cases I’d like to explore include email, browsing, music, podcasts, keeping up with RSS feeds, text editing, Twitter, games, virtualisation, emulation for retro gaming, etc. Therefore, in most cases I’ll be interested in finding good quality desktop applications. I’ll also look out for web apps or services that might fill in if native software is lacking. Terminal-based apps will also be of interest and I know there is some cool stuff out there. For more advanced users, they could live in the terminal alone and I’ll check that side of things out. This isn’t something a typical desktop user would want though, so the aim is to find that good desktop app that works the way most people would expect.

This is very much a fun side project for me. I’ve never really had a blog before, so that’s also new to me as I go down this journey. If one person finds this interesting, I’ll be happy enough. My family are my priority and spending time with my children always comes first. I’m in no rush to push out blog posts or stick to any specific schedule. Things will just appear as and when I get time to do them.

Let’s see where this takes us! ?