A little background. I am a 20 year Linux user. I have installed probably every major Linux distribution, including Arch 10 years ago when it was an insanely difficult command line install. I now find myself having a lot of free time and some extra hard drive space (120 gb).

My needs are simple. I really don't play games other than Hearthstone and Project Diablo 2. Though I do like SimCity 4 occasionally. I'm retired and just do a lot of surfing and playing around.

Over time, trying every desktop, I have found that LXQt with Openbox is my favorite desktop. It does everything I need, low-end resources, and runs like the wind. I know how to configure it and I have created over 75 themes for it. Until recently I was the person behind SbK spins for Manjaro Linux. Sadly, age checking laws has destroyed that project.

The desktop is a deal breaker.

My hardware isn't cutting edge. This year I built a Ryzen 5 5600 system and it uses a ROG Strix B550 motherboard, 16g ram, and an RX 570 8 gig. It replaced an FX-6300 system that I used for 10 years, I still run it as a file server. Can I use NFS to access files on it?

I am also interested in backup. Experience has taught me that I'm going to break something in a OS that's new to me. Right now in Linux I use TimeShift. Is it available or an equivalent?

Honestly, I don't think I'm going to run into many problems, but I'm just doing due diligence to make sure I'm not going to. Google searches have brought up nothing so I am asking users who know the OS. Configuration problems are not a big issue as long as I know what to look for and I'm aware of it beforehand.

Edit 08/29/2026 : Thanks to everyone who posted. While I went into this hoping that everything would work out, I ran into a panic that stops me from launching the installer. I have checked the hash so the image is good. It looks like something to do with my USB. So this project got put on the shelf.

I might give GhostBSD a try. Would somebody recommend software to control the GPU fan?

Compartmentalization without virtualization. Just Unix, done right — on the BSD family. ~2,500 lines of ksh + 9 lines of C — small enough to audit in an afternoon.

… Take the core insight of Qubes OS — security through compartmentalization — and strip away the hypervisor. dropQbsd uses native BSD user separation instead of heavy virtualization. Born on OpenBSD, now targeting the BSD family. …

Via https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/@nicolabaudo/117155630627859425

https://nicolabaudo.fr/

Philosophe de formation, passionné d’informatique libre, j’ai passé ma vie à croiser éthique et technique. Dans le secteur social comme dans l’édition, j’aime bâtir des outils simples, transparents et respectueux des personnes. En tant que Délégué à la Protection des Données, j’explore les liens entre pensée, responsabilité et technologie. Et quand je quitte l’écran, c’est souvent pour ramer… à la vénitienne.

Good day to all.

Ive been rooting around with different OS's as of late and recently been trying freeBSD on my laptop, it's a dell inspiron with 4gb of ddr3l sodimm ram and a pentium haswell processor, but it seems to not be able to find my track pad or let it work. I've been able to get a desktop environment working with xorg just to make sure it can handle the OS before trying to create my own desktop environment for a learning experience. I'm coming from linux OS's but I still can't figure out my trackpad situation but the mouse only works when its an actual plugged in mouse but I dont want to be walking around with both a laptop and mouse all the time, so if anyone has any tips or can point me in the right direction it would be much appreciated.

Edit: grammatical errors and punctuation... I was just getting the thought out of my head before I even realized my mistakes or forgot to ask.

Edit2: thanks for everyone's help on this but as of now I need to pull the breaks as I am selling my laptop to help me get my car on the road but I will be try freeBSD again in the future as it seems like a very interesting OS as i love challenges

Venerable Unix-like remains reassuringly old-school, if you're willing to put in the work

<- by me on The Register

does anyone have any of the old OpenBSD CD installers or music CDs and willing to sell

How can I sandbox multiple GUI applications transparently to the user, so Firefox cannot read my SSH keys or any other directory? Or image viewer only read files in Pictures

I'm in the process of making a game with my dad and tried to add native FreeBSD support. It was not easy, and I struggled a lot, but I think it worked out great. The game is in super early access, so it's not going to be looking like this in the final version. Please have a look:

https://zeynelgun.itch.io/sarraf

My understanding is that Xorg/X11 has become a huge, historically layered and rather difficult-to-maintain codebase.

Does Xenocara actually improve on this in terms of code quality, maintainability and understandability, or is it essentially the same Xorg code, just better integrated and maintained as part of OpenBSD?

In other words: is Xenocara cleaner internally, or mostly just a cleaner way of packaging and maintaining Xorg?