I would suggest openbsd. it is not user friendly in the "hide all complexity from the user" sense but more like "this system is simple enough to understand yet full featured enough to work in".

The way I like to explain it is. if you like the unix operating environment, It is hard to do better than openbsd for a desktop system. If you are expecting something more like a mac or windows environment, there are options, but I suspect you would be better off with linux(or mac or windows for that matter).

Openbsd is comfortable in a way that is hard to explain. While largely this is just what what a person is used to. with obsd I have a good feel on how it works and goes together. something I never really felt with linux. however you do lose a lot of the network effect advantages that linux has.

> What's the most casual user-friendly distro of *BSD out there? GhostBSD?

MacOS?

Ymmv, but I found macos might be friendly to the user, but only because it's getting to get money out of them. User-(bad)friendly.

They're derivatives with their own kernel each, so in that regard the question does not make much sense. Due to its large amount of binary packages though, I'd say FreeBSD it is out of the big three.

Would it be fair to say the Arch Linux users will feel right at home with FreeBSD? They seem to have similar concepts.

Pre-systemd Arch felt very much like another BSD. At least about as close to one as a Linux could.

These days it’s a lot more Linux-y though.

Just trying to identify what's the Mint/Ubuntu/Zorin/elementary OS equivalent of BSD in terms of ease of use.

The point is that they're not really comparable. Mint/Ubuntu/etc all ship the same Linux kernel, that's why they're called distros. They're different distributions (distros) of the same software (Linux kernel, etc).

The different BSDs aren't distros, they are different kernels that are developed in parallel. Obviously there's shared history there, and some shared userspace, but FreeBSD and OpenBSD aren't just two different BSD distros of largely the same software.

I'd say that if you're trying to find the Mint/Ubuntu/Zorin/elementary of BSD, then it's not really for you. The BSD ecosystem isn't really driven by ease of use, today they're more interested in various niches - hardware appliances, OS research, etc.

If you're curious about what unix is and what a bsd is, I would recommend netbsd or openbsd in a vm.

Well of course they're not trying to replace macOS, for instance, but when an OS gets big enough to have offshoots and different front-ends and desktop environments and so forth, one would assume there are at least experimental attempts emphasizing ease of use, just like there are experiments to develop offshoots for any other purpose, from power users to pen testers. At least like, someone's toy project on GitHub or SourceForge. I just assumed BSD was big and well-established enough to have such efforts.

Besides GhostBSD, looks like there's also Lumina, MidnightBSD, FuryBSD, and TrueOS/Project Trident?

https://lumina-desktop.org

http://www.midnightbsd.org

https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=furybsd

https://itsfoss.com/trueos-bsd-review/

They're definitely trying to replace MacOS: https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/

> experimental attempts emphasizing ease of use

yes, i would define them very much as experimental

Sure, but that does mean that there are BSD projects driven by ease of use as their niche.

I installed NetBSD in a VM last week, and it felt like I was using Linux from 20 years ago.

Is that a bad thing?

For some things I felt a bit nostalgic, but for other things, not so much.

It was a neat experience and worth doing.

Probably still FreeBSD, even though I'd claim NetBSD's documentation is a tad better. (And Ubuntu really does not stand out as beginner-friendly compared to e.g. openSUSE)

openSUSE is a gem.

I can't even fathom how many times I've made a mess from my impulses to tidy up my system and it just manages to "fix itself".

There are also a lot of neat things, like being able to use multiple versions of GCC side by side. Not every distro behaves well on that regard.

You can try ravynOS or helloSystem. They are FreeBSD distros made with desktop users and ease of use in mind.

OpenBSD is in fact already pretty much user-friendly. Installer is simple, althought an a textual interface. It comes with preinstalled X server and window managers fvwm and cwm. In the installer you can choose Xenodm to start automatically after boot, it would be your display manager and you can just simply login through it to fvwm. From here you can edit .xsession and choose any window manager you installed or pre-installed cwm.