Elegant and chic: GhostBSD 25.02 with macOS-like "Gershwin" desktop

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The development team around Eric Turgeon and Nahuel Sanchez, who are partly based in Canada, have completed the GhostBSD 25.02 live system. The current version (exact name GhostBSD 25.02-R14.3-p2) is based on the FreeBSD 14.3 release and therefore includes all the new features and improvements from FreeBSD 14.3, particularly in the area of WLAN. GhostBSD is a pre-configured FreeBSD that can be easily installed on a disk from the live system and immediately provides a running and up-to-date FreeBSD system. It is pre-configured with either the MATE, Xfce or the new Gershwin desktops.

Gershwin Desktop Environment: unfinished, but promising

GhostBSD normally installs a MATE or Xfce desktop. With GhostBSD 25.02, however, a new variant has been added with the Gershwin Desktop Environment (runs on the Xfce4 window manager). Hosted by the GhostBSD team, it is intended to support the development of Gershwin together with application development in Objective-C in the Cocoa style. The Gershwin Desktop Environment is a modular, lightweight desktop for Unix-like systems that is conceptually based on the classic NeXTSTEP interface. It is based on an Objective-C architecture with a GNUstep substructure. Perhaps this is a little reminiscent of the development philosophy of NeXT and early macOS versions (Mac OS, Mac OS X, OS X). The typical Gershwin components – including the dock, window manager, panel and configuration editor – are independent developments, but follow a common API model in the style of Cocoa/AppKit.

Gershwin can be run under FreeBSD, Linux and Illumos and is suitable for systems with reduced graphical complexity – or for purists who have not forgotten Cocoa. But: Gershwin is still in its infancy, tools such as "Software Station" do not work. Gershwin is not yet practical as a "daily driver"; instead, GhostBSD is better used with the MATE or Xfce desktop, depending on taste.

Better GPU and WLAN support

GhostBSD integrates the Intel, AMD or Nvidia GPU used during installation and installs the corresponding drivers. This has to be done manually with native FreeBSD. With GhostBSD 25.02, the list of available devices has been updated and now also includes AMD Radeon HD 8790M, Radeon HD 8240 Kabini and the Nvidia RTX-4000/5000 series, for example.

Especially those who install GhostBSD 25.02 on a modern notebook will be pleased about the significantly improved support for the various WLAN chips through additional firmware packages.

ZFS now without restriction and /tmp always deleted at startup

GhostBSD 25.02 now also follows the perhaps more modern approach of deleting the /tmp directory at startup by default. FreeBSD does not do this by default, you have to activate it during installation in the security settings or later via clear_tmp_enable="YES".

With the previous version 25.01, GhostBSD added an optimization for systems with little RAM by limiting the Adaptive Replacement Cache (ARC, the ZFS cache in RAM). The vfs.zfs.arc.max setting was apparently carried over to the later GhostBSD 25.01 installation and limited the speed of ZFS. This modification was therefore removed again in GhostBSD 15.02. Other minor improvements include the sound system, which can now switch correctly between audio systems with more than two channels. A bug in the ZFS boot environments has been fixed where old unneeded environments were not deleted as desired.

Graphical frontend for pkg(8): GhostBSD Software Station

The developers have also improved the "Software Station" package management system, which is much easier to use than the original pkg(8) from FreeBSD, especially for mouse-oriented beginners, but is ultimately only a graphical front end for it. The translations into simplified Chinese, Russian and Brazilian-Portuguese in particular have been improved.

GhostBSD 25.02 is available as a live ISO with MATE, Xfce or Gershwin desktop for free download on the project page and can therefore be safely tested on existing systems. The developers recommend a modern computer with 8 GB RAM and at least 15 GB disk space for a permanent installation. The extensive changelog shows all the new features in detail.

(mma)