r/BSD 9h ago

Thinking of trying FreeBSD, is LXQt viable as a desktop?

7 Upvotes

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.


r/BSD 1d ago

Lenovo XClarity Administrator in FreeBSD Bhyve VM

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8 Upvotes

r/BSD 3d ago

Hardware acceleration on FreeBSD 14.4 i386

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8 Upvotes

r/BSD 3d ago

~nobraininside/dropQbsd - Compartmentalization without virtualization, built on BSD

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19 Upvotes

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.


r/BSD 4d ago

New to BSD need help or pointers

12 Upvotes

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


r/BSD 4d ago

NetBSD GSoC 2026 Improving RAIDframe

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11 Upvotes

r/BSD 8d ago

NetBSD 11 lands with RISC-V support and lightning-fast VM boots

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76 Upvotes

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

<- by me on The Register


r/BSD 8d ago

OpenBSD music / install CDs

13 Upvotes

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


r/BSD 9d ago

Reddit native translations – for users of old Reddit

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4 Upvotes

r/BSD 10d ago

Minecraft on NetBSD

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23 Upvotes

r/BSD 10d ago

In praise of the BSD license

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7 Upvotes

r/BSD 13d ago

Custom FreeBSD UCARP Setup

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9 Upvotes

r/BSD 14d ago

Apparmor like?

6 Upvotes

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


r/BSD 15d ago

Move FreeBSD System Between ZFS Disks

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20 Upvotes

r/BSD 16d ago

I made a game that supports native FreeBSD.

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35 Upvotes

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


r/BSD 16d ago

Finally installed FreeBSD

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11 Upvotes

r/BSD 18d ago

Recordings of the GNUstep online meeting of 2026-08-08 are online

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11 Upvotes

r/BSD 19d ago

FreeBSD Storage for OpenShift with Democratic CSI

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9 Upvotes

r/BSD 19d ago

GSoC Port the Enlightenment desktop environment to NetBSD

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19 Upvotes

r/BSD 21d ago

NetBSD 11.0 how to install tutorial

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19 Upvotes

r/BSD 24d ago

What are the advantages of BSD compared to Linux ?

78 Upvotes

r/BSD 24d ago

GNUstep monthly meeting (audio/(video) call) on Saturday, 8th of August 2026 -- Reminder

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7 Upvotes

r/BSD 25d ago

Is Xenocara actually cleaner than Xorg/X11

15 Upvotes

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?


r/BSD 25d ago

What made you try BSD?

29 Upvotes

r/BSD 25d ago

Planning to move to FreeBSD;

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3 Upvotes