FreeBSD

Implementations

FreeBSD is widely used as a building block for other commercial and open-source operating systems. The projects below are of particular interest.

TrueNAS is network attached storage (NAS) software that shares and protects data from modern-day threats like ransomware and malware. TrueNAS makes it easy for users and client devices to access shared data through virtually any sharing protocol.
GhostBSD is derived from FreeBSD, and uses the GTK environment to provide a beautiful look and a comfortable experience on a modern BSD platform offering a natural and native UNIX®-like work environment.
- https://www.xda-developers.com/i-tried-using-a-freebsd-distro-as-my-daily-driver-in-2025/
MidnightBSD was forked from FreeBSD 6.1 beta, and continues to use parts of more recent FreeBSD code bases. Developed with desktop users in mind, MidnightBSD includes everything that you would expect for your daily tasks: mail, web browsing, word processing, gaming, and much more.
NomadBSD is a persistent live system for USB flash drives, based on FreeBSD. Together with automatic hardware detection and setup, it is configured to be used as a desktop system that works out of the box, but can also be used for data recovery, for educational purposes, or to test FreeBSD hardware compatibility.
pfSense is a FreeBSD-based customized distribution tailored for use as a firewall and router.

Articles

Three Ways to Try FreeBSD In Under Five Minutes:

on an ARM MacBook under QEMU (brew install qemu, then Download the FreeBSD VM image, then expand the image (

xz -dk FreeBSD-14.2-RELEASE-arm64-aarch64-zfs.raw.xz; qemu-img resize -f raw FreeBSD-14.2-RELEASE-arm64-aarch64-zfs.raw +10G

)); run the image with the following script:

```
!/bin/sh -x

default_disk="FreeBSD-14.2-RELEASE-arm64-aarch64-zfs.raw"
disk="${1:-$default_disk}"

qemu-system-aarch64 \
-m 4096M -M virt,accel=hvf \
-cpu cortex-a72 \
-bios edk2-aarch64-code.fd \
-rtc base=localtime,clock=rt \
-nographic \
-serial mon:stdio \
-device qemu-xhci \
-device usb-kbd \
-device usb-tablet \
-device virtio-net,netdev=net0 \
-netdev user,id=net0,hostfwd=tcp::2222-:22,hostfwd=tcp::3389-:3389 \
-drive if=virtio,file=${disk},format=raw,cache=writethrough
```

using Amazon Lightsail
using Amazon EC2

All three suggest using this Ansible playbook to get some stuff bootstrapped.

Tags: platform os bsd

Last modified 23 August 2025

FreeBSD

An operating system used to power modern servers, desktops, and embedded platforms.

Implementations

Articles