FreeBSD is a fast, secure, modern Unix-like operating system with a fantastic community, great documentation, and powerful technologies like ZFS and LLVM. It’s my operating system of choice for everything from my i7-2600k desktop to my home router to my ARM plug computer jukebox. Though famed for its uptime in the datacenter the same OS is just as suited to desktop or laptop computing with a little work. Why use FreeBSD? Maybe I’m just getting old, but it’s nice to use an operating system that didn’t spawn a billion-dollar anti-malware industry through frequent security failings, where you can choose the interface you like and reasonably expect it to stay that way instead of being forced into the design fad du jour, where you don’t have to argue about the init system being replaced two times in the same decade, and whose key organizations don’t collectively kowtow to Microsoft when convenient.

I’ve used many operating systems and have yet to find one more consistent and cohesive yet as well-supported as the BSD family, and FreeBSD is the one with the biggest community and most available drivers for things like graphics cards. “FreeBSD on the server, Linux on the desktop” is an oft-seen sentiment among some FreeBSD enthusiasts, and it’s sort of understandable considering the conservative out-of-the-box FreeBSD installation. Despite that, FreeBSD is just a few settings away from being an easy, powerful Desktop OS rivaling Linux, complete with the same software ecosystem available through the Ports collection. Unlike Linux where everything including the kernel is a package, FreeBSD is developed in a single source tree and released on a set schedule — twice a year — as a complete operating system on top of which you can install third-party software. The Release Engineering page tracks the release history and schedule. Two major branches see releases in parallel, and major branches tend to live for two years (four minor versions) after their x.0 release.

This guide attempts to show users with various hardware configurations the best way to configure a usable modern workstation running FreeBSD based on my own experience with Emi, my FreeBSD workstation. There are projects such as TrueOS and GhostBSD that can give you a good out-of-the-box desktop FreeBSD experience, but I find them disconnected from the underlying operating systems because they dump you into KDE or XFCE and attempt to hide as much of FreeBSD as possible behind graphical configuration. That’s not a bad thing, and I’m glad those projects exist, but this guide gets there in the other direction. You will install FreeBSD, learn how it works, and configure it into a great desktop. Compare this guide to something like Linux From Scratch or a Gentoo installation and you’ll see what a breeze this really is. The Getting FreeBSD page has links to ISOs for the six tier 1 architectures. This guide focuses on amd64/i386 PCs though is broadly applicable to them all.

The ISOs are available in bootonly, CD, DVD, and memstick. 1GB USB drive and dd the newest memstick image to it. The larger DVD images are available complete with Ports distribution files for those doing fully-offline installations. Boot the chosen installation media via whatever means your computer can (EFI boot menu, BIOS setting, fallback) and get ready to install. FreeBSD will boot to bsdinstall and offer to Install, load an interactive rescue shell, or just boot normally off the installation disk. Choose Install, choose the keyboard mapping appropriate for your computer, and enter a hostname for your machine. When asked to choose system components I recommend selecting all of them. Internet connection isn’t working, and system src is needed for some Ports to build and install. On the next screen, Partitioning, select either the Auto (ZFS) option or the Auto (UFS) option. UFS is the traditional Unix file system and is usable on any machine. It is fragile in the case of power loss or crashes unless journaled.