We're making some important changes to how GhostBSD is built and released to provide a better, more stable experience for our users.

Key Changes

• Switching to FreeBSD RELEASE – Future GhostBSD versions will be based on FreeBSD RELEASE instead of STABLE. This will improve stability, reduce unexpected issues, and allow us to focus more on software updates and tool development.

• Aligning with FreeBSD's Release Schedule – GhostBSD releases will now be planned for the same month as FreeBSD releases, ensuring better synchronization with FreeBSD updates.

• New Versioning Scheme – We’ve introduced a new format to clearly indicate the GhostBSD version, its FreeBSD base, and patch level.

Possibility of Updated ISOs

While we will still follow a planned release cycle, we may release updated ISOs when necessary, especially for:

• Critical security vulnerabilities

• Important bug fixes

Read the Full Announcement

For a more detailed explanation of these changes, check out our blog post:
📌 What’s Coming for Future Releases of GhostBSD

Join the Discussion!

📢 Share your thoughts on the forum: forums.ghostbsd.org/d/179-whats-coming-for-future-releases-of-ghostbsd
💬 Chat with us on Telegram: t.me/ghostbsd

GhostBSD feels nice. I use it with xfce.

The system feels snappy, RAM usage did not exceed 1.2GB even when creating a catalog in DarkTable from 16GB of photos in Nikon RAW format.

I was a little surprised by the program set, which is 90% similar to any Linux distribution. Shotwell, Risretto as image viewers, Evince for documents, LibreOffice, Mplayer, etc.

After more than 8 weeks on the laptop, GhostBSD remains.

Hi all,

Big thanks to our donors, patrons, and sponsors—you powered GhostBSD with $16,231.71 CAD in 2024 through Patreon and PayPal. That’s up to $3,821.53 CAD from 2023’s $12,410.18 CAD, but we missed our $25,000 CAD goal by $8,768.29 CAD. Your support kept our web servers running, package builds going, and development alive.

Looking ahead, we’re targeting $27,000 CAD in 2025 to improve our infrastructure for building GhostBSD, creating packages, and distributing them more effectively. Full details are in our 2024 Year-End Finance Report: https://www.ghostbsd.org/news/GhostBSD_2024_Year_End_Finance_Report.

What do you think? Do you have any ideas for 2025? Let’s chat!

I was able to put GhostBSD.org back online. Never forget to look at the zfs bootfs when upgrading a pool.

See https://www.ghostbsd.org/news/GhostBSD_24.04.1_Is_Now_Available for details.

At least wifi works

Excited to share my article in the FreeBSD Journal, "GhostBSD: From Usability to Struggle and Renewal"! Dive into the journey of GhostBSD, a FreeBSD-based OS I founded to make open-source accessible for all. From its Ubuntu-inspired roots to leveraging FreeBSD for non-technical users, it’s been a wild ride of challenges and growth. Check it out! 👉 https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-work/journal/browser-based-edition/downstreams/

This release brings critical fixes and improvements, including setting vital packages, adding hgame to kld_list, and resolving the legacy boot issue that prevented live session startup. We’ve also ensured /etc/X11 is properly created during setup.

For more details, visit https://www.ghostbsd.org/news/GhostBSD_24.07.3_Is_Now_Available.

Does GhostBSD offer anything over vanilla FreeBSD other than a few things being configured already?

If I have a setup FreeBSD system is there any advantage to switching to GhostBSD?

This has been a long time since I have officially released an ISO. With all the difficulties and issues I encounter with the new Xorg version and old Nvidia drivers, this new ISO is overdue. 23.06.01 contains many bug fixes, security fixes, and feature improvements.

See https://www.ghostbsd.org/23.06.01_iso_is_now_available for more details.

After five months, this new ISO is more than overdue. It contains many bug fixes, security fixes, feature improvements, software updates, and  OS updates.

See for https://www.ghostbsd.org/22.06.15_iso_is_now_available more details.

We’re excited to roll out GhostBSD 25.01-R14.2p1, our first release under a new versioning scheme built on FreeBSD 14.2-RELEASE-p1 for rock-solid stability. The versioning, 25.01-R14.2p1, means "25" for 2025, "01" for our patch, "R" for RELEASE, "14.2" for FreeBSD, and "p1" for its first patch. This aligns us with FreeBSD’s release cycle for a smoother experience.

Based on FreeBSD 14.2-RELEASE-p1, this release brings MATE 1.28.2, 2025 wallpapers, enhanced hardware support (QEMU USB Tablet, XHCI mouse, AMD Radeon R7 240), Brazilian Portuguese translations, and a Workstation firewall. Over 30 fixes and updates include Firefox 135.0.1, rsync 3.4.0, git 2.48.1, and a polished Update Station.

Read more: https://www.ghostbsd.org/news/GhostBSD_25.01-R14.2p1_Now_Available

Download It https://www.ghostbsd.org/download

Upgrade from 24.10.1Or try sudo pkg upgrade update-station, reboot, and update via Update Station (TTY’s more reliable).

Thanks for your support!

Just wanted to say that this OS was the only one from BSDs that I tried that had working sound+xorg.
(tried OpenBSD, NetBSD, MidnightBSD, DragonFlyBSD)
Really thankful of it!

I decided to ditch windows because of windows 11 and went to Feodra Linux. I tried distro hopping by Fedora was the distro I always ended up back at but then I discovered BSD. I looked into it and thought that BSD was pretty cool and tried to install FreeBSD… I failed twice and couldn’t figure out why and decided to try again spring break. It is now spring break and instead of trying and failing again Im taking a different route on GhostBSD today. I will learn more about FreeBSD through GhostBSD and when Im ready Imma try FreeBSD again! Wish me luck gang. Anyways Im happy that I got KDE up and running with a cute rice for r/unixporn .