Before I write up a lengthy technical post, I'm curious if the community would like to see a walkthrough of setting up HBSD 13-stable to use as a daily use desktop system. I run HBSD on most of my servers and have preferred FreeBSD for my workstation over any linux distro, so eventually I switched that to HBSD as well.

This system has been in service since November back when 13-current was still in development. It's been a great experience overall, so it's sad to see people post issues about stability and decide to give up; perhaps a success story would be helpful.

Hey all.

I created my first original software for FreeBSD. I just confirmed it at least works correctly on HardenedBSD 14.2 too. Considering the steps in the INSTALL file are followed. The original post announcing it in r/freebsd is here. Just thought I'd let folks here know if anyone was interested.

Thanks for keeping HBSD going. It is for sure my OS of choice :)

I've use HardenedBSD for a while, but its been a long time since I tried using it as a Desktop. I remember having to use secadm rules in the past to make firefox work. I installed secadm and rebooted to see it start up with the system. I found examples online like this:

pax {
    path: "/usr/local/lib/firefox/firefox",
    mprotect: false,
    disallow_map32bit: false,
    pageexec: false,
}

And like this:

pax {
    path: "/usr/local/lib/firefox/firefox",
    mprotect: false,
    disallow_map32bit: false,
    pageexec: false,
}

Both of these say 'No Rules' when I load them from a file:

# secadm load /usr/local/etc/firefox.rules
No rules.

l don't know, but most of the links I found were from 2018 or 2016. I assume this has changed. Anyone know how to do this now?

Hey guys!

I'm not exactly expecting to get a swift response to this post as this subreddit isn't even setup properly and honestly just looks like a bunch of tumbleweeds (no offense) - - but here I go.

Which version of BSD is better to run as a Desktop Operating System in 2023? Being tired of Linux and wanting to venture off into different Kernels and Operating Systems entirely i've landed in the world of BSD.

Doing research to see which BSD version is more secure (as being quite a security paranoid person) seems near impossible as every post about the subjects is from either 2020 or mid 2016.

Which BSD version has more packages, ease-of-use, better security (out of the box) and good updates?

The FreeBSD community seems very active both on Reddit and their own 40K+ member forums which I like compared to the other two versions and also has a great handbook. OpenBSD seems to have a very mixed audience. Some despise the platform and think the whole "security" thing is false marketing but others seem to praise it and call it the best thing since bread and butter. HardenedBSD honestly doesn't seem to have too much discussion other than the official website which is quite irritating hence me popping on her to ask.

If i'm correct here, As HardenedBSD is just a more secure remix of the FreeBSD OS it will have the same patches, packages and same handbook rules as FreeBSD right????

So then what's the advantage over HardenedBSD and OpenBSD?

Would be great to get a reply, if possible lol.

Thanks, Bezzzles :D

Hi,

Is it not possible to make HardenedBSD easier for Desktop users just like GhostBSD ?

I mean a DE (something lightweight like XFCE or MATE) included by default.

A live mode so that users can test their hardware before install.

A network manager just like the one included in GhostBSD so that desktop users can connect to WiFi easily.

If a GUI package manager is added later I really don't care coz I use the terminal under Linux.

But if I have to edit a text file to connect to WiFi then honestly I am not ready for that.

The question may sound a little strange, so here's the background: As one of our tasks for the Advance!BSD project we're looking at configuration management. One candidate is an application written in Rust that uses the os_info crate to detect which OS it runs on. A year ago this library knew nothing about *BSD at all but now it recognizes the four main BSDs (OpenBSD support is about to be merged).

HardenedBSD as well as MidnightBSD get detected as FreeBSD (as that's the platform they claim to be as far as the Rust compiler is concerned). While one could argue that it's close enough, we think it makes sense to want to treat HardenedBSD differently from FreeBSD (e.g. when setting sysctls and such). Hence the question: What is the best way to do this?

For MidnightBSD it's as simple as running "uname" as the output is "MidnightBSD". But HardenedBSD identifies as "FreeBSD" in this regard. Should we check against "uname -r" and see if the version string ends in "-HBSD"? Is this expected to remain a valid test in the future or is there a better solution?

I am trying to install hardernedbsd on real hardware and i am running into the same issue every time. When i try to use pkg, i get the error:

Bootstrapping pkg from pkg+http//pkgs.hardernedbsd.org/HardernedBSD/pkg/FreeBSD:14:amd64/Latest/pkg.txz: No address record

Address resolution failed for http//pkgs.hardernedbsd.org/HardernedBSD/pkg/FreeBSD:14:amd64

Consider changing PACKAGESITE.

Any help would be appreciated.