The Remaining Challenge Out of Berkeley
Let's put it out there: desktop environments and window managers on the BSD's are simply there to give sysadmins a decent experience.
As server OS's they are phenomenal, as desktops the better part of meh.
Before the pitchforks come out: I've done quite some FreeBSD installs, even made a how-to for KDE Wayland back in the day. A FreeBSD base install for the dummy I am myself. Mango & River window managers: cutting edge. Look at my Codeberg and you'll see the dots.
Especially the communities around the BSD's are really nice. There's a lot of strong technical opinions, refreshing because it is about content. And a lot of encouragement and support to join the ranks.
The community also has a number of great writers, a couple of blogs I follow are really well-written and readable, both from the technical as well as the non-technical perspective.
And still, it doesn't gel with me. Not really.
Recently I was asked to revive my Hyprland on FreeBSD repo, I tried, but after 3 tries I gave up. Unexplainable why it didn't work, I carefully ticked all boxes.
Came across a NetBSD 11 install video; the DVD and CD iso's, the separate img file, burning with gui software or dd: it all didn't work, as in not installing all sets and ending up with an incomplete system.
I don't want to run a potato. Wifi ootb, yes please, it ain't 1998 anymore. Wayland please, just because. Bluetooth I can do without, but still. Less hoops or burning rings of fire.
All BSD's at the moment solve either one or most of the mentioned gripes, and it's moving along, we desktoppies just have to sit and wait it out. Fortunately GhostBSD is the Linux Mint of the BSD's and it is very good at it. But I don't like Mate or Xfce.
If you're on a wired LAN, running Xfce or Sway you're grand, I'll give you that.
As for me: having done my fair share of Slackware, Gentoo and Nix installs I'll keep coming back, probably hitting a similar wall every now and then. Until it crumbles.
Wait for my next triumphant blog on how I made it work.