Following the demise of PC-BSD/TrueOS, the most compelling BSD-based desktop operating system with a pleasant out-of-the-box user experience is helloSystem. The helloSystem OS has been aiming to be the macOS of the BSDs and for the past few years has been building a macOS-inspired desktop atop FreeBSD. Out today is helloSystem 0.8 as their newest version built atop FreeBSD 13.1.

The helloSystem 0.8 release continues to focus on being a desktop OS catering to simplicity, elegance, and usability. With the v0.8 release they have re-based against FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE, improves its launch command, pre-installs the VirtualBox Guest Additions for a better Oracle VM VirtualBox user experience, improved handling for MIDI controllers, initial support for launching some AppImage files using the launch command, and support for recent Intel graphics like Gen12/Xe Tigerlake using the DRM kernel module ported over from Linux 5.10.

helloSystem 0.8

With helloSystem 0.8 there is also various user interface improvements, "force quit application" support in the system menu, and a wide range of other desktop infrastructure and UI tooling. The helloSystem operating system is also now shipping with Trojita as its email client, GPU acceleration is enabled for WebEngine-based browsers like Falkon, there is a new "Processes" utility, and a wide range of fixes throughout the platform.

Downloads and more details on helloSystem 0.8 via GitHub.

Update: See Running The macOS-Inspired, FreeBSD-Powered helloSystem v0.8 On AMD Zen 4 for my brief review of this new release.