Hello,
I'm Robin, a student and frankly, scared of technology. That fear of technology drove me to Linux for a few years and I felt a lot more secure. But then came PulseAudio and after that systemd, and now it has become politicized to the point that Russian maintainers have been ousted from Linux just because they're Russians. What happened to FOSS??

Anyway my research brought me to this conclusion, and please correct me if I'm wrong:

The thing about Linux is that it wasn’t any more than a Unix-like kernel in the first place. Unix has always been a cohesive software distribution with a complete single-source distribution including both kernel and a “complete” userland all in one and BSD continued/continues that heritage. GNU/Linux systems are a bunch of independent packages all stuck together after the fact, with a Linux kernel in the middle, and increasingly an ever-more corporate/“proprietary” form of “glue” holding them together. Except for choice of kernel and packages it’s not much different from MacOS in philosophy.

So I'm thinking of switching from MX-Linux to GhostBSD. I even asked about all this in the MX forums and my post got deleted without warning or comment from the Admins. The Linux Foundation is being run now by Microsoft, IBM, and probably Google and Fakebook anyway. I also just learned that all the Linux LTS kernels, from oldest to newest, all expire in December of 2026. Something is planned for 1/1/2027 and FOSS may not be ready..

But I will be. That's why I'm here. Still scared of technology.

I'm a GUI user who is always scared I'll mistype a command, hit ENTER and accidentally ignite the earth's atmosphere or something. So any GUI tools I can find and use I'll certainly try to employ them.

Thanks!

Welcome to GhostBSD! Try burning GhostBSD to a USB stick and run it live and see if you like it. There's a slight learning curve when switching from Linux to BSD but GhostBSD takes care of most of that. If you have any questions ask here or go to our telegram channel.
BTW where did you hear that Linux kernels will expire in 2026?

Thanks, Neville. Someone in a forum mentioned it, and I looked here to confirm it.

Interesting thanks

I did it!

After spending some time poking around in Live sessions, playing with settings, exploring the Software Station and other gems to be found here, I was comfortable enough yesterday to install this awesome OS, giving it the entire HDD and wiping away my old Linux OS.

Not long ago I would have been scared to even try it. So many thanks to the team for takung the terror out of FreeBSD for newbies like me. It does require an investment of time in reading and researching to do BSD safely and effectively, but many of the commands and such are already quite familiar to me, coming from Linux. One can't help but learn just using and maintaining this wonderful OS.