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Comment by eatonphil | Hacker News Reader

To clarify, I think there was mention that PC-BSD had a tendency to be behind the FreeBSD ports releases because it required the extra wrapping. But I am totally hazy on this so I guess I should just defer.

I did stumble upon Cooltrainer, yes. But I think ultimately I did not find it useful other than just nice reading material.

One of the "problems" is that there a ten ways to configure every setup and no one has the same setup. Sticking with the manpages and official guide were ultimately the most helpful things to me personally.

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> To clarify, I think there was mention that PC-BSD had a tendency to be behind the FreeBSD ports releases because it required the extra wrapping.

Okay, that's true - if the maintainer doesn't put in the work or there's no maintainer in the first place, the work won't get done. I find that's true with no matter what ports/package manager you choose to use, though, and at any rate, at least back when I experimented with PC-BSD, nothing's stopping you from ignoring PC-BSD's package manager altogether and just using the vanilla FreeBSD ones.

Well, I still think you should give PC-BSD a try some day, though I totally understand if you want to take a break from tinkering and use whatever's currently working for you for a while. We've all been there. :)

I guess I'll have to give it a go then! Probably in VirtualBox though. I am loathe to repeat this process.

Also, any reason you'd recommend this over GhostBSD? I don't really know the difference. They seem to be offering similar things.

Back when I first tried PC-BSD, I don't think GhostBSD existed yet. I've tried it once or twice since then, though. GhostBSD is definitely more lightweight and simple in what it provides (no graphical package manager, for example), whereas PC-BSD is more kitchen sink; I guess whichever one works for you depends on what you're looking for.

By all means, feel free to give both a try.

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