MidnightBSD 1.2

His soft spot for lone warriors lures Mayank Sharma to the land of MidnightBSD, but he doesn’t escape completely unscathed.

- Mayank Sharma

MidnightBSD isn’t the only project that’s working to help BSD get to the desktop, but it’s certainly one of the oldest. While it’s only at v1.2, the project has been in development for well over a decade. The project also differs from the other efforts such as GhostBSD and TrueOS in that it isn’t a derivative of FreeBSD but is instead a fork.

MidnightBSD has several customised utilities and infrastructural components, most notably its package manager called mports. MidnightBSD’s home-brewed package management system works in a similar way to DNF and APT to search, install and upgrade apps. It shares similarities with FreeBSD’s ports system and also borrows some ideas from the OpenBSD project. But since the project is essentially a oneman show, the mports collection is fairly limited and bundles some very outdated apps. For instance, the main office suite isn’t LibreOffice but an outdated version of OpenOffice 3