2026 just became the year of FreeBSD on the (Amazonian cloud) desktop
Desktop AMIs ‘designed to behave as much like Windows as possible’ now available as an on ramp for new users
FreeBSD, a popular open-source operating system, is now available for desktop users through a unique approach. Colin Percival, a maintainer and release engineering lead for FreeBSD, announced the desktop distro on Thursday, stating that most people view FreeBSD as a server OS used via command line, but it can also function seamlessly with a graphical user interface (GUI).
The desktop version of FreeBSD includes the KDE desktop, which must be installed separately. To make it easier for new users to discover and start using FreeBSD, Percival packaged the OS as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI), specifically designed to run on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). These AMIs aim to mimic Windows images, allowing users to launch an instance using an m7i-flex.large type, which runs 4th-gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors with 2 to 64 vCPUs and 8 to 256 gigabytes of memory.
FreeBSD desktop AMIs come pre-installed with Chromium and LibreOffice, a combination Percival considers a useful starting point. He provided detailed installation instructions, noting that the AWS Console is not designed to understand these AMIs support Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). Consequently, users will be suggested to use port TCP/22 instead of the RDP port TCP/3389, and the console's "Connect" wizard will display SSH instructions instead of RDP instructions.
Percival urged anyone considering trying out FreeBSD to take advantage of this opportunity, launching an instance and experiencing the OS for themselves.
Written by urgent.news from The Register's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
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