I also note a marked difference in RAM usage between PC-BSD 10.0 and FreeBSD 10.0, that is, PC-BSD 10.0 uses about 3 x as much RAM as FreeBSD 10.0. My observations are based on my two VMs (PC-BSD and FreeBSD). PC-BSD has a s**t load of services running on start up. I prefer OpenBSD and XFCE as it is super light and fast. I'm currently dual booting Slackware and OpenBSD on two boxes. This FreeBSD VM uses about 280 MB of RAM with XFCE.

Well... I actually tried that and installed the FreeBSD DVD. Then I started going through the documentation and found every component, e.g., Xorg, has to be installed individually, via the old, "make install clean," etc., etc., etc......
Been there. Done that. Got the T-shirt and the coffee mug.
That was YEARS ago and I'm not about to go through it again...
Maybe, some rainy winter day when I'm in the "home" and can't get out of the wheelchair, I'll re-consider, but for now, while I can still get around under my own power... not going to happen! There are better things to do with what time I have left on this old planet.
:)

PC-BSD will by design use more memory due to all the services it loads on startup to offer a complete desktop operating environment.

You can however disable those services you don't need by editing rc.conf-pcbsd and rc.conf to what you need only. After some tweaking I got mine down to 570MB of RAM used by the system and services.

Wow, DOWN to 570MB? What DE are you using? My OpenBSD box (32-bit, granted) running Xfce idles at about 68MB, and my Slackware laptop (64-bit) running Xfce idles at about 160MB. Even my 64-bit Arch/Gnome 3 idles at about 300MB.

The more I use PC-BSD the more I like it, but if it is going to use 2 1/2 gigs of RAM it better be mowing the lawn and doing the laundry.
:)

^ AND making the coffee! :D

No one is forcing you to compile from source in FreeBSD. FreeBSD now ships with an excellent package management system called PKGng. To install xorg in FreeBSD 10.0 I issue this command.

# pkg install xorg

That is it. You have xorg installed in a few minutes. Then all you need to do is configure /etc/rc.conf for hald and dbus. Dead simple.

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO.../x-config.html

And it does make a good cup of coffee, but I just can't justify using that much RAM. A couple of nights ago the machine was running PC-BSD with the Xfce DE and the only application open was Gkrellm which reported 2.8+ GIGS OF RAM was being used!
That is way, Way, WAY OUT OF LINE!
I'll keep it on the hard drive for a while, but won't be using it again anytime soon.
Cheers!

I hear you, man! If you want light and fast give FreeBSD or OpenBSD a try.

I suggest NetBSD too.
I know its community is poorer than other *BSD, but in my opinion it's too underrated :)

I agree, NetBSD is still underrated after so many years of surviving the tests of time. It may be the Slackware of BSD world. The documentation is very good though.

Regards.

I have followed this thread recently, and done a good bit of reading around the BSD forums here on LQ.

I have run BSDs (currently only FreeBSD) in a VM under Slackware, but no serious use. I have never tried to use one as a primary OS, but am interested in doing so at this time. (Downloading FreeBSD 10 as I type).

This thread has put me off of PC-BSD due to apparent resource requirements.
NetBSD has some attraction for use on older hardware, but the recent politics of it puts me off as well.
I am unfamiliar with Dragonfly except for a good reading of their website today - will probably give it a look.
FreeBSD has survived my previous VM installs, for reasons too ephemeral to try to state.
OpenBSD is familiar by name, I have run it in a VM but not recently.

I may start another thread when I get serious about it, hopefully next couple of weeks, but I would appreciate any comments to put on my stack from current BSD users... things of immediate interest to me...

1. Since my focus at this time is directed to FreeBSD and Dragonfly, what might be the major features or use cases to differentiate them?

2. I currently run Slackware on everything for home and business and love it! In particular I think the Slackware package tools are as good as it gets - how would the BSDs package tools compare, and in particular, would my Slackware habits be at home there?

3. I tend to rely on older hardware, dual core 64 bit machines are still the latest and greatest in my realm. I would likely install to something like an AMD Phenom II at this time. How important would that be? Is it still possible to run FreeBSD/Dragonfly on a good 32 bit machine?

My initial use case would be server and development platform with PostgreSQL and MariaDB.

All comments appreciated!

FreeBSD 10.0 is an amazing distro, I have it running in Virtualbox on my Slackware64-current box. It has been a few years since I've tried Dragonfly so I won't offer any advice on that BSD.
The only problem I have with FreeBSD 10.0 is it is difficult to dual boot with Slackware. If you want to run FreeBSD as the only OS on your HD then you are good to go. So I dual boot Slackware with OpenBSD. I really love the simplicity of OpenBSD. Here is my dual boot set-up for Slackware, the last little snippet of my lilo.conf.

To set-up a partition for a dual boot (Slackware/OpenBSD) use the Slackware DVD when you're installing Slackware to set the partition as type A6.
The above partition scheme is sda1 as swap, sda2 as /, and sda3 as /home.

Thanks hitest.

I will be dual booting with Slackware. Can you tell me the cause of the difficulty dual booting FreeBSD and Slackware, and the advantage of OpenBSD in that respect, please?

At this time the target for a BSD would be a partition on a second drive (i.e., what would be /dev/sdb/ on most systems). I always use Slackware/Lilo with UUIDs and am reasonably competent at sorting out most boot problems and configurations with it.

The problem with FreeBSD and Slackware is that the default partition table used by FreeBSD does not play well at all with LILO. I was able to dual boot Slackware and FreeBSD when FreeBSD was at version 8.x. OpenBSD has no difficulty with LILO. You may have better luck if you are installing FreeBSD on another hard drive. I have not tried that. A dual boot set up with Slackware and OpenBSD on the same drive works well for me.