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 is now available for the desktop, in a roundabout way.

Colin Percival, a maintainer and release engineering lead for the open-source OS’s release, announced the desktop distro on Thursday.

“Most people think of FreeBSD as being a server OS which is used only via the command line, but as anyone who has attended a BSD conference can attest, it works just fine with a GUI too,” he wrote.

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He’s not wrong about that, but left unsaid is that FreeBSD doesn’t include a GUI. Users need to install one.

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The desktop version of the OS therefore includes the KDE desktop. Percival packaged it as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI), the image Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud needs to run an instance.

“Desktop AMIs are designed to make it easier for new users to discover and start using FreeBSD,” Percival wrote. “You can boot them in EC2, including as part of the AWS Free Tier, and connect to them using the same Remote Desktop Protocol used for connecting to Windows VMs.”

“Indeed, I've carefully designed the AMIs to behave as much like Windows images as possible,” he added, “with the exception, of course, that since they run FreeBSD, you don't have to pay for the operating system.”

You read that right: One of the more prominent members of the open source community wants the project he works on to behave like Windows!

The AMIs include Chromium and LibreOffice pre-installed, a combination Percival rates “a useful starting point.”

His post includes detailed installation instructions that mention using an m7i-flex.large instance, a cloudy VM type that run 4^th-gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors, with 2 to 64 vCPUs and 8 to 256 gig of memory.

Percival also points out that the AWS Console “doesn't understand that these AMIs support RDP, so if you launch an instance via its ‘Launch an instance’ wizard it will suggest creating a security group with port TCP/22 open rather than port TCP/3389; and the ‘Connect’ wizard will show SSH instructions rather than the RDP instructions which are shown for Windows.”

“I've asked Amazon to provide a mechanism for AMIs to be marked as RDP-enabled in order to turn on that missing functionality.”

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“If you've been thinking of trying out FreeBSD, this is your cue,” Percival’s post urges. “Go launch an instance!” ®