So far #NomadBSD has been the easiest #BSD install that I have done so far. Nomad is based on #FreeBSD and appears to use their repos. For the most part everything seems to be working just fine.  The only issue I have at the moment is getting #wifi to work; not a biggie since I have it wired.

Alright team, I am going to give #BSD another try. What is the best version of BSD that I can install on an Alder Lake #N100 Intel CPU?
 
I have a mini pc that is collecting dust at the moment and I gots the BSD itch.


Edit: Thanks for all the suggestions. I am trying out #NomadBSD which is based on #FreeBSD. Supposedly it is fairly new user friendly. The documentation is easy to follow.

If this goes belly up, I will try the other big three. At this time I don’t want to go through with manually setting up a desktop environment.

#Octopkg is a footgun in #NomadBSD. So is pkg.

I'm in #NomadBSD for the first time in a few years, and it's 1000% better than I remember it. So many things are working well, and it has a beautiful desktop design. The laptop I'm using is kind of old, and I didn't initially use a newer, larger (and presumably faster) USB drive. But still it's doing great.

I'm not sure how they arrived at this combo of KDE and Xfce, but it's pretty nice.

Pro tip: The first time I put the image on the USB drive, I used Nautilus to expand the lzma file and GNOME's Impression to make the USB drive. Didn't work -- the BIOS didn't see it. The second time I used the lzma command line utility (as recommended by the project) to get the img, then I used Fedora Media Writer to create the bootable drive. That worked.

With a bit of a faster USB drive, this could absolutely work.

https://nomadbsd.org/

Trying #NomadBSD / #FreeBSD on #MacBookAir. Works nicely.