FreeBSD vs macOS for Daily Use: My Personal Migration Story

As a designer I’ve been using macOS since 2005, but with each new update, I dislike the direction Apple is heading in. They add unnecessary features that use system resources and can’t be disabled. My seven-year-old MacBook Pro with an Intel processor became so slow and unresponsive with the latest macOS version that I can’t use it at all anymore. If your Mac can’t handle the latest macOS version, the only solution is to buy a more powerful Mac. This is probably fine, people upgrade their hardware from time to time, and this is part of the evolution of the field. However, Apple can deem any five-year-old Mac obsolete. It seems like they have more control over your computer than you do.

In order to optimize macOS and turn off unnecessary system services, I decided to learn deeply about how macOS works. I was surprised to find that it was very similar to my past experience with FreeBSD:

• Both Unix or Unix-like.
• macOS has many terminal apps that I’ve seen before, such as top, ps, and ifconfig.
• Bash, Zsh, and Tcsh.
• As we know, Apple only uses part of FreeBSD in their kernel.
• Services called “daemons”.
• macOS and FreeBSD share a similar file system hierarchy: ~/ for the user folder, ~/Desktop, ~/Downlods and so on.
• System directories such as /etc, /bin, /usr, etc.
• The man page.

After discovering all these similarities, I started thinking that it might make more sense to focus on FreeBSD than on macOS, which is closed and highly restrictive. With FreeBSD, I have full control and can change how things work.

I had some experience with FreeBSD 4.5 on my old 486 IBM PC, but after 20 years, I decided to refresh my knowledge and see how far I could go.

In this experiment, I switched from macOS to FreeBSD to achieve the following goals:

• To compare the performance of both systems for desktop usage. This is important because Macs are expensive. What hardware will we need to comfortably use a desktop in 2025? For this comparison, I pitted a $1800 MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro processor against a $300 Mini PC.
• To tweak FreeBSD to closely match the macOS look and feel so that when I switch from my working computer to FreeBSD, the experience is similar.
• To show my friends and the world that there is a good alternative to macOS besides Windows or Linux.

Before I begin, here are my quick test results for both operating systems. I ran desktop apps on each operating system to see how quickly they could be launched and how responsive they felt during initial and subsequent usage.

YouTube video loading in Firefox on FreeBSD vs macOS

Open an image on FreeBSD vs on macOS

Play a video on FreeBSD vs on macOS

Open the Photos app on FreeBSD vs on macOS

Hardware

When I tell people that a $300 AMD mini PC can keep up with an $1800 M1 Pro MacBook in daily use, the first reaction is disbelief. How is this even possible? As you may recall, the introduction of the M1 processor was a significant event for Apple, marking the beginning of a new era of speed an optimization.

I guess the answer lies in the efficiency of FreeBSD and the lack of unnecessary background processes, also on fast SSD. Unlike macOS, which runs a lot of services (daemons) in the background, some of which can’t even be disabled, FreeBSD gives you full control. Combined with lightweight desktop environments like MATE and compiled apps optimized for your specific hardware, the system feels snappy—even on budget CPUs.

Where Performance Declines

My budget mini PC isn’t perfect for everything. One clear limitation is graphics performance. The integrated Radeon Vega GPU is not very powerful by today’s standards, and that becomes noticeable in GPU-intensive applications like Blender. While basic 3D previews and light modeling work are possible, rendering times are much longer compared to macOS on the M1 Pro, and viewport performance can lag when working with complex scenes. If you’re doing serious 3D work or GPU-heavy tasks, this setup quickly shows its limits.

Resource Usage When No Apps Are Open

FreeBSD, htop:

macOS, htop:

FreeBSD, top:

macOS, top:

FreeBSD Settings to Match macOS Behavior

If you already have FreeBSD installed, you can follow my approach to make it look and operate more like macOS. I’m using MATE because it runs faster than Xfce on my computer.

Enable TrearFree

/usr/local/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-amdgpu.conf 

Section "Device"
    Identifier "AMD"
    Driver "amdgpu"
    Option "TearFree" "true"
EndSection

Replaced MATE’s UI fonts to SF Pro Display

I found that the topic of matching macOS-style font rendering on X Server is a major point of debate online. I decided to use another approach: compare both screenshots to see how to achive closer look by tweaking X Server font rendering settings.

1. Install SF Pro Display, Regular and set it as default in MATE’s UI.

2. To set MATE’s font rendering similar to macOS I connected both computers to my 1080p monitor and made screenshots on both operating systems, then step by step I tried to achieve similarity as close as possible by using Figma and zoom tool and different FreeType font rendering settings. Here is result that I achieved:

To achive that add this:

  ~/.profile

  export FREETYPE_PROPERTIES="cff:no-stem-darkening=0.0 autofitter:no-stem-darkening=0.0"

Set Smoothing to Grayscale and Hinting to None (I also set font size to be 10 and DPI to 95):

Results: Fonts in macOS on the left versus MATE on the right. You might notice that fonts in macOS appear bolder, not only because Apple often uses semibold and bold in UI, but also because of how macOS renders them. Apple also doesn’t use subpixel smoothing. With the settings I provided, you can achieve a pretty similar look. It won’t be exactly the same because MATE and macOS render letters, spacing, and other details differently, but it will be very close, especially compared to MATE’s default settings:

3. For console I’m using SF Mono.

MATE’s Settings

Then I changed MATE’s most common shortcuts to:

• CMD + Tab to app switch
• CMD + M to minimize
• CMD + Q to close app
• CMD + W to close tabs
• CMD + H to hide apps

Firefox Settings

To change CTRL to CMD in Firefox go to about:profiles, find the Default Profile (marked “Yes”), open that folder, and create a user.js file with the following content:

user_pref("ui.key.accelKey", 224);

To disable the ability to open the menu by pressing Alt (since it’s often pressed accidentally), add the following in about:config:

ui.key.menuAccessKeyFocuses: false

Apps Performance

Inspired by this video, I tried using ports, but I can’t say for sure if they provide any performance improvements compared to installing from packages (pkg install).

macOS Wallpapers

My favorite wallpapers are from macOS Sequoia and macOS Ventura.

MATE’s Theme & Icons & Cursors

Will be added soon.

Dock

Will be added soon.

FreeBSD Desktop Project

If you’ve read the article up to this point and have never tried FreeBSD on real hardware—or tried it before but ran into issues—I want to mention that the FreeBSD Foundation is actively working on improving the desktop experience.