FreeBSD Desktop AMI Debuts on AWS: KDE, RDP, Windows-Like Experience

FreeBSD release engineering lead Colin Percival has announced a new desktop-oriented Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that makes FreeBSD accessible to newcomers through a familiar Windows-like experience on AWS EC2.

Most people think FreeBSD is a command-line-only server operating system, but anyone who has attended a BSD conference can attest that it works very well with a graphical user interface (GUI).

FreeBSD itself does not include a GUI; users must install one manually. This AMI packages the KDE Plasma desktop environment, along with Chromium and LibreOffice as a useful starting point.

The AMI is designed to behave as much like a Windows AMI as possible. You can launch it in EC2, including as part of the AWS Free Tier , and connect to it using the same Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) client used for Windows instances. Percival notes the only difference is that because it runs FreeBSD, there is no operating system license fee.

Technical Details

Instance type: m7i-flex.large (4th generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors, 2–64 vCPUs, 8–256 GB memory)

Pre-installed software: KDE Plasma, Chromium, LibreOffice

Access protocol: RDP (TCP/3389)

AWS Console Limitation

The AWS console does not recognize that these AMIs support RDP. When launching via the "Launch Instance" wizard, it suggests creating a security group that opens TCP/22 (SSH) instead of TCP/3389 (RDP), and the "Connect" wizard shows SSH instructions rather than the RDP instructions shown for Windows.

Percival has requested that Amazon provide a mechanism to mark AMIs as RDP-enabled so this missing functionality can be enabled smoothly.

If you have been wanting to try FreeBSD, this AMI provides a low-friction entry point: launch an instance, connect via RDP, and start exploring a fully configured FreeBSD desktop in the cloud.