Which type of applications? What I have found to be finicky is the desktop environments, however BSDs are pretty much tuned for web servers/applications. Bastille is designed for deploying web applications in jails securely and built on top of FreeBSD which is a pretty good default OS that gets out of your way already.

Normally you don't release an app for BSD specifically unless you want to offer a port. In which case software is usually built and if you need containerization you can put it in a jail.

It seems you would do well to install a FreeBSD vm/usb and give it a run. Their documentation is pretty good and their forums are helpful.

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aborsy 3 days ago | parent [-]

Desktop apps: PDF viewer, office applications, playing video and audio, IDEs or editors at least, …

If they support flatpaks, it might be good enough.

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righthand 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

They have all of that. Flatpack is not a thing in Unix and you wouldn’t want it. If you want the terribleness of Flatpack stay on Linux. This post is about self-hosting not Desktop software.

	▲	aborsy 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Flatpaks, from the source if available, are excellent: you get the latest versions of the app from the official source, with permissions set for a pretty locked-down sandbox. What’s not to like, I’m curious? The storage is cheap these days, if you consider downloads are large. Core apps are robust.

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Gud 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

https://www.freshports.org/