I did take the time to work on some ports to fix most of the problem, sure that is mush more fix to come and MATE 1.18 is in ports, slim will still be the default DM on GhostBSD because there are problems that need to be overcome before to start using LightDM.

The state of the ghostbsd-build should be fine unless there are things to add or remove, but it builds both XFCE and MATE flawlessly, ok it could be argued that things are not working properly, we only need a new pkg build to fix those problems. I am gonna start an amd64 pkg build to help me to go forward I did a git repository that mix both ports repositories just for the time been.

I have a big question and we might try to get the community involved into it.

What do we do with i386?

I have i386 that I don't us it and if do so it would run on FreeBSD and not GhostBSD. I do not test much i386 and if there is no one willing to take care of having i386 to work properly we will shoot our self in the foot at one point.

I think we need to let go i386 at one point, could be at 11.2, 11.1 or 12.0 release what is you is your thought on that?

i386 support right now is a major selling point for GhostBSD and FreeBSD, there are only a few Linux distros that still support 32 bit arch, (notably debian and openSUSE).

However, those 32 bit machines usually have low amount of RAM, along with the fact that browsers have become very bloated, therefore have become inadequate for "desktop" use.

Personally I would make an announce about the upcoming EOL for GhostBSD/i386, and if it depend from me the next will be the last release supported (i.e. 11.1 and 10.4). After that, i386 support will remain availabble from FreeBSD only.

All things come to an end eventually and so will i386 support. But I'm really torn in that case. On the one hand I tend to say "Let's move on, drop i386 and probably turn towards aarch64 instead". However I agree with ASX here that more and more operating systems are dropping i386 support which means we could probably benefit from people forced to switch discovering us. I would not underestimate the "retro" computing scene. People who invest time in keeping their boxes alive way past the normal lifespan of those machines usually have quite some technical knowledge and may even be interested in helping out.

However especially the browser issue is a real problem these days, making old machines unfit for desktop usage. But there definitely are people fed up with the direction that it all takes and then strange things happen - like rediscovering Gopherspace (take that, Tim "DRM" Berners-lee! ). BTW: Did you know that current (!) GhostBSD images are available via Gopher? No, I'm not joking, there seems to be a Polish university mirror. If you don't believe me, fire up lynx (that still supports Gopher and not just Http):
It's moments like when I discover such things that just make me smile and give me a warm feeling. Therefore I would vote to not discontinue i386 completely for now. I'm willing to keep it going for the near future (or until my last i386 machine breaks). I would suggest to support only one i386 release in the future, though, probably even starting with the coming 11 release. I'm a MATE guy and haven't really used Xfce in years, but since the latter is more light-weight, I would recommend dropping MATE/i386 and keeping Xfce/i386 for now. In the long run it might be feasible to bring back an OpenBox version or something else that's really light-weight and then drop Xfce/i386, too.

My guess is that if we keep supporting i386 for a while now some people will come along and hopefully volunteer to help keeping it up. If I'm wrong in that regard we can still always drop i386 at a later point.

I have a few machines that I normally use to test i386 ISOs:

HP d630, desktop sff, 2 GB Ram, 32 bit cpu, intel graphics
This machine is really slow, somewhat noisy, heat a lot, and propably is one of those that could benefit from a 32bit OS, unfortunately it doesn't boot from USB even if it is supposed to; additionally it only have a CD and not a DVD reader.

HP nx9005, notebook, 1 GB Ram, Athlon 2550+ 32 bit cpu, ATI Radeon graphics: The ram on this notebook can't be expanded, 1 GB is the max. supported, it also doesn't boot from USB, but at least it have a DVD device, however its CPU doesn't provide SSE2, a CPU option more and more "required" these days. This machine use a PATA disk (60 GB) ... also painfully slow. It has a beatiful 4:3 15" screen, but I'm unable to put in some good use.

Asus EEEBOX, 1 GB Ram, Atom 64 bit CPU /Atom d4xx), Intel graphics: I use this machine as a personal NAS system, to perform backup via wifi, it is relatively modern even if low power, but it is really a 64 bit machine, many other EEEBOX use a 32 bit CPU (Atom N270) which is not enough powerful run a light desktop. I'm using this machine without monitor/keyboard/mouse, and I access it thru SSH, Considering it consume 10~20 W it is a more "green" option than resurrect the HP d630 desktop.

Dell D430, 2GB Ram, Core 2 Duo 64 bit, Intel graphics: Thiis is a small 12,1 inch screen, old notebok, very light, RAM can't be expanded, use a low power 64 CPU (Core 2 duo U7600, 1.2 Ghz and I love this subnotebook. (in fact I added an msata SSD there, in place of a very slow original 4200 rpm 1.8" hd). It is very handy to carry arround, it is much more readable than many 10" screen, in fact I think I will never buy something below 12 or 13 inch.

Flybook a33i, Transmeta Crusoe 1 Ghz (i586), 512 MB Rarm, radeon graphics, 10 inch, w/touch screen.
Support for Transmeta cpufreq governor was dropped upstream in FreeBSD in 10.2, that's now a no go, other than that I have installed ZFS there, just for fun, and FreeBSD 11 run much better than 10.3 in this sspecific case.
However installing GhostBSD there was a pain, I had to kill/turn off lot of thing to make the installer running without overflowing the available RAM.

As a matter of facts, I can really use only the Dell Latitute and the EEEBOX, that casually have both a 64 bit CPU.

This days, really, Core 2 Duo CPUs are going to be phased out, even if they are all 64 bit CPU, in favour of core i3/i5/i7 and up.

So, to me it appear somewhat masochist to continue to support i386 ... and for use cases different from desktop FreeBSD provide enough support.

That's my own experience, looking forward about yours