Since FreeBSD is on the front page today, I thought this is a good time to learn from the collective wisdom of this community. 5 simple questions to those who use FreeBSD to stir up a conversation.
1. Where do you use FreeBSD? On your laptop? Remote servers? Routers?
2. Why do you use FreeBSD instead of Linux?
3. Why do you use FreeBSD instead of OpenBSD or another *BSD?
4. Do you find something lacking in FreeBSD? Is there something that is good in another OS that you'd like to see in FreeBSD?
5. What is that one thing about FreeBSD that you would hate to lose if you were forced to use another OS?
2) Poor interactions with Linus, DaveM, and the Linux community (see below)
3) Performance
4a) A different package system, more akin to Ubuntu LTS with PPAs, so we could have stable packages for 99% of things, but could get the latest versions of software when needed.
4b) ebpf/xdp
5) Missing ^T (SIGINFO) support, simple init system, a kernel that makes sense
2 extended:
In 1994, I was a linux fanatic, with a stack of floppies I'd use to install linux on any pc I could get my hands on. I landed a job as a sysadmin for a stats dept, where we were using ancient DECstations running ULTRIX. Disk space was expensive, and TeX fonts were large. So we kept TeX fonts centrally located in NFS. The DECstations were old and slow compared to PCs (12.5MHz mips, vs 66Mhz 486), so I wanted to replace them with PCs running Linux. The problem came that it took the DECs ~1 second to render latex .dvi file using xdvi. It took a linux box a minute or more. This was because the DECs did NFS file caching, while Linux didn't, and xdvi seeked around at random in the font files.
I went to the 1994 Boston USENIX and met Linus at the Linux BOF. I asked him about NFS file caching. He said something like "bah, nobody uses NFS, we have no plans to implement any sort of NFS caching, its not important".. So I got up, went to the FreeBSD BOF, and they said it should work just fine. I've been a FreeBSD user ever since.
Then ~10 years later, working for a company making one of the first 10GbE NICs, I had submitted our base driver and got it accepted via the netdev list. I then completed work on TCP LRO in our driver, submitted that, and got it NACK'ed for the reasonable reason that they didn't want to have multiple LRO implementations. EVEN THOUGH OUR COMPETITOR'S DRIVER HAD THEIR OWN LRO IN THEIR DRIVER, AND ANOTHER VENDOR SUBMITTED A DRIVER WITH THE BASE DRIVER AND LRO IN THE SAME PATCH AFTER US AND GOT IT ACCEPTED, AND THEY DIDNT RIP LRO OUT OF THE OTHER DRIVERS. So our driver had dog-shit performance out of the box due to a lack of LRO as compared to 2 of our competitors. At that point I was pretty much done with Linux.
Compared to FreeBSD, where we had the best LRO in our driver, and a few other vendors copy/pasted it, and it wound up eventually being centralized as tcp_lro.c and driver-specific LRO ripped out.
1. 2 laptops and quite a few servers, some remote, some local
2. While I prefer FreeBSD, I use Linux too. I think it's important to know more than one OS. Also my employer standardized on RHEL, not much choice there
3. It seems to be the one where most of the (non-strictly-security-related) innovation takes place, and many of the OpenBSD security related innovation trickle down reasonably soon.
4. Docker (hate it, love it, but so much software is distributed in this way now), recent WiFi adapters/standards
5. ZFS (I know it's possible on Linux too now, but good luck convincing my employer, anything not covered by support is a tough cookie there), ZFS, ZFS, dtrace, its very nice update/upgrade process, a sane and quite rich base system, the Ports collection, its very nice handbook and documentation.
2. As of right now, mostly curiosity. I have dabbled in FreeBSD on and off for years, and every time I install something from scratch I give it another go. In addition, the experience is more cohesive and "it just works" compared to almost every Linux distro I've ever used (the closest I've found is Slackware.) Let me explain.
When I say cohesive, I mean mostly that it has extremely well thought out documentation, and most common things you might want to do are in the FreeBSD handbook. Just go to the relevant chapter and read up.
When I say "it just works", I don't mean that the out of the box experience is just magically perfect and pre-configured like you might see on Windows or Ubuntu. What I mean is, the ports (and the pre-compiled packages made from them) are extremely reliable. You install them, and they work. Not to pick on Ubuntu specifically, but I have found this not to be the case more often on Ubuntu. Sometimes you install a package on Ubuntu, and it doesn't just work, and you might have to hunt down a config file to make some adjustments, its location may or may not be different from vanilla and may or may not be documented, or maybe it's a bad package and you're SOL.
Furthermore, I've found that upgrading ports and packages in FreeBSD doesn't break things anywhere near as often as on most Linux distros I've used. It's very reliable in that sense, and it just works.
3. This is older hardware for personal use, and I don't really need the enhanced security of OpenBSD, especially the enhanced security that comes with a performance cost.
As for NetBSD or DragonflyBSD, I have the impression, which may or may not be correct, that FreeBSD has better hardware support than either of them, and I want all of my peripherals to work.
4. I do most of my gaming on dedicated hardware these days (Steam Deck, Nintendo Switch), but it would be super great if the experience of playing games was more smooth. Thanks to the magic of Linux binary compatibility and Proton, you can totally play Windows and Linux games on FreeBSD with decent success, but the process of setting that up is awkward and ad-hoc.
5. See 2. Also, I like ZFS a lot, and I get the impression that getting up and running with ZFS on Linux is more of a hassle.
2. FreeBSD offers a coherent base system with sane tools. pf is a godsend, and the ports collection is a good trade-off of configuration and simplicity. ZFS used to be a killer feature but is being integrated into Linux systems.
3. FreeBSD is designed around "general purpose" use and has a lot of backing from corporations like Netflix.
4. FreeBSD is missing a true container solution that is compatible with Docker (jails don't count). There has been some work on this as of the most recent BSDcon, so I'm hopeful.
1. Servers, I'm partial to openBSD because of a saner IMO /etc and works-out-of-the-box (for me). My coworker is the more freebsd kind and since he does the work, his opinion prevails.
2. I moved houses 3 days ago. Had installed MX linux prior to moving on my desktop computer. Today, no DHCP IP on my computer. Man and apropos didn't help much. Ifconfig, arp don't exist. They require an apt install. I'm clueless as to what's happening. GUI tools didn't help much. So yeah to all predictable systems including windows.
3. VSCode (which when I last checked a week ago didn't work on freebsd either) and a lot of other programs which aren't there on OpenBSD. NetBSD haven't touched, so won't comment.
4. Userland stuff. BSDs in general pitch themselves as complete OSs, but the whole getting X working is like assembling a GUI stack IMO.
5. Continuing from the previous point (yeah, I'm a hypocrite), a few hundred MBs of RAM and very little GHzs on the CPU gets you a fully functional Desktop environment. If a browser is needed, add a bit more RAM and maybe some CPU.
I might be wrong, but VSCode didn't work (for me) on 13.x and I ran across a few forum posts for others who couldn't get it done either. I had very little time to figure out the right "distro", and VSCode was a requirement. Went to distrowatch, and installed the top choice (please don't roast me about it).
Hmm weird. Did you try to just do "sudo pkg install vscode" ?
Don't try to download it from the website, this won't work as freebsd is not a supported platform but it's simply in the package collection and works great as such.
Ps I wasn't trying to roast you at all. I'm happy you found a solution even if it's not FreeBSD <3
In general that's one of the things I like about the FreeBSD community. We don't really have this push to make it mainstream or to advocate it. If you like it welcome to the club. If you don't, that's fine too. We have no desire to see "the year of FreeBSD on the desktop" generally speaking.
I really like that lack of evangelism which is so common on Linux especially because of the distro wars.
ifconfig (on most linuxes) has been deprecated because it doesn't support all network features anymore. You're meant to use "ip". It also does some of what used to be netstat/route. And there's 'ss' for the rest of netstat things.
1. I'm using FreeBSD-13 running on RPi2 (armv7) as DNS server to the SOHO network. I'm using dnscrypt. I'm serving 1-5 rps. From a stress-test the system can serve up to 43 DNS rps without problems.
2. Small overall footprint in terms of resources.
3. I went with NetBSD because of the even smaller footprint (see 1). NetBSD, according to the docs, requires just 40mb of RAM to run. Hit many walls with NetBSD and switched to FreeBSD.
4. PF is not working on armv7 for 13.2[^1]
5. The rc system, the complete control over the small-ish amount of processes running, pre-compiled binaries are nice. I must say that I enjoy the overall simplicity and clear-cut documentation, no need to go through hoops to understand _how_ DNS resolution works :-)
1. Servers
2. I use both, but use FreeBSD for bare metal nearly exclusively. Linux for virtual hosting because you can't always get FreeBSD.
3. I use both FBSD and OBSD. OpenBSD I use for router-type applications and for some standalone things. I use these instead of other *BSDs because I know them better.
4. Not really.
5. The consistency and stability of the OS from a usability perspective. Linux moves fast, e.g. systemd, while FreeBSD isn't fundamentally that much different from 20 years ago.
Also, FreeBSD has deeply entrenched support for ZFS, which is a game changer. It's available for Linux, but it's not quite in the same first-class citizen state as it is on FreeBSD.
I'd miss the documentation as well. Both Free and OpenBSD have astoundingly good documentation.
3. I'd actually rather use some some mythic OS that was the combination of DragonflyBSD + OpenBSD ... but since that doesn't exist, FreeBSD just nudges ahead of either Dfly standalone or OpenBSD standalone.
4.
- turning all services (except ssh) off, by default. OpenBSD does this.
- move all non-core things out of the base, like sendmail (now DMA, what a nice import from DFly btw). Minimum base (OpenBSD)
- the base should only have one way to do things (don’t have 3 different firewalls in base like today)
1. old computer found in a dumpster. Using it to learn about sysadmin and networking.
2. I installed it when centos was dead and I was looking for a stable os for a web server. My main computer runs Linux Mint.
3. It’s the first one I tried. Might check out open bds and dragonfly when I get into hosting and virtualization.
4. I’m just limited by lack of knowledge. But I like that there’s a more common path to follow, with great documentation. For the things I have working now, I feel like I have a better handle on my config choices vs in Linux distros I don’t always know if I’m doing things the Linux way or the Ubuntu way.
5. Several nights and weekends playing with ancient hardware and alternative software.
1. I use it on a NAS system. For years this was vanilla FreeBSD from 10 to 13. A few months back I replaced the system with TrueNAS Core which is based on FreeBSD 13, retaining the ZFS pools from the original installation. This system hosts storage and network shares, services hosted in jails such as databases, build slaves and artefact storage, and Windows virtual machines also hosting services and remote desktops.
2. First-class ZFS support, full NFSv4 ACL support which works with Samba and Windows ACLs and is a massive improvement upon POSIX.1e DRAFT ACLs.
3. No real preference, but ZFS support is (for me) the killer feature. Next are jails and Bhyve.
4. The main lack is the more comprehensive selection of drivers found on Linux. That said, it's pretty decent and I do find the overall quality of the drivers and system as a whole is better than Linux.
5. The system is engineered as a cohesive whole. While other BSDs might be similar, and perhaps Debian was attempting this a couple of decades back with its core design principles, most of the alternatives are lacking in this essential cohesiveness.
> 1. Where do you use FreeBSD? On your laptop? Remote servers? Routers?
Everything headless and sometimes kiosks.
> 2. Why do you use FreeBSD instead of Linux?
There's no such thing as "using Linux". You should ask why use FreeBSD over Debian, or why FreeBSD over Arch. Much easier questions with often quite obvious answers.
> 3. Why do you use FreeBSD instead of OpenBSD or another *BSD?
OpenBSD has no usable filesystem.
> 4. Do you find something lacking in FreeBSD? Is there something that is good in another OS that you'd like to see in FreeBSD?
Not really. Maybe swappiness and zram would be nice sometimes, but no biggie.
> 5. What is that one thing about FreeBSD that you would hate to lose if you were forced to use another OS?
1. Used in on my desktop for approx 8 years but migrated away a year or two back when I ran into one too many things that doesn't work well for desktop experience. Now it's only running on my nas.
2. I still use it on my nas because I'm familiar with it, has good documentation and very stable, and first class zfs support.
3. OpenBSD and DragonflyBSD both look quite fun to mess with but not the greatest desktop experiences, so that's why I always used FreeBSD in the past. Now I keep using it because familiarity and I know it will do what I need for my nas (mainly serving files and virtualization).
4. The desktop experience. It's doable if you're willing to give up some features and spend a bunch of time configuring some other ones but I've got other stuff to do these days.
2. Centralized documentation, board of directors versus benevolent dictator for life, faster network stack, fewer GNU tools in the base install, ports tree, license.
4. Hardware support, especially power management (ACPI, SpeedStep, etc.) on laptops that are not ThinkPads or Dell Latitudes. Wayland.
5. The FreeBSD handbook.
The biggest problem with the BSDs are not the operating systems themselves, but the network effect surrounding GNU/Linux causing developers to completely overlook them, going on to create bodies of code that are not easy to port or in some cases impossible (Systemd, Wayland).
2. ZFS, jails, stability (although the root reason at the time was "because people smarter than I recommended it"). In hindsight I can see how running some services works better on this system.
> 1. Where do you use FreeBSD? On your laptop? Remote servers? Routers?
Right now, I run FreeBSD on a few machines: my rented server, my two home servers which also do redundant PPPoE + NAT, a NAT machine at my MIL's that I also use for offsite backup of my home servers (I don't trust the rented server enough to run backups there), additionally, I have two mini PCs setup to run mythtv frontend (but the backend is not currently running, because our tv habits have changed). My desktops are Windows. My wireless access points and I think my managed network switches are Linux, so is the ISP provided DSL modem and LTE to network device (which I believe also runs embedded Android on the actual modem). I do have an old acer chromebook that boots FreeBSD, but I haven't used it in a while (my son used it for minecraft until an update changed a library and made it too hard to get working)
2. Why do you use FreeBSD instead of Linux?
I had great experiences with FreeBSD at Yahoo and WhatsApp, and bad experiences with systemd when Debian adopted it, so I decided to switch. And I've been mostly happy. Going between Yahoo and WhatsApp, I jumped about three major versions of FreeBSD in a weekend, and everything felt the same, but better. Jumping between major releases of Debian, lots of things feel different and sometimes better, sometimes worse, sometimes the same; I felt a lot of major changes I was dealing with were complicating my system to deal with use cases I didn't care about, and that a lot of the worse offenders were coming from the same developers and I was tired of dealing with their software and tired of trying to get things to work without it.
3. Why do you use FreeBSD instead of OpenBSD or another *BSD?
IMHO, FreeBSD is focused on being practical and also has a performance focus. OpenBSD has a very opinionated security focus, which I apprechiate, but features needed for performance are missing and unlikely to arrive; I'm more willing to compromise security than performance, so there you go. I mentally associate NetBSD with portability, but I'm not running FreeBSD on exotic equipment, and not interested in fighting with my embedded Linux devices to get them to run software of my choice: been there, done that, I'd rather tilt at different windmills now.
4. Do you find something lacking in FreeBSD? Is there something that is good in another OS that you'd like to see in FreeBSD?
Hardware support is hit or miss. I have usb 2.5G nics I can't use that I thought I'd be able to (but didn't check, and I have other uses for, so no big deal). HDMI audio on certain generations of intel chips is difficult because the graphics and audio drivers need to coordinate on clock settings, but there's no mechanism for that in FreeBSD, the Linux gpu driver is shimmed into the FreeBSD kernel, so that makes it trickier than it maybe already was. I had trouble getting FreeBSD installed on the chromebook I mentioned originally, but it did get fixed.
Not having a large user community makes it hard for hardware/software providers to get excited about providing support, because they don't get a sense of return on investment.
5. What is that one thing about FreeBSD that you would hate to lose if you were forced to use another OS?
Stability of experience. I know that 90-95% of the skills and knowledge I develop on FreeBSD will apply to future releases. I've had to learn firewalls on Linux three times (of course, FreeBSD also has three firewalls, but they are all supported and all kind of different; I simultaneously use pf, because of pfsync which provides for seamless NAT failover and ipfw to do traffic shaping and network delay simulstions; I've never used ipf, but I assume it provides value to some), and I work with mixed versions of Linux for work and have to deal with sometimes ip, sometimes ifconfig, sometimes netstat, sometimes ss on a regular basis, and it makes no sense. FreeBSD has the same needs for interface config and routing and socket listing, and made the existing tools do it, rather than new tools that work the same but different. Who has time for that? If FreeBSD ends, which I don't expect it to, I'll just go live in a cave with the final release and the best computer I can put together that's supported by the final release, and that will be my computing for the rest of my time. Honestly, while I sure computing will continue to develop, a big beefy box purchased today should get me a long time of continued use, so I'll be fine. When it falls apart, maybe there will be a retro marketplace, or maybe I'll move to assisted living.
Hopefully people have a better reason than simply getting off a purported bandwagon.
I was engaged with the early stages of a project where one of the founders wanted us to base a payment platform around FreeBSD. His reasoning boiled down to "Linux is too popular". The consequences of this choice would be significant, and that just isn't a justified position so I bowed out. The project, unsurprisingly, was a failure.
I'm curious if you could talk about any of the consequences at all. There's a very similar situation unfolding at my company currently. New project running on FreeBSD because that's what the admin likes, and he takes every opportunity to bash Linux that he can. I'd like to prepare for potential pitfalls best I can.
We've already had issues around compatibility with third party software and OS upgrades (which surprised me in particular, likely a mistake on the admin's part but I'm not privy to the details).
FreeBSD seems like a wonderful OS for purpose-built hardware (eg pfsense, PlaystationOS, Netflix's distribution servers), but I'd much prefer to be on something common for the general compute. I don't even want to know what hiring another/replacement admin will be like in the future (we're entirely on-prem in a city that's away from a major population centre, niche enough as it is without adding FreeBSD on top).
> I'm curious if you could talk about any of the consequences at all.
One major consequence is that your software and setup scripts are likely to continue to work over many major releases. Basic system tools don't often get replaced, so you don't need to worry about migrating to a new tool to configure interfaces, or a new firewall (although you do have three firewalls to choose from, they all have been there for a long time) or a drastically new init system etc.
Otoh, there are many projects that are made for Linux only. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally. Lots of assumptions creep in, people write Makefiles that need GNU make, and call make recursively with 'make' instead of $(MAKE), but FreeBSD has BSD make as make, and GNU make, if you install it, as gmake. FreeBSD sets up cc to be llvm's clang, and I don't think that's common in Linux. Many projects compile with either, but some don't. Specialized linking is tricky. Compiler and linker changes are probably an exception to my rule earlier about not replacing tools, but there's a case to be made that clang is at least as good as gcc, and the license is a better fit; there's no requirement that the base be all BSD licensed, but it's nice to move in that direction where possible.
System monitoring is different, but capabilities are roughly similar. FreeBSD has some nice things, and Linux has some nice things, I've got my preferences, but whatever.
I don't think it's hard to take a reasonable systems aware person and sit them down with a FreeBSD book and a FreeBSD system and get acceptable results. Yes, mastery takes time, but consultancies are available if you need mastery right now, and don't have time to develop it in house.
Normally the reasons for me don't tend to fit those who use Linux. And then it always turn in to a pissing match of "Linux can do that too". As linux suits to you for reasons.
It's up for you to take my recommendation and try for what you want the OS for rather than take my reasons to why.
I may recommend a Honda for that it's a Japanese manufacturer but the reason may be because my type of drinking cups fit the holders.
Why FreeBSD:
bHyve (Virtual Machines) within Jails. I have individual applications running in Jails, with proper ZFS integration including encryption.
The kernel is rock solid, its a fresh breath of air. Especially when to compiling your own.
Server stability is excellent minus this issue.
Everything just works, it feels less clunky than Linux in my opinion. That then turns in to a flame.
My personal opinion is that Systemd infuriates me. Microsoft has its grubby hands over it and many others. Political and non.
I don't have time to debate all this nor do people seem to accept that's how I feel about the Linux community. Both have their flaws and disadvantages.
Justifying my opinions is tiring and time consuming.
> His reasoning boiled down to "Linux is too popular".
You made the right choice. That founder demonstrated domain incompetence alongside a demonstration that they don't know when to delegate, with a side of shallow reasoning.
I've only recently had to start using BSD, and FreeBSD is definitely easier to get started with.
Anecdote:
I found a null pointer dereference in the OpenBSD httpd last week that allows an attacker to crash the server with a single crafted request. It's now patched.
I tried for a while to get a backtrace of the bug on OpenBSD, but their ancient gdb port doesn't support follow-fork-mode, and their clang port generates DWARF that their gdb port doesn't understand. Every time I reproduced the crash, the backtrace was just useless ASLR addresses. FreeBSD had none of these problems, and I was able to collect the backtrace in minutes.
What's the advantage of running Bhyve within a jail? The userspace process is sandboxed with Capsicum[0], which should provide similar security benefits, shouldn't it?
Is it just that you already have a jail and need to add Bhyve to it?
I've used it as my desktop OS since 1999 or so (first on FreeBSD's DEC Alpha port, so as to eat my on dogfood as I was one of the main contributors to the alpha port), with a brief detour running Ubuntu Linux on x86 when I was doing almost 100% linux work from 2010-2015 or so.
I run very basic GPU (GTX 750), use ZFS for everything, run lxde, and use linux firefox as my main web browser (via the LinuxJails project at https://wiki.freebsd.org/LinuxJails).
For day-to-day use its nearly the same as linux, and runs nearly the same apps as linux. The biggest frustration I have is "linux recipes" for doing things often don't work (naturally, since the OS is different), and electron apps are a crapshoot, since the electron is chrome, and the emulation needed for chrome is incomplete. For example, I'm listening to spotify right now and I can listen to playlists, but can't just play a song..
EDIT: One the things I loved about Ubuntu LTS is the packages being essentially frozen, aside from security fixes. FreeBSD is a "rolling release" OS for 3rd party packages, even on stable branches. That's one of the reasons that I use the ubuntu LTS firefox ... I can apt-get update & apt-get upgrade just the web browser and its dependencies, rather than the 1700 unrelated packages that I'd need to update just to get the newest firefox.
Vscode is also Electron and works great though. Chromium itself too.
For Spotify I use spotify-qt which is ok (not great) though with the latest version from ports it refuses to store my password in the KDE keychain any longer :(
Ps I actually love the rolling packages on FreeBSD while keeping a stable OS. On Linux these things are usually coupled. You can however change FreeBSD to quarterly updated packages if you so desire. Just set it to the quarterly branch instead of latest.
I use spotifyd and control the music from my phone most of the time.
I mostly don't care if I have the latest version of libfoo, but I do care that I have the latest version of anything exposed to the internet (eg, firefox), and any security updates required to libfoo.
What I hate is when I do a pkg update; pkg upgrade firefox and it pulls in 1000+ pkg updates via dependency chains, some of which change how things work. That's why I like the linux jail approach. Back in the old days (early/mid 2000s) when things were simpler, I still ran linux web browsers for the same reason. I could just download the tarball from mozilla or opera or whatever and update to the latest browser binary without taking a chance on fubar'ing my system.
You are probably the first FreeBSD guy who understands [and likes] the LTS option one can get with Linux world. Many from FreeBSD crowd just don't get the plain idea of LTS at all. Kudos!
You know how there's a constant stream of weird things Linux does that annoy and confuse you? Like .sudo_as_admin_successful showing up in your home directory with no way to turn it off and nothing really documented anywhere? Or being afraid to upgrade because you don't know which method won't clobber your custom kernel modules?
You can get rid of a lot of unexpected behavior just by using Slackware. I like the BSDs, but I also like having broader hardware and software compatibility.
I just started using FreeBSD and one of the first thing I did was to follow the Handbook instructions to set up a minimal Debian in Bhyve that I then used to access my old Linux partitions to copy files. Works very well for that and I have no complaints, but I also can't say I noticed any major improvement over Qemu?
But I made a quick attempt to also install something with graphics, probably Lubuntu, and I did not get that to boot. Is the graphics good enough to play games and run some Linux-only applications with reasonable performance?
The hypervisor is not enterprise like VMware where you can easily pass 3D accelerated adapters. But it's still very usable over remote-desktop. Windows Server works a charm, as does Linux Desktops via VNC or whatever remote protocol you use.
You can pass though hardware devices including graphic cards but you need to have it as a secondary and unused. bHyve is unable to use the primary card as well as a shared device for the guest.
Yeah the thing is that bhyve doesn't seem to have an emulated console like the other virtualization solutions out there. That makes things a little more cumbersome.
I'm not even talking about 3D passthrough. Just a fake VGA adapter you can see in a window so you can run an installer.
The browsers in a jail is a lot of work to install and maintain though. I wish that was more of a click and go. Doesn't have to be easy mode of course but it could really do with a bit of automation.
I have a weird luck with FreeBSD: it seems that every time I think about trying it, I find that it's just a month or so before a major version release. The first time I considered trying it was just before FreeBSD 10 was released; that laptop died and I later felt like giving it a go only to find myself twiddling my thumbs until 12 came out, and just last month I got permission to install VirtualBox on my work laptop (Windows) only to find that...
There's no Shockwave anymore; that killed the first attempt (I couldn't play iSketch with my friends). The second one ended because the Chromebook bricked. Third time is the charm, right?
The old releases don't become pumpkins immediately upon release of a new one. Things were different around 10, but nowadays, the support expectations are pretty clear[1]. FreeBSD 12 support ends at the end of this year, so not a good choice for new users; FreeBSD 13 support is expected to end in January 2026, so if you install today, you don't need a major update for about two years. That's plenty of time to try it and see if you like it. If there's a critical feature in the upcoming release that you'd like, RCs are available in advance of release, but IMHO, I wouldn't suggest that as a matter of course for a new user; sometimes RCs have rough edges and that's not a great intro. But you know, up to you.
In the past, waiting for an X.1 release was advised by some, but I don't think that's necessary anymore.
A new gunion(8) utility tracks changes to a read-only disk on a writable disk. This can be useful for making tentative changes to the disk, such as file system repairs or software upgrades, and then either committing or reverting them. c7996ddf8000 (Sponsored by Netflix)
I’ve been evaluating FreeBSD, and the primary thing that I miss is the ease of use that comes with using docker images.
The jails system + zfs is pretty nice. If there was an ability to snapshot a jail and easily package it as an image… I wouldn’t look back at docker again.
I admit that I'm not familiar with docker, but I had assumed their import/export would deal with images. Or is that not true?
See https://pot.pizzamig.dev/Images/
I suspect your question is essentially "why is this 14.0, and not 13.3?" And the answer to that question is that this is a new release from our development branch, not an update to an existing branch used for the 13.x releases.
FreeBSD 14.0 represents over two and a half years of feature development, stability and security improvements, and bug fixes. Some of these changes were cherry-picked into the stable/13 branch and were included in the FreeBSD 13.1 and FreeBSD 13.2 minor releases built from there.
A sibling comment notes that APIs or ABIs may change between major versions. This is true, but this is not the reason for a new major version. Rather, ABI and API changes are allowed during the development cycle on the main branch, but are not cherry-picked into the existing stable branches.
I have a proposed change to include in the release notes some significant changes that happened to have been merged into 13.x already, and so far have been excluded from 14.0's notes: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D42546
One such changes is moving from OpenSSL 1.x to OpenSSL 3 in the base system, due to OpenSSL 1.x going EOL. That's one of the things that caused this release to take so long.
> WiFi 6 support has been added to wpa (wpa_supplicant(8) and hostapd(8)). c1d255d3ffdb 3968b47cd974 bd452dcbede6
Finally! Although, wifibox has been a good enough stop gap solution, I'm happy to have decent WiFi support after all these years.
Can't wait to upgrade.
Next on my wishlist: Bluetooth.
The release builds are currently running, with the ETA for the official announcement being November 14:
* https://www.freebsd.org/releases/14.0R/schedule/
There will be an announcement at (amongst other places):
* https://lists.freebsd.org/archives/freebsd-announce/2023-Nov...
(This seems to happen with every release.)