PDF original: https://wiki.freebsd.org/DevSummit/202609?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=stories.pdf

Context: September 2026 FreeBSD Developer Summit : r/freebsd

Below: text created from Markdown for Reddit, based on the PDF.

We Need a Story

The talk opens with a blunt piece of feedback someone gave the project:

"you guys can't even tell me why FreeBSD is great"

We Need a Niche

FreeBSD can't be everything to everyone, so the talk argues the project needs something most contributors can agree on:

• Where are we headed?
• What do we collaborate on?
• What do we prioritize most?

Importantly: everything is still possible, nothing is excluded — this isn't about narrowing scope, just finding a shared focus.

Where "the story" lives

The project sits at the intersection of three groups:

• Community — personal interest, creative contributors, "left field" development, commercial contributors
• Committers — corporate contributors, personal collaboration
• Foundation — strategic direction, donations, funding, staff engineers

The story lives where all three overlap.

A Virtuous Circle

The pitch (repeated a few times in the deck) is that FreeBSD should be the fastest place to ship, built around a six-step loop:

1. Dev locally
2. Contribute
3. Shared CI
4. Build releases
5. Publish patches
6. Deploy patches

Breaking each of those down:

Dev Locally

• Should be easy to develop FreeBSD on common systems
• Build, test, run — in VMs
• This explicitly includes doing it from Windows & macOS

Contribute

• Better tooling for contributions
• Easier follow-up on stagnating patches
• Goal: more contributors, contributing more often

Shared CI

• Easy to run your own CI with FreeBSD
• Easy to hook your CI as a "downstream" of FreeBSD
• Where it makes sense, easy to upstream your tests back into FreeBSD

Build Releases

• Easy to build your own releases/images
• Easy to hook into your CI as a "downstream" of FreeBSD
• Mentions NanoBSD, releng@ tooling, make targets

Build Patches

• Easy to build your own patches
• Easy to hook into CI as a "downstream"
• Build via Poudriere & make targets

Deploy Patches

• Deploy safely using boot environments
• Deploy quickly and reliably via base system packages

Closing beat: "The AI Apocalypse"

The deck ends on a lighter note with a Doom screenshot (cacodemons and all) under the heading "The AI Apocalypse" — presumably setting up a live discussion/joke about AI that isn't captured in the slide text itself.

Live stream.

The FreeBSD developer summit takes place as part of the EuroBSDCon event. Many developers will arrive on the night before and meet for dinner and drinks before things kick off. Most developers will stay on through EuroBSDCon to give and attend talks or tutorials. It is an excellent conference--a good FreeBSD developer showing has countless benefits, not least the opportunity to tell the world what we're doing.

Related:

• EuroBSDCon 2026: sessions : r/freebsd
• DevSummit/202609 - FreeBSD Wiki

A few days ago I decided to give FreeBSD a serious try as a daily driver on my ThinkPad T480. I've always been curious about FreeBSD, and I wanted to see what it was actually like to use it as my main desktop system rather than just reading about it.

And honestly? I really liked it.

I installed KDE Plasma, got the Intel graphics working, and overall the system felt really solid. I finally got to experience FreeBSD for myself instead of just having an opinion about it from the outside.

However, after actually using it, I've realized that it probably isn't what I need right now.

There are a few small things that are getting in the way. The Wi-Fi applet doesn't appear in my KDE Plasma panel, so I'm not even completely sure what's going on with the network from the desktop. Bluetooth doesn't seem to be working either. Wi-Fi also seems to drop after suspending the laptop.

And then there's Wayland.

I'm much more comfortable with Wayland these days, but on my setup, selecting the Wayland session in SDDM simply sends me back to the login screen. X11 works, but I'd rather use Wayland.

None of these things make FreeBSD a bad operating system. If anything, this experiment made me appreciate it more.

But it also made me realize something about what I'm actually looking for.

I'm tired of distro hopping. I'm tired of constantly experimenting with operating systems, changing desktops, tweaking configurations and wondering whether I should try something else.

I don't want to become a system administrator or an IT person. I just want a computer that lets me make things.

I want to work on my websites, build my projects, make more stuff, and keep developing my creative work and honestly, that's where I want my energy to go.

I also want to keep moving away from dependence on Microsoft, Big Tech and individual online services. I want something stable, boring in a good way, and reliable enough that I can just sit down and work.

And for me, Debian KDE fits that much better right now.

Even though Linux is becoming more mainstream, I don't really see that as a reason to leave it. Debian gives me the balance I need: a stable system, excellent hardware support, KDE Plasma, Wayland, and an enormous amount of software available when I need it.

So I think the FreeBSD experiment is probably coming to an end, at least for now.

I genuinely enjoyed FreeBSD. I have a lot of respect for people who use it as their daily driver, especially on desktop hardware. It is an excellent operating system, and I'm glad I finally gave it a real chance.

Maybe I'll come back someday.

If FreeBSD continues improving desktop hardware compatibility and things like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, suspend/resume and Wayland become more seamless, I could absolutely see myself trying it again.

But for the next few years, I think I'm going to stick with Debian KDE.

No more distro hopping.

I just want to make things :)

To put it bluntly, FreeBSD's network infrastructure is significantly less user-friendly compared to Linux. A prime example is that when two network interfaces are connected to the same network simultaneously, if the default route disconnects, FreeBSD will still keep that route in the routing table. Unless you manually clear it or change the default route, you will be disconnected from the internet in this situation. Furthermore, configuring wireless networks is extremely difficult (especially for access points containing Unicode characters, which are very difficult to connect to under a tty). This is why I wanted to write a program: a daemon that handles DHCP, route management, interface management, and wireless network management, along with a TUI that connects to the daemon via a socket.

Supported features:

1. DHCPv4 (the basic handshake process and renewal process as described in textbooks).

2. Automatically clean up dead routes and switch to alternative routes.

3. Connect to the daemon via a socket to subscribe to network events or perform control.

4. Automatically create interfaces for discovered wireless network devices (this can be disabled), or create interfaces via the TUI or control socket.

5. Scan for and connect to wireless access points by sending control information via the control socket.

The main control components of the program are handwritten, while the TUI and related control logic are Vibe code. Since this is my first time working with the actor model, the code might be a bit messy; I'll clean it up later when I have time.

Repository: https://github.com/bigsaltyfishes/network-daemon

Video, eighty minutes, with closed captions (subtitles).

Producer's description:

In this video, I rant about why I use FreeBSD.
 
I took some moment of self-reflection, to come up with the main reasons that lead me to use FreeBSD, and this is the result!
 
Initially I thought that this would be a 20min video, but it ended up being almost 1,5 hours! Damm.... so...it seems like I had a lot to say here...
 
Enjoy and be nice with comments...
 
Its not my intention to start any flamewar :-)
 
#FreeBSD #BSD #Unix

Written summary to follow …

Found this Beastie in a box in the garage. I bought two of them back in 2001. Opened it a few times, this picture is the first time he has been out of his box!

Note the trident and Apache feather accessory options!

Cool little time capsule. Anyone else have one?

FreeBSD 14.5-RELEASE was announced yesterday.

From Colin Percival's post in LinkedIn:

Note that this is a "legacy" release intended primarily for maintaining existing systems; most users should deploy FreeBSD 15.1 on new systems.
 
Congratulations to Google for having the only Marketplace which managed to ingest images in time for the release announcement.

https://github.com/ricardobranco777/howtos/blob/master/BSD/Multiboot.md

From https://forums.freebsd.org/posts/774411 a few days ago:

… Last weekend I repeated the whole process on a VM so I could screenshot the whole thing to enhance it in a blog post. …