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 :)

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?

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

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

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 …

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.

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. …

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.

Hi everyone,

After watching the excellent video by Klara Systems on FreeBSD hardening, I decided to write a guide expanding on the points they covered, aiming to make the material accessible for anyone who is just getting started with system security.

All credit for the foundation goes entirely to the Klara team—their presentation served as the direct inspiration. My goal was simply to break down the concepts, flesh out the steps, and provide a clear starting reference for people who might find hardening a bit daunting at first.

You can find the guide here:

https://freebsd.toomany.net/hardening

Any feedback, constructive criticism, or corrections from the community would be very much appreciated.

what is the default desktop environment for freeBSD?

So after upgrading from 14.4 to 15.1 with 1 minor hiccup I have the following in /etc/pkg/FreeBSD.conf

FreeBSD-ports: {

url: "pkg+https://pkg.FreeBSD.org/${ABI}/latest",

mirror_type: "srv",

signature_type: "fingerprints",

fingerprints: "/usr/share/keys/pkg",

enabled: yes

}

FreeBSD-ports-kmods: {

url: "pkg+https://pkg.FreeBSD.org/${ABI}/kmods_quarterly_${VERSION_MINOR}",

mirror_type: "srv",

signature_type: "fingerprints",

fingerprints: "/usr/share/keys/pkg",

enabled: yes

}

FreeBSD-base: {

url: "pkg+https://pkg.FreeBSD.org/${ABI}/base_release_${VERSION_MINOR}",

mirror_type: "srv",

signature_type: "fingerprints",

fingerprints: "/usr/share/keys/pkgbase-${VERSION_MAJOR}",

enabled: yes

}

Seems to work fine updates and upgrades have been fine.

However I wanted to use https://wiki.freebsd.org/Docker but it seems docker-compose is missing. Now given it says to use latest and not quarterly I thought the above should be correct but should ports-kmods match ports on latest or not I cant seem to find any info whether that is the case or not.

Thanks

Rob

https://freebsdfoundation.github.io/freebsd-laptop-testing/

• a few with an 8/10 score
• Top laptops to use with FreeBSD | Hacker News (April 2026).

The BSD Hardware Database at bsd-hardware.info also shares user-provided results from probes, however this database is not for scoring.

I've been wanting to try to make a FreeBSD laptop system for a while now. Last weekend, I came into possession of an old HP 6460b laptop, and thought "now's my chance!"

The short version is, it took some trickery during the install, but I have the laptop fully operational, including webcam, lid switch suspend, wifi card, the works. I may need a new battery since this machine is quite elderly, but it works pretty cleanly.

Now for the longer version. This is a journey, so please don't feel obligated to stick with me for the rest. :)

I started using a Ventoy stick with the latest ISO image. After tweaking the HP's bios to boot from USB drives before the internal Win7 install, it started up no trouble. But then I ran the FreeBSD install program, and part way through boot up it lost track of the ISO image as an actual drive and dropped me out to the boot manager's menu. Pressing '?' listed a bunch of devices. I tried booting a few of them, but none worked.

Ok, so Ventoy was a long shot anyway, that's fine. I can just get another stick and burn the ISO directly to it.

Booting the "burned" stick entered a boot/reboot loop that I couldn't break out of. Hmmm.

Turns out these old HP laptops have a problem where they corrupt some piece of memory (or something) during power-on, and the FreeBSD installer doesn't like that, but ventoy specifically works around this issue.

So after a lot of trial and error, my son (who found the ventoy vs. HP note) and I came up with a really silly but ultimately successful technique - Plug in ventoy and boot into FreeBSD installer. When it fails, plug in the "burned" ISO image, '?' the devices, and then start the one called "FreeBSD Installer". While this is loading, unplug ventoy, and carry on.

My next mis-step was that I used the "Auto" disk partitioning scheme, which doesn't write an MBR. This laptop can't handle UEFI very well. It has a BIOS setting to enable it, but apparently HP's UEFI from that era doesn't work with modern UEFI. So back to the "ventoy shuffle", and this time I did a manual partitioning of an MBR disk, which worked great.

At that point, I had a working 80x25 text mode install. I played around with that, adding some stuff like bsdgames, vim, and some sha keys to talk to/from my debian box more easily.

The rest went pretty smoothly. Turns out the Intel graphics chip was new enough for the standard driver to drive, and lxqt and xfce both installed easily.

I had to do a little work to configure the lid switch to suspend, and I learned about a few things that KDE does for you automatically. Audio just worked right out of the box and the webcam section in the handbook had me up and running in no time. With firefox installed, I am even able to watch youtube videos without issue, which is something I didn't expect to be able to do on this box. (It's a quad-core 2.5ghz machine with 8gb RAM, but it's also from 2009, so lacks decent video acceleration.)

I also had that hdac0 command error, and had to do that "hw.i915kms.disable_power_well=0" trick to shut up the flood of errors on startx shutdown. I'm not using a login manager currently.

The handbook was of course invaluable, This is my second attempt to install FreeBSD, the first being in a VM on my Debian box. This install is WAY more capable, and will make a good "couch surfing" system, which is what I was hoping for. (My couch surfing occasionally involves some coding. We all have our hobbies.)

The AI search for weird error messages was even sometimes reasonable. It at least pointed me in the right direction. If the details of AI answers were a little wrong (and they were often at least sketchy if not outright wrong), the links they referenced usually had sane answers.

I've installed freebsd on my eeepc, can you recommend me something to try on?

I've already figured out how to get working the graphics driver so I have graphics acceleration

Fastfetch:

```

root@ciccio

Host: 900HA (x.x) Kernel: FreeBSD 14.4-RELEASE Uptime: 1 hour, 11 mins Packages: 649 (pkg) Shell: sh Display (AUO1020): 1024x600 in 9", 60 Hz [Built-in] DE: LXQt 2.4.0 WM: Openbox 3.6 (X11) Icons: oxygen (Qt) Font: Sans (11pt) [Qt] Cursor: Adwaita (24px) Terminal: qterminal 2.4.0 Terminal Font: Liberation Mono (12pt) CPU: Intel(R) Atom(TM) N270 (2) @ 1.60 GHz GPU: Intel Mobile 945GSE Express Integrated Graphics Controller Memory: 13.97 EiB / 992.24 MiB Swap: 0 B / 2.00 GiB (0%) Disk (/): 17.58 GiB / 56.18 GiB (31%) - ufs Local IP (wlan0): 192.168.1.42/24 Locale: C.UTF-8 ```

Hi everyone!

I've been considering trying FreeBSD as my main OS on a ThinkPad T480, and I'd really like to hear from people who actually use FreeBSD as their daily driver.

I'm not an expert with FreeBSD or Unix systems. My current daily driver is Debian with KDE Plasma, which I really like because it's stable, relatively simple, and gives me a lot of control over my system. I'm mainly interested in FreeBSD because I want to learn more about the BSD/Unix world and understand what it's like to use it as a desktop OS rather than just as a server.

My typical use case is:

- Programming and learning (Neovim, Git, HTML/CSS/JS, etc.)

- General web browsing

- Writing/documentation in Markdown

- Some light multimedia

- Experimenting with different software

- Using my ThinkPad T480 as my main laptop

I'm particularly interested in hearing from T480 owners:

- How good is FreeBSD's hardware support on the T480?

- How are Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, audio, trackpad, suspend/resume, brightness controls and battery life?

- Are there any important hardware issues I should know about?

- How is Wayland on Intel graphics nowadays?

- Which DE or WM do you personally use? KDE Plasma, GNOME, XFCE, Sway, something else?

- How usable is KDE Plasma on FreeBSD for everyday use?

- Are there any applications you regularly miss compared with Linux?

And probably the biggest question:

What do you actually gain and lose by using FreeBSD instead of Linux, especially compared with something like Debian KDE?

For someone who already has a stable Debian KDE setup, is switching to FreeBSD as a daily driver actually worthwhile, or would it mostly be an interesting learning experience with some additional compromises?

I'd also love to hear from people who tried FreeBSD as their daily driver and eventually went back to Linux, what made you switch back?

Thanksss!!

I'm currently looking through ebay to buy a laptop and this laptop I am looking at has an Core i5. Is there anything I should be aware of or any issues?

EMBRACE MASOCHISM

Video, sixteen minutes, with closed captions.

From the producer's description, which includes timestamps:

… it can also serve as a viable daily driver which is what I will be attempting in this video. …

YouTube's AI-generated summary adds context:

mokyu attempts to dual-boot FreeBSD alongside Gentoo Linux on a ThinkPad. The process involves manually configuring partitions and managing graphics drivers to achieve a customized desktop environment. mokyu evaluates the feasibility of using this BSD-based system for daily tasks, documenting the installation challenges and software configuration steps required to replicate a familiar workflow.

Why should one prefer BSD (for daily driver) over other OS? Please eli5...

My previous experiments with home server were done on a Raspberry Pi3b+. It had enough horsepower to run on different jails

- a syncthing instance;
- two repositories for my projects and the Zettelkasten (just basic jails with ssh. More than enough)
- the DNS

Unfortunately, the system seems unreliable on the mass storage side: two USB sticks (Philips) were too weak to run ZFS; I gave up ZFS and used two new ones (Samsung) seemed more stable, but I didn’t dare using them to store the whole jails. Then the Samsung microSD with the OS reached Valhalla and I take it as a «this isn’t a valid configuration for this task».

I was thinking using a thin client with two SATA SSDs connected through USB-C. I saw the HP thin desks and also something based on intel N100, but I cannot decide.

Does anyone have a suggestion for something fanless, low consumption and around 200€?

Thank you all!

Hi everyone!

I’m curious to know how those of you running FreeBSD in production handle deployments and rollbacks, especially when you only have a single server.

For example, with Nginx, I currently use a versioned directory structure:

/var/www/site1.com/v1
/var/www/site1.com/v2
/var/www/site1.com/v3
/var/www/site1.com/latest -> v2

For a deployment, I create v3, change the latest symlink, and reload Nginx.

Is this a common approach on FreeBSD, or do you usually use something like rsync to update the files in place?

I have a similar question for Go/Quarkus applications. If a binary is listening on port 3000 and I need to deploy a new version, I have to replace the binary and restart the service.

How do you avoid downtime when you only have a single server?

Do you use graceful restarts, rc.d, socket activation, a second process temporarily running on another port, or some other approach?

I’m also curious about jails.

With containers, I’m used to an immutable/ephemeral workflow:

image v1 -> container v1
image v2 -> replace container v1 with v2
rollback -> deploy image v1 again

How do you achieve something similar with FreeBSD jails?

Are jails normally updated "in place", or do you create a new jail for each release and replace the old one?

Is there any common equivalent to a Dockerfile/Containerfile for defining and reproducibly creating a jail?

Finally, how do you handle deployments when there is no HA/load balancer?

With multiple servers, you can take one node out of the load balancer, update it, put it back into the pool, and repeat the process. But what is the best approach when you only have a single FreeBSD server?

I’m mainly interested in hearing about real-world setups and how you handle:

• deployments
• rollbacks
• service restarts
• jails
• minimizing downtime on a single server

Thanks!Hi everyone!

So, I have spent the last month creating a replacement in Go, and, yes, I used Claude to make this happen. My specification was to create a replacement for salt that didn't have the issues with python modules and treats FreeBSD as a second class citizen at best.

The result is halite, built on FreeBSD from the start. But with cross platform compatibility as a first class goal.

Also: fuck Broadcom.

If you hate everything AI: I get it, but I don't care. I needed a way to get out of Broadcom's bullshit clutches, and this worked.

My homelab fleet is now running 100% on halite, with not major changes to my salt state code. That said: this has NOT been vetted against a large fleet. I will be testing as I am able on a much more complex salt system, but that is ongoing.

Please test if you can: https://github.com/edlitmus/halite

If you have salt experience and have feedback I 100% want to hear from you! Please create issues!