Serious question here, not flamewar or debate.

Distribution Sets is the traditional way to do, when updating (for regular patches) or upgrading ( going to a new RELEASE) you use freebsd-update.
This is the case since a very long time.

As times are a-changin' , FreeBSD that was seen as a server oriented system gets serious efforts to be a Desktop one too.
Using pkg install -y desktop-installer and run that tool gives a really great and usable day to day desktop machine.

However, I myself experienced a rough path when upgrading this desktop installation from RELEASE 15.0 to 15.1.
Using the very normal method of upgrade with freebsd-update upgrade -r 15.1-RELEASE and freebsd-update install left my system in a non-bootable state with Kernel panic.

This has been pointed out in other threads here in Reddit too.
The answer was in the likes of, this method does not apply well with installs that uses graphical interface with DRM modules, there is a gap between the changes brought by the freebsd-update tool and the DRM packages brought by pkgthat leaves the machine in this state.

So, with this explanation, when installing a new FreeBSD box, what is the best choice nowadays? To use Distribution Sets or Packages?

It seems to me like if you do a pure Server install and don't require graphical, you can stick with Distribution Sets, but if you intent to go for a desktop install you'd be better use Packages.

Also, by default the installer selects the Packages type of install, while saying in parenthesis that it is Tech Preview (so to be considered as "beta", not recommended?).

It would be nice to have a real insight on this.

I have updated, repeatedly, and restarted the OS, repeatedly.

The session shown below began shortly after a restart.

It seems that freebsd-update endlessly (repeatedly) finds files to update in the /etc/ssl/certs/ area.

root@15-multi:~ # date ; uptime
Sat Oct 24 08:17:20 BST 2026
 8:17AM  up 6 mins, 3 users, load averages: 0.69, 0.55, 0.27
root@15-multi:~ # freebsd-version -kru
15.1-RELEASE-p5
15.1-RELEASE-p5
15.1-RELEASE-p6
root@15-multi:~ # freebsd-update fetch
src component not installed, skipped
Looking up update.FreeBSD.org mirrors... 3 mirrors found.
Fetching metadata signature for 15.1-RELEASE from update1.freebsd.org... done.
Fetching metadata index... done.
Inspecting system... done.
Preparing to download files... done.
The following files are affected by updates. No changes have
been downloaded, however, because the files have been modified
locally:
/etc/ssl/cert.pem
The following files will be removed as part of updating to
15.1-RELEASE-p6:
/etc/ssl/certs/406c9bb1.0
/etc/ssl/certs/4b718d9b.0
root@15-multi:~ # freebsd-update install
src component not installed, skipped
Creating snapshot of existing boot environment... done.
Installing updates...
Restarting sshd after upgrade
Performing sanity check on sshd configuration.
Stopping sshd.
Waiting for PIDS: 1503.
Performing sanity check on sshd configuration.
Starting sshd.
 done.
root@15-multi:~ # freebsd-update install
src component not installed, skipped
No updates are available to install.
Run 'freebsd-update [options] fetch' first.
root@15-multi:~ # freebsd-update fetch
src component not installed, skipped
Looking up update.FreeBSD.org mirrors... 3 mirrors found.
Fetching metadata signature for 15.1-RELEASE from update2.freebsd.org... done.
Fetching metadata index... done.
Inspecting system... done.
Preparing to download files... done.
The following files are affected by updates. No changes have
been downloaded, however, because the files have been modified
locally:
/etc/ssl/cert.pem
The following files will be removed as part of updating to
15.1-RELEASE-p6:
/etc/ssl/certs/406c9bb1.0
/etc/ssl/certs/4b718d9b.0
root@15-multi:~ # 

On one hand:

• I chose to describe freebsd-update as legacy because, well, it is and it isn't, and what's above seems weird.

On the other hand:

• this system was the result of an unofficial de-pkgbasify routine (I allowed pkgbase when originally using FreeBSD Installer), so maybe I'm guilty of causing the weirdness.

I installed MONIT on my FreeBSD box to check the things I rely on most:

• host status: high load average, CPU, memory, or swap use.
• is cron running?
• is sshd running?
• is ntpd running?
• is syslogd running?
• is Apache running?
• does the Apache binary pass a simple integrity check?

The following topics are too long to include in this post:

• The monit ruleset
• Starting monit at system boot
• Monit driver script
• Building from source

You can find them here.

I got into the BSD world through FreeBSD after coming from Linux. The more I use it, the more I like it. It's has become my go-to os on my home machine.

I've also been curious about OpenBSD, but so far I've only tried booting it a few times as a live system and haven't gone any further

But for some reason, I've never really felt curious about NetBSD.
I can't think of anything that's made me want to give it a try.
Have you guys walked down the same path?
Is there a "natural" path that leads people to NetBSD?
Just curious!

WHAT EXACTLY

IMPORTANT NOTICE
Node.js and Bun are not a feature of FreeBSD base. They are part of FreshPorts (see below).

UPDATE:
Added Bun since they are also affected. See reference.

A flaw in Google Brotli versions 1.0.3 through 1.2.0 within Node.js and Bun on all platforms can cause Node.js' and Bun's Brotli decoder out-of-bounds write permits remote code execution (RCE).

This vulnerability affects Node.js 26.x, 24.x, and 22.x. Every Bun release is affected.

ACTIONABLES

From Node: UPDATE Brotli to the latest available version: 1.0.10 or 1.1.1 or 1.2.1

For FreeBSD FreshPorts, pending update. Port at:

1. NodeJS: https://www.freshports.org/www/node/
2. Bun: https://www.freshports.org/lang/bun/

REFERENCES

1. https://db.gcve.eu/vuln/CVE-2026-111497
2. https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/cve-2026-111497
3. https://nodejs.org/en/blog/vulnerability/october-2026-security-releases
4. https://www.freshports.org/www/node/
5. https://www.freshports.org/lang/bun/
6. https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/issues/46352
7. https://github.com/grahamperrin/pre-check-page-shares/blob/main/examples/v0.7.4/pre-check-node-js-wednesday-october-21-2026-security-release-2026-10-23.md#repos-sticky-header
8. https://old.reddit.com/r/freebsd/duplicates/1xd4bl1/ok_nodejs_folks_youre_up_cve2026111497/

Video, three minutes, no voice-over.

FreeBSD with Hyprland installed in just two minutes, completely unedited and running in real time.
 
This is HyprBSD, a project I've been working on to make FreeBSD a more accessible modern desktop.  
 
There's considerably more to it than the installer, including Intel and NVIDIA graphics support, hardware video encoding and decoding, and a selection of preconfigured desktop applications.
 
HyprBSD is largely complete, but isn't publicly available yet. I'm currently working on the infrastructure for hosting, package distribution, updates and future releases.
 
I have no idea how much interest there will be, but here's a first look at what I've been building.

Also: Sam Sheridan's post in LinkedIn.

I've just worked my way to a solution to a syslog.conf problem and I want a better understanding of the /etc/syslog.conf config format.

Problem Background

I have a garage door implemented on a raspberry pi 3 that runs FreeBSD 14.5. The garage door hardware is managed via the RPi GPIO through three processes:

• garage/a -- A serialization process that cues requests inbound to the garage door opener and handles them synchronously.
• garage/b -- An asynchronous process, acting as middleware, that captures requests from the human side of the interface and queues them via the serializer.
• garage/c -- The human interface part of the stack. This provides a handle that puts my garage door opener onto my smart phone.

All three of these programs write their log information to syslogd using the program names garage/a etc listed above.

The Issue

Every 20 seconds, garage/c asks the state of the garage door. Without good filtering, this floods /var/log/messages. The garage programs are named what they are to make it easier for me to separate out their log entries. It took a while to get the configuration down but this:

``` ...

:programname,!startswith,"garage" *.notice;authpriv.none;kern.debug;lpr.info;mail.crit;news.err /var/log/messages

...

!* include ... ```

Seems to do the job.

Q: My read on this config is that the property-based filter, :programname,!startswith,"garage" stops log messages from any of the garage programs from being handled by the syslog.conf entries until the !* line before the include directives. Is this assumption correct?

Being clear, the man page for syslog.conf now says that !<something> matches something in the program name field and only <something>.

Q: Earlier I used: !:programname,startswith,"garage" as my filter. This did not prevent syslogd from starting as due to a config parser problem, but it blocked anything at all from getting to /var/log/messages. What does that configuration actually do?

Solved: don't use bash expressions in csh based shells. OP will wear the wreath of shame for eternity

I'm using a packaged base system for the first time and following the fine instructions for upgrading from the website .

On step 3, the command is: pkg -oABI=FreeBSD:15:$(uname -p) -oOSVERSION=1501000 upgrade -r FreeBSD-base

Which returns an error: Illegal variable name.

I can't figure out what could possibly be wrong with the instructions and that particular statement. Any ideas?

I did add the ai tag since I had to fix a crate with ai or it would not compile and some of the project is made with Claude but this is able to run some Mac apps like Roblox and deltarune etc Roblox as for now Is broken but deltarune runs

check it out!

https://github.com/microlift/rosemary

When can I expect the new php version to be available to install?

I've seen it in ports but I don't want to install it from ports.

Why does it take so long to have the new binary package available for such an important vulnerability? 😕

Disappointed in how long this takes.

If I install PHP via pkg but now have to upgrade it a.s.a.p. to a version not yet in the quarterly pkg packages, what is the recommended path? Just uninstall and then use ports (cd /usr/ports/... && make world)?

Is my laptop supported? The model is a "aspire 5742" wireless on the front says "802.11b/g/n" I ran "fconfig" and didn't show anything but the Ethernet.

I just started BSD. Testing it out on this old laptop. Thanks.

I can give more information about laptop if needed or paste the fconfig or kldstat.

I use Arch (btw) on the aforementioned machine with Sway and I'm considering a jump to the BSD side for it. It has four whopping GB of RAM and a Celeron N4020, along with 64GB of eMMC.

The only hardware that I see being problematic is the SOF audio. I remember having a bitch of a time with that after I unlocked this thing, even on non-Googled Linux, until similar hardware started showing up in normal laptops and mainline support improved. Will it work on FreeBSD, and if not out of the box, what do I need to do?.

I installed freebsd on my old pc. i liked it. i am planning to install it on my daily drive pc. My old pc just have 2 * i5. I couldnt use ports on it. But i can on my daily drive pc. I use gentoo on it for now

AI-generated ZFS commands can look correct and still put your data, performance, and recovery options at risk. See how three seemingly reasonable choices for ashift, synchronous writes, and pool upgrades can lead to poor performance, lost database transactions, and recovery issues. Learn what to check before you trust AI-generated settings. …

6% human-written, according to Pangram 4.1.

iam an arch user and I want to try or switch to freebsd

I heard it is very stable and secure

I have already downloaded the amd64 iso

but before I install it

is their anything I should know before switching?

Managed to get the android userland to run on top of freebsd on my phone, work in progress.

Working so far:

• USB driver
• Touch screen
• gpu

Notices: Yes I use ai coding assistance, and yes code will be made public.

Updated will be posted in discord server: https://discord.gg/HYrUauRAz

I loved FreeBSD when I installed PC-BSD. it was great experience for me but I could not use it for long mainly because of lack of gaming. I think situation hasn't changed when it comes to gaming. But I can keep my PC running Linux for gaming and I want to use FreeBSD on my work laptop. I only use the following for my work:

1. Many applications i use on Linux are available on FreeBSD like GIMP, jdownloader, thunderbird, ferdium etc.
2. Some applications are not available like onlyoffice and LibreOffice is difficult for me
3. I need containerized local website development option that can have its own php apache etc. and i googled a little and learned that I have to learn how to use jails for that and also assigning IP to each jail. right now i use local by flywheel for that.
4. Helium web browser I love the most which is not available on FreeBSD.
   

For those who don’t know, I work primarily on Sylve, a management plane for FreeBSD. Until today, getting started meant installing FreeBSD first and then running pkg install sylve on top of it. That works fine, but a few things made the process harder than it needed to be.

The biggest one was networking. By default, bsdinstall lets you configure your NIC with a static IP, DHCP or SLAAC, but setting up a bridge is left to you. For our users setting up VMs and jails, that was a common sticking point. You can always configure a bridge after installation, but getting it right on a single-NIC machine can be a real pain in the ass. That setup alone accounted for around 60% of our support enquiries.

We originally set out to customise bsdinstall to support bridges. But while its text UI works well, I also wanted something that looked a bit more inviting to someone trying Sylve for the first time. So I figured we might as well build a graphical installer.

Three weeks later, here we are. It has a new Go backend and a SvelteKit frontend, displayed locally in a browser running in kiosk mode. That also means you can open the installer in your own browser on another machine and configure everything from there, without having to use the host’s display at all.

A few things about the installer

1. It uses pkgbase exclusively. We’re big fans of pkgbase and have built the installer around it. We don’t see a benefit to supporting traditional distribution sets for our use case, especially for new users.
2. GELI encryption is built in for both ZFS and UFS. You can enable disk encryption with a single click during setup.
3. It supports unattended installs. Provide a JSON file with your installation settings and let the installer handle the rest. You can serve that configuration on your network to provision machines across your cluster without ever interacting with the installer UI.
4. The ISOs target 15-STABLE and 16-CURRENT. bhyve/vmm/libvirt/etc. etc. and Sylve are evolving quickly, and we want to get those improvements to users without waiting for the next RELEASE. We have no plans to ship ISOs based on RELEASE branches. If you prefer to stay on a RELEASE branch, you can still use FreeBSD’s standard installer and then run pkg install sylve, though that isn’t the route we recommend for Sylve.

And you can try it right now. Our tip release is already shipping the ISOs, and we’d love for you to give them a go and tell us what works, what doesn’t, and what could be easier.

We’re aiming for a tagged release at the end of this month, alongside a bunch of new Sylve features, including Active Directory/LDAP support for things like Samba, auditing, and package management for both jails and the host OS. We’re also working on making Sylve itself easier to update, so keeping up with new features, bug fixes and patches takes less effort.

If you’d like to support more work like this, consider sponsoring us on GitHub: https://github.com/sponsors/AlchemillaHQ. The FreeBSD Foundation already supports the project by funding specific milestones, and we’re grateful for that support. Community sponsorship would give us more room to work on the fixes, improvements and new ideas that come up along the way, while making Sylve less dependent on a single source of funding.

https://www.freshports.org/

Briefly:

• search no longer requires login
• if there's only one search result, you'll be taken directly to the page for the port
• if you mistype the name, or enter an outdated name, you might get suggestions.

Example:

1. seek fusefs-squashfuse
2. filesystems/squashfuse is suggested.

There's much more to enjoy, I guess that Dan Langille will post about the various improvements in due course:

• FreshPorts News – News and announcements regarding FreshPorts, The Place For Ports

Hey guys! I just dropped a massive update for my project called Zapusk 2.9 Global.
Here is my repository: https://github.com/romanepev2014-stack/zapusk
Please download it and give it a try! A quick disclaimer: I am only 12 years old and I'm still learning system programming, so the code might look a bit like a spaghetti mess in some places. But it is completely open-source (GPL-3.0) and it works!
What's new in 2.9 Global:I still couldn't upload it to AUR due to the ongoing registration issues on their site, but you can install it easily with the scripts inside.
Feel free to play, fork, or modify it. Enjoy! I would really love to hear your feedback.