For the benefit of people who don't absorb the entire article (spoiler alert):

>> … AI didn't take our jobs. Greed did. …

Colin Percival (FreeBSD Primary Release Engineering Team Lead) longer uses that ID in Reddit.

Instead: /u/perciva

Most recently, in /r/freebsd https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/1rphd7t/freebsd_14...

All hail.

In <https://lists.freebsd.org/archives/freebsd-hackers/2025-Augu...> (August 2025), Konstantin Belousov (kib@) write:

> There was a long and hot thread about 'Rust in base' recently. …

Unfortunately, the list archives are not suitably indexed by popular search engines, so, for example, https://www.startpage.com/do/dsearch?query=Rust+base+site%3A... does not find what's required. Sorry.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeBSD-Q4-2025-Status-Report includes Michael Larabel's quote from the final status report of 2025:

> At some point in early 2026 the rust KPIs should be stable enough for interested developers to try writing new code with them. They will not be perfect, but I want to make sure they work roughly like existing drivers expect and also fit the expectations of rust developers before asking for testers. Hopefully the Apple drivers will be back up to parity with the initial WIP in C in the first half of 2026 as well.

https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/96pm7w/benno_rice_...

> Benno Rice: The Tragedy of systemd – BSDCan 2018 : r/freebsd

Don't be misled by the title. I thoroughly recommend listening to the whole thing.

There has been a disproportionate amount of negative noise from people who know too little about pkgbase.

pkgbase is a good thing. A very good thing. A huge game-changer, in terms of testing STABLE and CURRENT.

Is that still a problem?

A few weeks ago I noted a change in ARC-related documentation for OpenZFS on Linux. I can't remember the details (I can find them, if necessary) but I do remember that it was a significant improvement for Linux users.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47407895

Part of the problem is, too few committers. https://cgit.freebsd.org/doc/log/access?h=refs/internal/admi...

> as well as developing quality translations. …

https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=267274

https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=284875#c8

For Russian, things are better: https://freshbsd.org/freebsd/doc?committer[]=Vladlen+Popolit... – see https://cgit.freebsd.org/doc/commit/access?h=refs/internal/a...

It's probably fair to say that trust in Oracle is irrelevant to OpenZFS.

Where Linux does use ZFS: to the best of my knowledge, it's typically OpenZFS – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47407937 is my own use case.

https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/@grahamperrin/116168374700889783

> Would anyone like to say something? > > …

Maybe slightly optimistic.

https://bokut.in/freebsd-patch-level-table/#stable/13

https://bokut.in/freebsd-patch-level-table/#stable/14

https://bokut.in/freebsd-patch-level-table/#stable/15

True.

I have OpenZFS-native encrypted root-on-ZFS for Kubuntu 25.10, made ultra-simple by the installer for Ubuntu (25.04 at the time).

FreeBSD can not yet do this. Please see, for example, https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=263171

> 263171 – add loader(8) and boot loader menu support for boot with OpenZFS-encrypted ROOT

Ahem.

<https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/1rpnd05/comment/o9...> for the ZFS chapter "… telling people to do the WRONG thing, …"

<https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/1ru0k9u/comment/oa...> for the ports chapter "… misleading, it was wrongly updated: …"

– and so on.

> … the project's documentation is a gold standard IMHO.

Documentation certainly is not gold standard. I'm a former doc tree committer, familiar with many of the bugs …

I shouldn't overgeneralise.

https://github.com/orgs/FreeBSDFoundation/projects/1/views/3... … and so on.

A blocker, although this bug was not the reason for rescheduling:

https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=290024

TIL

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_aren%27t_gonna_need_it

For Arch users of KDE Plasma and applications, are essential packages ever missing? <https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/KDE#Installation>

From https://gist.github.com/grahamperrin/307b8cdef5d4dcd30f5fdc4... for FreeBSD:

> It's not unusual for a Tier 1 platform to have no package for a wanted desktop environment. Two platforms are at this tier: …

For example, kde for FreeBSD 15.0-CURRENT was recently missing for a few days for AMD64; is still missing for aarch64 (64-bit ARMv8).

This is not to criticise the maintainers of packages or repos. I do understand the constraints.

The absence of an essential meta package is, inescapably, an impedance when aiming to test installers and upgrades, especially with pkgbase.