So i had a mission, getting WoW and Hyprland to work on FreeBSD, and i did :D

What are the practical benefits of switching from Fedora to FreeBSD?
I'm curious why i should choose BSD over Fedora?

Would be used for gaming and YT videos mostly

have no idea why its doing this. my window manager is unusable and i cany remove the thing from the autostart file that breaks it bc of this

Hi All,

I've been developing this Wayland compositor and integrated desktop environment written in Zig (and some C).

It's currently Linux only, but I've been considering a FreeBSD port and wanted to gauge whether there's any interest before committing to it.

It's a bit different from most Wayland desktops as the compositor and desktop shell run in a single process, with a custom scene graph (still need wlroots but own scene graph), shared GLES2 rendering pipeline, configurable window decorations (including custom shapes), glass effects, and a fairly extensive theming system - see examples above.

My initial goal would simply be to get the compositor and shell running natively on FreeBSD, then gradually bring over the remaining functionality, although systemd services tab would probably be omitted or replaced.

I'm curious whether anyone here would be interested in using something like this, or perhaps helping test an early port.

The project is open source and developed with AI assistance, which I'm happy to be transparent about. GitHub: https://github.com/oxydizer/rediwm

Would love to hear your thoughts! Thanks!

So you guys told me, FreeBSD is great for hosting a server, why is it better than say Debian Linux? ty guys

I recently moved my Freebsd root volume to a different drive and wanted to keep the same EFI partition that I had been using. My efibootmgr entry for the system didn't change but the FreeBSD boot loader can't find the ZFS pool. I've tried messing with the currdev and vfs.root.mountfrom settings from the loader and also from the loader.env and from boot/loader.conf files but haven't had any luck so far.

Is this supported? Any gotchas that I need to be aware of?

Hey everyone! Zapusk 3.0 — Super Global Update is out 🚀

For those who don't know: Zapusk is my open-source launcher (GPL-3.0) for running Windows games on Linux and FreeBSD. Drop in a .exe — it installs Wine, DXVK and all dependencies by itself.

What's new in 3.0:

🪟 Two new themes:

• Windows XP — Bliss desktop with hills, a taskbar and a Start menu that opens every section of the launcher

• Windows 95 — working Start menu and chunky authentic beveled buttons

🔧 Auto-heal: if a game crashes, the launcher reads the log, tries fixes (install vcrun, d3dx9, .NET, reinstall DXVK...) and relaunches — up to 4 attempts

📥 One-click import of games from Steam, Heroic, Lutris, Bottles and GOG

⏪ Prefix snapshots: a copy is made before risky changes, one-click rollback anytime

💀 Panic kill — instantly terminates a frozen game

📊 Monitoring overlay (FPS, CPU/GPU, RAM) like MSI Afterburner, right Shift+F12

⬆ Self-update button — downloads the right package for your distro by itself

Packages: pacman, .deb, .rpm, AppImage. FreeBSD — via ports/script.

https://github.com/romanepev2014-stack/zapusk

Bug reports in Issues are very welcome — especially from anyone trying it on FreeBSD 🙂

Hey Freebsd community,

Is there a way to get wifi working on a Framework 16 7040 Series laptop? It uses the AMD RZ616 Wi-Fi 6E card. I've tried wifibox, but I can't get it to work. Any other suggestions?

Thank you!

I've been on a strange project as of late- attempting to create a windowing system using libvgl (Exclusively using the system graphics library was done previously with the IRIX mex and HP/UX HPWindows/9000, so i can say there are some prior art for those who doubt it could be done).

However, the demo for the VGL libary won't work at all from my prior experience. I've tried changing around the demo's code to see if something did go wrong; first was seeing if the unorthodox… i = 0; while (i++) { DoSomething(!); if(i > 8) break; } means of loop control could be redone to the less common but supported "do while" loop, and that was not the case.

Even if i had a fair bit of help from the freebsd discord, i still haven't found a way to get the libvgl demo up and running on my x86-64 system that's being ran on UTM.app (found the same issue on i386 as well if anyone was wondering if it worked on the first arch freebsd ran on), so if anyone finds a way to get the demo up and running. I'd appreciate that.

I have a WIP version of the libvgl demo that i've been trying to get up and running on github if anyone wants to poke it: https://github.com/MagnetarRocket/freebsd-src/blob/main/share/examples/libvgl/demo.c

EDIT: typos.

Maybe a noob question, but I have been running this system since FreeBSD 14, and usually for security patches it's just a matter of fetch, install, reboot.

Now with the recent update to p6, even after a reboot it's still running p5. Why?

$ freebsd-version -kru ; uname -mvKU
15.1-RELEASE-p5
15.1-RELEASE-p5
15.1-RELEASE-p6
FreeBSD 15.1-RELEASE-p5 releng/15.1-n283639-893c7c99b60d GENERIC amd64 1501000 1501000

Kernel: FreeBSD 15.1-RELEASE
Shell: sh
Window Manager: Hyprland 0.56.2 (Wayland)
Cursor: Bibata-Modern-Ice (24px)
Terminal: kitty 0.49.2
Terminal Font: DejaVuSansMono (11pt)
Memory: 4.11 GiB / 15.36 GiB (27%)
Swap: 46.11 MiB / 2.00 GiB (2%)
Locale: C.UTF-8

It looks like archive.freebsd.org is down for a few days (a week?). I could not find any information about it. Is this known? Should this be reported somehow somewhere?

Copied from the artist's original post (2024):

from left-to-right: puffy, technomage, beastie, tux, pocket daemon, fred, glenda, daemon

It's one of the images in the random carousel in the sidebar …

Update ― Monday 26th October

I have removed the artwork above from the sidebar of r/freebsd – please see the pinned comment, below, about his more recent work.

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.