PC-BSD Rolls Into A Rolling Release Distribution

PC-BSD, the popular desktop FreeBSD-based operating system that's rather friendly towards conventional end-users, has now become a rolling release platform.

One month ago the PC-BSD project shared their future plans that involved moving from a fixed release that follows FreeBSD to instead a rolling release model. Their primary motive for moving to a rolling release model is that official FreeBSD releases are too infrequent, with it being a year or more between official releases. "With us tracking the upstream FreeBSD releases, it has really tied our hands getting new releases out to the public. The past couple of releases had a delay of almost a year between them, which is WAY too long in my opinion. To further compound the problem, our build system wasn’t designed to do frequent updates of packages and our utilities, which made getting updates out to the community a long and tedious process."

By moving to this new model, PC-BSD users will be able to quickly receive new features and bug-fixes to the core PC-BSD utilities and packages. The PC-BSD system packages will also be updated in sync with the FreeBSD ports tree. The turn-around time from having something hit the FreeBSD ports tree and it being available to PC-BSD users is expected to be within a ferw days.

A PC-BSD post at the end of February announced that the first rolling-release images are now available.