FreeBSD 14 Beta Released - Initial WiFi 6 Support, Updated LLVM Toolchain, Fwget Utility

[grahamperrin]

FreeBSD 14-STABLE should be out before the end of October.

stable/14 was branched in August.

The October-oriented schedule at https://www.freebsd.org/releases/14.0R/ is for 14.0-RELEASE, not to be confused with 14-STABLE.

Phrases such as CURRENT, STABLE, RELEASE, legacy, and production are frequent sources of confusion. For https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/sh....cgi?id=273017 there's behind-the-scenes work in progress that should go towards improving this situation.

[ehansin]

stable/14 was branched in August.

The October-oriented schedule at https://www.freebsd.org/releases/14.0R/ is for 14.0-RELEASE, not to be confused with 14-STABLE.

Phrases such as CURRENT, STABLE, RELEASE, legacy, and production are frequent sources of confusion. For https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/sh....cgi?id=273017 there's behind-the-scenes work in progress that should go towards improving this situation.

Thanks and thanks for sharing that link. I have been confused by this before, had to sort out what was what.

[antnythr]

I used FreeBSD for years as a regular general use desktop system, and I found it to be great. Very few issues. What ended up changing things though was when I switched up my hardware from a desktop PC to a laptop. This laptop was one of the ones that had an nVidia/Intel Optimus graphics setup and it was basically impossible to run FreeBSD. The touchpad also had a lot of issues as well. I switched over to Linux which had quite good support for my machine. Over time I began to realize that a large majority of the general use desktop development (whether you're talking about hardware support or software) was happening on Linux and then things would eventually be ported over, or you could figure out ways to compile things yourself, but it was always somewhat behind. I'll always have a soft spot for the OS though.

I've been wanting to set up a home server lately, and I'd love to set it up with FreeBSD.

[grahamperrin]

… I never have been a fan of the little devil logo, it always sort of weirded me out. …

People assume that it's the logo because, amongst other things, it's so much larger than the logo at the home page.

It's neither a devil, nor the logo; please see https://www.freebsd.org/copyright/daemon/ (and https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/sh....cgi?id=273360 aims to partially fix breakage that was caused by disappearance of the publications page).

[grahamperrin]

… a bug in their wifi stack that allowed interceptors to read encrypted packets!

Also, FreeBSD bug 256957 – Wi-Fi: rc.conf(5) NOAUTO, ifconfig(8) up and unwanted WLAN connections to open networks

In retrospect, I should have applied the security keyword at the outset.

The other security bugs that I'm trying to progress are private (and nastier).