It's Official But Sad: TrueOS Is Over As Once The Best Desktop BSD OS

It's been on life support for a while but to much sadness, TrueOS indeed is no longer being maintained as the once very promising downstream of FreeBSD that for a while offered arguably the best out-of-the-box BSD desktop experience.

TrueOS, formerly known as PC-BSD, is dead. Kris Moore, the VP of Engineering at iXsystems, confirmed earlier this month on their forums that work has ceased on the operating system.

TrueOS in 2018 with its Lumina desktop environment.

When asked whether it was abandoned given the most recent commit was from early January, Kris commented, "Yes, at this point there is no active work continuing on TrueOS by the original developers. We've been somewhat swamped with TrueNAS Core and related efforts for a bit now, but we will go ahead and retire the site / repos before too long."

PC-BSD 10.0 in 2014.

Kris later followed up with, "Over the past 2-3 years it's been a personal passion project for a few iX employees, and we're all busy pushing very hard on TrueNAS CORE/Enterprise and some other projects right now. Plus there's not a lot of community demand for what it was trying to do in that space, so we've mostly all moved onto other things."

PC-BSD in 2007.

TrueOS began as PC-BSD back in 2006 as a FreeBSD downstream while in 2016 transitioned to the TrueOS branding. TrueOS/PC-BSD offered one of the best BSD desktop experiences. I have many fond memories of PC-BSD/TrueOS over the years and personally will miss it a lot.

For the past two years though it's been on a steady decline particularly after they worked to re-invent itself but without the desktop focus.

The folks at iXsystems meanwhile are working on TrueNAS 12.0 CORE as the culmination of TrueNAS and FreeNAS.

For those looking for a desktop-friendly BSD-based OS with nice out-of-the-box support in the era past TrueOS/PC-BSD, the best I've found for any desktop BSD at the moment is GhostBSD along with MidnightBSD.