BSD Cafe Billboard

Posted by Luis Emanuel to r/BSD:

I daily-drive Linux at work and FreeBSD on my personal ThinkPads (T480 & P52 currently). Both laptops and both operating systems, every day. I'm the kind of person who reads freebsd-update output and Phoronix benchmarks in the same hour.

Recently saw the "is FreeBSD really that goated" thread and it brought back the timeline of my own journey. Started with a rough — call it version 0.9 — build that barely had X11 working, evolved through five iterations, landed on something I'd call "production-stable personal desktop" around version 2.0 on FreeBSD 15.0 with a heavily customized MATE, ZFS boot environments, BastilleBSD jails for microservices, WireGuard tunnels and PF.

If I could send a packet back in time to my earlier self, here's what I'd put in the payload:

…

Question for this sub

What's the one thing you wish someone had told you in your first year on FreeBSD?

I suspect we'll generate a better FAQ in this thread than the wiki currently has.

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Yesterday from the same author:

• The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Two Systems on My Desk | The FreeBSD Forums

Thanks. Less formally: https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/1t7mzw1/comment/okqt36w/?context=1 …

grahamperrin said:

One or two bad eggs can spoil an omelette.

… and now, the omelette is thoroughly spoilt.

Linked from the commentary, the gov.uk domain:

• Our evaluation of OpenAI's GPT-5.5 cyber capabilities | AISI Work

Hi, thanks.

The subject line here does match the title of the linked article. This is good practice, good netiquette

The downvote (from me) is because the value of the article is disupted; you could not have known this when you shared it. It's a downvote for the article, not for you personally

For what it's worth, I think: don't delete it from BSD Cafe Billboard. It's good to raise awareness of the reputation.

The recent Hacker News story that unearthed the article gained very few votes.

FreeBSD Foundation Laptop Update:

• https://freebsdfoundation.github.io/proj-laptop/monthly-updates/2026-04 or
• https://github.com/FreeBSDFoundation/proj-laptop/blob/main/monthly-updates/2026-04.md

Cross-post: https://redd.it/1tc70zr

https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/@grahamperrin/116564335700354892 "tired old crap" …

@ciotbsd a gentle hint: in the absence of quotation marks, casual readers who don't follow links might wrongly imagine that the words above are yours.

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From the Senior Director of Technology at the FreeBSD Foundation in August 2022:

This link gets shared around every now and then, and my response is always the same: there is some useful insight, but there's also information that's so outdated it provides no value, outright misinformation, and self-contradiction. Some of the technical points are fair, and should be and are being addressed. But the commentary is often laughably wrong. The document seems more focused on advancing an agenda than a good-faith effort at improving security in FreeBSD.

• emphases: mine
• https://lobste.rs/s/2xxp8y/freebsd_lesson_poor_defaults#c_mhsghw

… surprised to realize that there was no default terminal; you have to install one …

On FreeBSD, x11/plasma6-plasma-desktop is comparable. The Plasma desktop environment installs without Konsole, without System Settings, and so on:

Thanks! Also:

• Mythos finds a curl vulnerability | Lobsters
• Mythos Finds a Curl Vulnerability | Hacker News
• Mythos finds a vulnerability in curl, a single low severity one, and curl's creator is not impressed, calls it "a succesful marketing stunt". : r/BetterOffline and (old Reddit) nine other discussions …

ping: https://mastodon.social/@vermaden/116547440312687324

It's also at https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/@vermaden/116547440017577532 (a slightly different post number), he typically double-posts.

An example for 15.0 to 15.1-BETA2:

https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/1t7mzw1/comment/oks7bj6/

Comments at https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/1t8rt8o/freebsd_pkgbase_minor_upgrades/, in particular:

Kernel modules should be upgraded at the same time as the kernel.

This is also missing from the FreeBSD Handbook, I'll wait for D56632 to be closed before making the suggestion.

You can flag (report) your own post with a request for it to be moved.

SDDM with X11Libre:

Sorry. I couldn't resist the urge to replace x11/xorg with x11/xlibre, in a test environment, after someone made a throwaway comment:

Wayland is very bad shit. XLibre wins

Fixed by reinstalling x11/xorg

Spun off from (Linux) Fedora Verified: Help Shape a New Way to Recognize Fedora Contributors | BSD Cafe Billboard

FreeBSD Project

https://framapiaf.org/@tubsta@bsdlab.au/116478621827645455

– redirects to https://social.bsdlab.au/notice/B5jMI1FY3WtTTWqvNA:

Something the #FreeBSD core team could consider. This is something that has probably been needed for a while @dch@bsd.network

My initial thoughts:

• it's an awful lot to think about for a project, or team (Core, for example), that already has, I think, too much to think about.

Fedora Project

From the Proposal:

Unanswered Questions for the Fedora Community

While we have a framework, there are several major questions we need the community to answer before we move forward. Specifically, we want to know:

• Validation: Should applicants be approved by grassroots peer vouches, or an elected committee?
• Fairness: Does this model truly value non-code contributions equally?
• Progression: How strictly structured should the path to becoming “Verified” be?
• Maintenance: Should the status expire after 12 months of inactivity?

Of those four questions, the first two are huge.

https://mastodon.social/@mxenbionix/116478348932821730:

… I do have to echo some of the concerns people seem to be raising about being unclear to what this is actually solving. …

Also, the commentary at and under https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/188603/3.

A user group solely for locals to meet in person and, occasionally, online?

A little stupidity (nothing special), just FreeBSD with KDE Plasma in VirtualBox with two virtual displays:

Parallel discussions:

• Open Source Does Not Imply Open Community | Lobsters
• Open source does not imply open community | Hacker News

Nit: I don't like the Douglas Adams pretence.

The heart of the problem isn't at the GitHub level; it's people, at any level. One or two bad eggs can spoil an omelette.

… No "community". No politics. No Code of Conduct. No pull requests or issues. No wiki. No core team. …

Worth reading (the author is a FreeBSD ports committer):

• HowToBe/CoreMember - FreeBSD Wiki

Eggs

– Doorverts – SDDC