A Love Letter to FreeBSD

Dear FreeBSD,

I’m still the new person here, learning your ways, stumbling over the occasional quirk, smiling when I find the small touches that make you different. You remind me of what computing felt like before the noise. Before hype cycles and performance theatre. Before every tool needed a plugin system and a logo. You are coherent. You are deliberate. You are the kind of system that doesn’t have to shout to belong.

You carry the quiet strength of the greats, like a mainframe humming in a locked room, not chasing attention, just doing its work, year after year. Your base system feels like it was built by people who cared about the whole picture, not just the pieces. Your boot environments are like an old IBM i’s “side A / side B” IPL, a built-in escape hatch that says, we’ve thought ahead for you. You could be, you should be, the open-source mainframe: aligned with hardware lifecycles of three to five years or more, built for long-term trust, a platform people bet their uptime on. Your core design reminds me of Solaris in its best days: a stable base that commercial and community software could rely on without fear of shifting foundations.

And make uptime a design goal: a thousand-day uptime shouldn’t be folklore, it should be normal. Not a party trick, not a screenshot to boast about, but simply the natural consequence of a system built to endure. Mainframes never apologised for uptime measured in years, and neither should you. Apply updates without fear, reboot only when the kernel truly demands it, and let administrators see longevity as a feature, not a gamble.

I know you are reaching further into the desktop now. I understand why, and I can see how it might widen your reach. But here I find myself wondering: how do you keep the heartbeat of a rock-solid server while also embracing the quicker pulse of a modern desktop? I don’t pretend to have all the answers, I’m too new to you for that, but my first instinct is to lean on what you already have: the natural separation between CURRENT and RELEASE. Let those worlds move at their own pace, without asking one to carry the other’s compromises.

And now, with pkgbase in play, the stability of packages matters as much as the base system itself. The base must remain untouchable in its reliability, but I dream of a world where the package ecosystem is available in clear stability channels: from a rock-solid “production tier” you can stake a business on, to faster-moving streams where new features can flow without fear of breaking mission-critical systems. Too many times in the past, packages vanished or broke unexpectedly. I understand the core is sacred, but I wouldn’t mind if some of the wider ecosystem inherited that same level of care.

Culture matters too. One reason I stepped away from Linux was the noise, the debates that drowned out the joy of building. Please keep FreeBSD the kind of place where thoughtful engineering is welcome without ego battles, where enterprise focus and technical curiosity can sit at the same table. That spirit, the calm, shared purpose that carried Unix from the PDP-11 labs to the backbone of the Internet, is worth protecting.

There’s also the practical side: keep the doors open with hardware vendors like Dell and HPE, so FreeBSD remains a first-class citizen. Give me the tools to flash firmware without having to borrow Linux or Windows. Make hardware lifecycle alignment part of your story, major releases paced with the real world, point releases treated as refinement rather than disruption.

My hope is simple: that you stay different. Not in the way that shouts for attention, but in the way that earns trust. If someone wants hype or the latest shiny thing every month, they have Linux. If they want a platform that feels like it could simply run, and keep running, the way the best of Unix always did, they should know they can find it here. And I still dream of a future where a purpose-built “open-source mainframe” exists: a modern, reliable hardware system running FreeBSD with the same quiet presence as Sun’s Enterprise 10k once did.

And maybe, one day, someone will walk past a rack of servers, hear the steady, unhurried rhythm of a FreeBSD system still running, and smile, knowing that in a world that burns through trends, there is still something built to last.

With gratitude,
and with the wish to stay for the long run,
A newcomer who finally feels at home.