[FreeBSD-Announce] FreeBSD 12.0 end-of-life

[Polytropon]

On Tue, 18 Feb 2020 04:00:18 -0700, @lbutlr wrote:
> On 17 Feb 2020, at 20:23, Tomasz CEDRO <tomek at cedro.info> wrote:
> > [...] 
> > FreeBSD does not seem to be reliable desktop environment
> 
> True for ever non-Apple Unix variant. Most (that is to say
> nearly all) FreeBSD installs are non0desktop servers.

I'm using FreeBSD since 4.0 as my primary desktop. While
12.0 and 12.1 definitely had issues, it never impacted me
(or my clients or family), so it's still here as a desktop
solution that works.

Of course I can understand the "never touch a running
system". As an illustration, I still support one special
customer who has a FreeBSD 4.4 Or was it 4.10?) system
still running (XFree86, _not_ X.org!). There is a replacement
ready, but the customer just doesn't want to replace this
airgapped and isolated system, because whenever we discuss
the options, he tells me: "Never touch a running system.
As long as it works, no need to 'fix' something."

On desktop systems, especially those including web browsers
and so-called "productivity software" (i. e., office suites),
security is far more important, as new approaches to broken
software concepts and flaky hardware (yes, I'm looking at
you, Mister Intelprocessor!) and their exploitation are
being invented very quickly. So the OS has to provide the
optimal solutions for mitigation. A faster release cycle
surely helps a lot. Newer security flaws probably require
methods of dealing with them that cannot be easily ported
to older releases, so that's probably the reason why they
are not supported that long.



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...