FreeBSD 11.1 released
Someone else in this thread, speaking of something else, wrote this line:<p>&quot;I assume that using version 11.1 is the way to go? No point in using the 10.x branch?&quot;<p>... and <i>that</i> is everything that is wrong with FreeBSD - and has been for over ten years.<p>I wrote a long critique of this issue in 2012 that you can read in the mailing list archives:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lists.freebsd.org&#x2F;pipermail&#x2F;freebsd-hackers&#x2F;2012-January&#x2F;037294.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lists.freebsd.org&#x2F;pipermail&#x2F;freebsd-hackers&#x2F;2012-Jan...</a><p>... and although many of the core team had agreeable sentiments in the very long discussion that followed, nothing at all has changed.<p>The poster is correct - there is indeed no point in using the 10.x branch.  What he doesn&#x27;t know is that there has been no point in using the 10.x branch for over a year now[1] but since the 11 release was at &quot;dot zero&quot; you were ill-advised to use that as well.  This means that for over a year <i>there has been no good answer to the question &quot;which version of FreeBSD should I use&quot;.</i><p>In summary:<p>FreeBSD is an operating system by, and for, FreeBSD developers.  It is very difficult to invest time and money into FreeBSD because the platform is neither stable[2] nor long-term.  Finally, FreeBSD, possibly unwittingly, loses a lot of end-user development and reinvestment since end users are never working on the same OS that the developers are.[3]<p>[1] As usual, all new drivers and non-critical bug-fixes go to 11, since that is what &quot;is current&quot; and nobody bothers backporting any of it to 10.  This was true <i>even before 11.0-RELEASE came out</i>.<p>[2] I don&#x27;t mean stable in terms of reliability - FreeBSD is rock solid and we trust all of rsync.net to it - I am speaking of the stability of the OS platform itself and what functions it is capable of.<p>[3] I&#x27;m not interested in your success stories running CURRENT in production.  The official stance of the FreeBSD project is that CURRENT &quot;includes works in progress, experimental changes, and transitional mechanisms&quot;.  They go on: &quot;FreeBSD-CURRENT is not in any way “officially supported&quot;.