FreeBSD 15, the next major update for the free and open-source operating system, is now available as a beta release. If you've been looking at FreeBSD as a possible alternative to Linux, or you just want to try it out in a virtual machine, there are a few new features and a ton of smaller changes.
FreeBSD is still a Unix-like operating system with a kernel, device drivers, userland utilities, and documentation all maintained under the same project. Many of the same utilities, applications, and desktop environments from the Linux ecosystem are natively available for FreeBSD, and other Linux software can run unmodified with the Linuxulator . Desktop Linux is still the best option for an open-source operating system for your PC, but FreeBSD 15 is shaping up to be another solid release.
First, there are some improvements to hardware compatibility. Intel Tiger Lake-H and Meteor Lake processors now have better driver support, there's a new rtw89 driver for some Realktek wireless hardware, and NVMe support is now enabled on all hardware architectures.
FreeBSD 15 includes "lots of improvements to the network stack, including performance improvements and bug fixes for the sctp stack." There are also many changes to the boot loader, like faster ACPI detection in EFI mode, and the LinuxBoot loader can now start FreeBSD from 64-bit x86 and ARM systems. The changelog mentions "many improvements to the audio stack" as well, including support for how-swapping in the audio mixer.
The FreeBSD installer has a helpful improvement in this release: firmware packages can now be downloaded and installed after the base system installation is done. Finally, many of the applications and utilities have been updated, including date, less, file, OpenSSH and OpenSSL, and grep.
FreeBSD 15 is also dropping support for most 32-bit devices, following the same change in Debian, Fedora, Windows 11, and other operating systems. That includes armv6 processors, 32-bit x86 CPUs (i386), and 32-bit PowerPC hardware. The developers said back in June , "While there have been a few requests to keep full support for these platforms, we have not seen an increase in developer interest or willingness to support these platforms."
You can download FreeBSD 15 Beta 1 as an install disc , virtual machine image , or OCI container image . It's available for 64-bit x86 PCs, 64-bit PowerPC (powerpc64 and powerpc64le), ARMv7, 64-bit ARM (aarch64), and RISC-V. There might be some bugs and outdated documentation, since this isn't the final release, so don't install it on any mission-critical hardware.
Source: FreeBSD via DistroWatch
