The TrueOS Difference: Changing Methodologies for Changing Times

Ken Moore <ken@ixsystems.com>

Since the TrueOS project was started in the middle of 2016 as a re-focus of the PC-BSD project, we have been seeing massive growth in our user base and the number of active contributors to the project. This session will go over the differences that TrueOS brings to the table compared to PC-BSD/FreeBSD, the reasoning behind those decisions, and how those changes are currently implemented within TrueOS.

The TrueOS project was started in July of 2016 as a re-focus of the PC-BSD project. This change allowed us to address several key issues that we were having with using FreeBSD releases as the “core” of PC-BSD. Since then, we have seen significant growth in the use of TrueOS not only as a Linux-desktop alternative but also as the foundation for server-focused appliances. This session will be going into detail about the issues that necessitated the change, the attempted solutions to those issues, and the final changes that are seen in TrueOS today.

In particular, we will discuss some of the following changes:

  • Release engineering (-Release vs -Current, time schedules) and quality assurance
  • Service management solutions (rc.d vs OpenRC)
  • Contributor policies (timeouts on patch acceptance, importing code from development branches)
  • Package management systems (package-base and pc-updatemanager vs ports)

Time-permitting, we will also discuss some of the upcoming changes that are scheduled to appear in TrueOS which will further distinguish it from PC-BSD and FreeBSD.

Website: https://www.trueos.org/

GitHub: https://github.com/trueos