[cperciva]

each point release is only supported for about three months

Where are you getting 3 months from? It's usually 9 months and occasionally 12 months.

Also, major versions are supported for 4 years and unless you're messing with kernel APIs nothing should break. (Testing is always good! But going from 14.3 to 14.4 is not a matter of needing lots of extra development work.)

[andrehacker]

I stand corrected, the official current release plan is "...while each individual point release is only supported FOR THREE MONTHS AFTER THE NEXT POINT RELEASE".

https://www.freebsd.org/security/#:~:text=on%20production%20...

Recent point releases:

14.3 (June 10, 2025)

14.2 (December 3, 2024)

14.1 (June 4, 2024)

14.0 (November 20, 2023)

13.4 (September 17, 2024)

>> Also, major versions are supported for 4 years and unless you're messing with kernel APIs nothing should break.

Well, things may not break but your system may be open to published vulnerabilities like these:

https://bsdsec.net/articles/freebsd-security-advisory-freebs...

For keeping up to date with vulnerability fixes for packages/ports (which are far more frequent) the "easy" path is to use the last FreeBSD point release.

[tete]

Yes, so what you do is you run `freebsd-update fetch` then `freebsd-update install` or if you switch a minor version you do freebsd-update upgrade -r MAJOR.MINOR` and do the same. Minor release upgrades are not the breaking kind. ABI, etc. will stay intact. There aren't expected breakages it's just that stuff will have new features and you might have some really specific use case where that shell command version output is checked and breaks stuff when it changes.

I think that's a big misunderstanding coming from other systems. Minor system updates are the kind of updates that a lot of other systems would pull in silently, while FreeBSD's major releases are a lot more like OpenBSD's releases (where minor and major version numbers don't make a difference).

Minor in FreeBSD means that stuff isn't supposed to break. It's a lot more like "Patch Level". I always want to mention Windows here for comparison, but keep thinking about how much Windows Updates break things and did so for a long time (Service Packs, etc.).

Maybe going about it from the other side makes more sense: FreeBSD got a lot of shit for not changing various default configurations for compatibility reasons - even across major versions. These are default configurations, so things where the diff is a config file change. I think they are improving this, but they really do care about their compatibility, simply because the use case of FreeBSD is in that area.

This is in contrast to eg OpenBSD where not so few people run -current, simply because it's stable enough and they want to use the latest stuff. They only support the last release (so essentially release +6 months) but again even there things do not usually break beyond having to recompile something. They all have their ports/packages collections and want stuff to run and OpenBSD being used a lot more "eating your own dogfood" style, which you can see with there being an OpenBSD gaming community, while that OS doesn't "even" support wine.