If you're installing FreeBSD today, use 15.0

Or just run -current in production, like we do. See https://people.freebsd.org/~gallatin/talks/OpenFest2023.pdf

Or https://papers.freebsd.org/2019/fosdem/looney-netflix_and_fr...

> Or just run -current in production, like we do.[0]

If you develop, it's probably best to do that against current [1], but if I'm running a web, mail, file, database, etc, server there is IMHO very little advantage to doing so. Most folks aren't trying to push >400Gbps.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4TZxj-Dq7s

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQ0mvmZtbaY

Seems like the reason is to catch new bugs, fix them and upstream the fixes promptly, with a team of 10 doing that. Sounds awesome, but I could see other people just passively consuming stable.

While I also use -current, I don't think this is good advice to the kinds of people who don't know if they should be running 14.4 or 15.0. There are caveats to running -current (for example, you need to disable the built-in debugging stuff on -current to get decent performance but the debugging stuff is already disabled on actual releases), so I think for new people it's best to recommend they use the latest release (15.0) and they can discover -current when they are more familiar with FreeBSD.

Yes, FreeBSD current is quite usable. It's fun to start using the new features as they are added to kernel and userland immediately !