Today – which is 2026/06/19 – is another anniversary of FreeBSD Day.Because of that kinda special ‘holiday’ I also prepared something special … FreeBSD project slowly but successfully is moving forward into the future with PKGBASE way of things … and freebsd-update(8) days are limited as it this tool will be deprecated and gone when FreeBSD 16.0-RELEASE will see the light of day.I was never a big fan of freebsd-update(8) tool – not that it was very bad at what it was designed to do … it was just always interactive and time consuming. Fetching binary delta patches took hours between major releases and FreeBSD developers also cried while preparing these patches between every possibility.So … as a kinda Easter Egg I prepared something special for 33rd FreeBSD Anniversary (Max Verstappen number for many years BTW) … a terminal screensaver that mimics the freebsd-update(8) tool This image below is a real life example on how freebsd-update(8) upgrade looks like.… and this is what I was able to recreate Right now the most recent FreeBSD release is 15.1-RELEASE … and from the earlier tree its 14.4-RELEASE. The FreeBSD project rule about upgrading is to first upgrade from 14.4-RELEASE to 15.0-RELEASE and then from 15.0-RELEASE to 15.1-RELEASE – that is why I picked up my screensaver settings in the same manner.% grep -A 3 SETTINGS freebsd-update-screensaver.sh# SETTINGS VEROLD="14.4-RELEASE" VERNEW="15.0-RELEASE"Its available for download on my scripts page – freebsd-update-screensaver.sh – here.While we are at the upgrading topic – I am really glad that FreeBSD project provided a dedicated upgrade related page to cover all possible ways of freebsd-update(8) tool and also newer PKGBASE way with pkg(8) tool.Its available here – https://freebsd.org/releases/15.1R/upgrading/ – for the record.This is how this page looks like.I use FreeBSD as my main ‘daily’ system since 2005 – that is 21 years now in 2026. Some people would say that I am crazy or hopeless … some people even shared their concerns like ‘Man … why are You doing this to Yourself?’ – and my take on that is … even with all things that were sometimes harder then on Linux (or Windows/Mac OS X/Android/AMIGA/…) systems – I believe that FreeBSD was/is still least PITA OS to work on with.It was predictable – using FreeBSD as your daily driver embraces POLA principle – for most of the times – even with major upgrades – you just have backward compatibility and everything works – its very RARE to have something broken when the development process continues its march … and even if … You still have almighty ZFS Boot Environments to cover Your ass anytime anything gets less then optimal.Happy FreeBSD Day!EOF