(This is from december and was covered in various places then)

SCALE was always the main future - that has been totally obvious to all customers at this point. It was also obvious there would be some point they were going to either merge them or maintenance mode Core.

Part of this seems like there are people think that "no new features = EOL", whereas it's usually "you get nothing = EOL".

ixSystems is basically guaranteeing support for Core until the users disappear, which is all someone should expect here.

Unlike most companies, TrueNAS has published roadmaps and the bugs associated with features on those roadmaps. See here: https://www.truenas.com/docs/truenasupgrades/ They are pretty clear about everything, and you can see there are no major version upgrades planned for Core and haven't been for a while - just another stable release.

Overall this just feels like "Some people are upset that they wanted to believe ixSystems was going to develop two completely separate products forever, one which used their preferred OS, despite all available evidence to the contrary".

ixSystems has been clear they will support Core until the userbase isn't worth it anymore. Some people seem to have confuesd support with "innovate and move forward".

TrueNAS is the FreeBSD NAS appliance thing. ZFS with easy setup, a GUI etc.

This announcement is that they're abandoning that project, replacing it with a version called "Scale", which if you go looking turns out to be Debian.

Bad news for FreeBSD really. I'm sad to hear it but then I also dropped FreeBSD with ZFS for Debian a couple of years ago so I can't really judge the company for the decision.

Couple of excerpts I found interesting for myself:

> Not officially yet, but I am giving the soft warning that the data is showing us that CORE will become non-viable at some point in the future. Without divulging too much, I can say that SCALE is seeing roughly a 5x growth rate compared to CORE and we don't see any reason for that trend to reverse. Being realistic about it, if somebody is just starting off with TrueNAS today, I'd highly recommend starting with SCALE since that's where the momentum is and is growing.

And

> Since introducing SCALE our growth numbers have shot through the roof, Linux container users far out-scale Jail users

A year or two ago I moved my outdated Proxmox server over to TrueNAS Core because I was getting more into the BSDs and liked the idea of "less controversial" ZFS support.

Sadly it did feel clunkier in many ways (my Unifi Jail sometimes fails with a vague error message, CPU temp sensors are inaccurate, SMB share auth is a pain), although stability has been rock solid.

I'll be moving back to Proxmox when I rebuild and upgrade disks. It's a shame that a company that was at the forefront of BSD development has decided to move away from it.

As a neophyte to the server/homelab world, why do people have such strong feelings about FreeBSD vs Linux? To me they seem to accomplish much the same things in much the same ways, although my only experience with a BSD like system is MacOS. Am I missing something crucial here?

I built a truenas server last December and I was hesitating between core and scale. I went with scale since I have been using debian for a while and never saw any reason to switch away from it. Glad I did.

Good ole BSDi, always doing great for FreeBSD.