Solved Will 11.x be supported for longer than 12.x?

[robroy]

FreeBSD Fans,

I'll bet this has been discussed a lot already, yet my search yielded only Terry_Kennedy's excellent Thread 68682.

I'm updating a few computers running 10.x-RELEASE, so I'm choosing between 11.2-RELEASE and 12.0-RELEASE.

I don't need any new 12.0-RELEASE features.

On the FreeBSD Security Information page, I see this nice table:

I'd like to choose the version that will be supported for the longest period of time.

This table sort of makes 11.2-RELEASE look like the winner, yet I'm not sure what's happening with the "TBD" part.

Does anybody happen to know what's up with this?

Thanks so much.

Rob Roy

 

[SirDice]

I'd like to choose the version that will be supported for the longest period of time.

They're all supported for 5 years but only the last minor version from a major branch. Each minor version expires 3 months after the release of a new minor version.

FreeBSD 11.0 was released in October 2016, so support for the whole 11 branch is expected to end in 2021.
FreeBSD 12.0 was released in December 2018, so support for the whole 12 branch is expected to end in 2023.

From 11.0 onward only the last minor version is supported for each major branch.

There's some discussion regarding the exact length of the support but as far as I know nothing has been officially decided or changed.

Note that the support schedule is for the base OS only. Ports are not included in this. From personal experience I can tell you it's absolutely a non-issue since you will mostly be dealing with third-party applications (Apache, PHP, MySQL, etc) any way. And all versions of FreeBSD use the exact same ports tree. So if you have PHP 7.2 as default you will have the same default on 11.x, 12.x and 13.x. Thus the version of FreeBSD itself is completely irrelevant, and by extension the support schedule of the base OS.