Using '<code>pkg</code>' for everything on FreeBSD 15 has been nice

Traditionally, the FreeBSD base system was managed through freebsd-update (also), which I would call primarily a patch-based system, while third party software was (usually) managed through pkg, a package manager. This was a quite traditional split, but it had some less than ideal aspects, and as of FreeBSD 15 you can choose to manage FreeBSD through pkg using what is called freebsd-base (which is also known as 'pkgbase'). If you're installing FreeBSD 15 from scratch, the installer will let you choose (and I believe it recommends the pkg based approach). If you upgrade from FreeBSD 14 to FreeBSD 15, there's a post-upgrade conversion process using pkgbasify (also, also).

(Technically you can use pkgbasify on FreeBSD 14, but pkgbase is officially experimental on FreeBSD 14.)

At this point I've been running a pkg based FreeBSD 15 system from more or less when FreeBSD 15 was released, first on a machine that I upgraded from 14 to 15 and then used pkgbasify on, and then on a second machine that I installed FreeBSD 15 on from scratch (partly because I wanted to move my test machine to less valuable hardware). In both cases, things have been fine. Over time the system has gone from FreeBSD 15.0 release to FreeBSD 15.0-p5, and each pkg-based update has been painless.

(Now that I look, the one thing that pkg-based updates haven't done is make ZFS snapshots. I honestly can't remember if freebsd-update did that for patch releases. I don't know how I feel about that, since I never made use of the ZFS snapshots that I believe got made in FreeBSD 14 for at least point upgrades, when going from 14.0 to 14.1 and so on.)

That FreeBSD's pkgbase is a bunch of separate packages means that those packages now have a range of versions from '15.0' through '15.0p5' (and now that I look, I have no '15.0p4' packages, which it turns out is because 15.0-p4 was a kernel update that was replaced by 15.0-p5's kernel updates). Fortunately 'freebsd-version' will let me more or less keep straight which patch level my current setup corresponds to.

We installed another FreeBSD 15 system recently and when we did, I recommended picking the pkg option. It's easier to keep everything straight, since we're already used to that sort of experience with Linux.

(I often had to look up the specific options I wanted to use with freebsd-update depending on what I was using it for this time around. Although I have no clear picture yet of how one goes from point release to point release in the pkgbase world (from 15.0 to a future 15.1), or even to the next major release (from 15.x to a future 16.0).)