The first release candidate of the big NetBSD 11.0 release is now available for testing.

NetBSD 11.0 is headlined by better RISC-V support and improved Linux binary emulation. There are also various new drivers for hardware sensors and fan controls, PVH boot support is now supported on x86 non-Xen platforms like QEMU and Firecracker, and a wealth of package updates. There is GCC 12.5, GDB 15.1, OpenSSH 10.0, and many other upgrades.

Presented today at FOSDEM in Brussels was the state of gaming on FreeBSD by Thibault Payet. Besides various open-source games able to be compiled natively for FreeBSD, this BSD can get in on the Steam Play gaming scene thanks to the "linuxulator-steam-utils" project as a set of workarounds for the Steam Linux client on FreeBSD 14 and newer. Linuxulator-steam-utils builds off FreeBSD's Linuxulator support for running Linux binaries to enjoy the likes of Steam and even Steam Play (Proton) Windows games running on this translation layer for Linux and in turn running on FreeBSD.

9front, a fork of Plan 9, blends eccentric design with a quirky community to preserve one of Unix’s strangest legacies.

Xous is a microkernel operating system designed for medium embedded systems with clear separation of processes. Nearly everything is implemented in userspace, where message passing forms the basic communications primitive.

A new BSD on the block is ChaosBSD that intends to serve as a testing distribution for unfinished and broken drivers not suitable for upstreaming to FreeBSD proper.

ChaosBSD is a downstream fork of FreeBSD that is self-described as:

"A Driver Proving Ground  

ChaosBSD is a fork of FreeBSD. It exists because upstream cannot, and should not, accept broken drivers, half-working hardware, vendor trash, or speculative hacks.  

We can."  

ReactOS began 2026 with another "major step" towards Windows NT 6 compatibility with updating its MSVCRT implementation from Wine for the Microsoft C Runtime DLL library. That improved support for a number of Windows applications running on this open-source OS. ReactOS is taking another step-forward now with addressing a very annoying usability issue where up until now you may need to refresh the file manager for seeing folder changes.

The BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system project just published a new status report to detail how they ended out the year.

During the month of December they updated their FreeBSD driver compatibility layer against FreeBSD 15.0 that released at the start of the month. With that the Haiku OS developers then updated all of their Ethernet and WiFi drivers from FreeBSD to align with the FreeBSD 15.0 release.

The initiative has reached the required signature threshold in 15 countries, with Germany and France – the two largest – expected to follow suit.