I used to love getting a new phone.
Unwrapping the box, booting it up for the first time, installing every app by hand, tweaking all the settings, logging into every account one by one—that used to be half the fun.
Now? Getting a new phone is just a chore. I don’t want to spend two hours tapping through login screens and two-factor prompts. I just want my stuff to restore from a backup and work so I can get on with my day.
I feel the exact same way about low-level sysadmin work inside a jail.
There was a time when building a FreeBSD jail from scratch was genuinely fun. Creating the dataset, bootstrapping the base system, editing /etc/rc.conf, running pkg upgrade, resolving library updates, tweaking /usr/local/etc configs, and nursing individual services through upgrades—it felt like craftsmanship.
Now, babysitting pkg upgrade across fifteen different jails isn’t fun anymore. It’s just boring.
That’s really why I’m all in on containers with Daemonless. I still want FreeBSD, ZFS, and real jails underneath—I just don’t want the chore of maintaining the plumbing inside each one by hand. Pull a fresh image, mount /config, start the jail, and move on.
Even better, the ecosystem around native FreeBSD containers is making the whole experience effortless:
- fjord gives you a lightweight web app store and Compose stack manager (for both Podman and AppJail) so deploying or updating a stack is just a click.
- Sylve brings Bhyve VMs, Jails, ZFS, and Daemonless containers together in a modern Proxmox-like UI for FreeBSD.
- FreeCORE carries TrueNAS CORE forward on FreeBSD 15 and OpenZFS with native support for running Daemonless container apps right on your NAS.
Keep the host rock-solid, let the containers be disposable, and skip the boring parts.