I’ve been a FreeBSD user since the late 90s. From 2002 to 2010, I was a ports committer working on the GNOME and Multimedia teams. I have always felt more “at home” with FreeBSD. There is a logic and cohesiveness to the Base System + Ports approach that just clicks for me in a way Linux distros often don’t.

But the world changed. The OCI (Docker) container workflow took over, and for good reason: immutable infrastructure and easy updates are incredible for sanity.

For a long time, I was stuck in a dilemma:

  1. Run Linux: Get the great container workflow, but lose the OS I love (ZFS, Jails, consistency).
  2. Run FreeBSD: Keep the OS, but go back to “sysadmin drudgery”—manually maintaining dependencies inside 15 different Jails like it’s 2005.
  3. Run a Linux VM on FreeBSD: The worst of both worlds. Overhead + complexity.

The Solution

With podman and ocijail stabilizing on FreeBSD, I realized we could finally bridge this gap.

I built Daemonless to provide a polished, “Docker-like” experience that runs natively on FreeBSD.

  • No Linux VM.
  • Native Performance.
  • Real FreeBSD Jails under the hood.

It isn’t just a tech demo; it’s a full fleet of high-quality images (Radarr, Sonarr, Traefik, etc.) built with s6-overlay for supervision and proper user mapping (PUID/PGID).

My goal is simple: Make “Docker on FreeBSD” as boring and reliable as it is on Linux.

Check out the project at daemonless.io or browse the images.