The Kdenlive team is happy to announce the release of version 25.12.0, just in time for the holiday season. For this release, we concentrated on improving the user experience. Many of these changes were discussed during our very productive Berlin sprint last September, where the team met for three days of brainstorming.

Interface and Usability

Docking System

We introduced a new, more flexible docking system, allowing you to group the widgets you want together or easily show/hide them on demand. Each layout is now saved in its own file, opening the possibility for sharing. It is also now saved inside the project file, so when reopening a project the layout used when saving it is loaded and you are immediately ready to continue where you left off editing! The downside is that existing layouts are not compatible, so that you will need to recreate your custom layouts.

Welcome Screen

We introduced a Welcome Screen to improve the experience for new users, and add some handy shortcuts for everyone. With your feedback this will evolve in the future.

Along with the Welcome Screen, we introduced a vertical layout and optional safe areas to improve editing of 9:16 videos.

Menu Restructuring

Part of a long running discussion in the team, the menus were re-organized to make them more intuitive. Our long-time users may be confused initially (hopefully not for long, though), but we tried to follow some of the conventions in the professional editing world. For example, we regrouped all file related actions like Render and the Project Settings in the File menu. There might be a few adjustments in the upcoming releases, but the most important changes are in.

Thanks to users and translators feedback, we were able to fix several parts of the user interface that were not picked up properly for translation, making Kdenlive easier to use in your native language.

Monitor

We revamped the monitor view of audio, with a minimap on top allowing to intuitively zoom parts of the audio. (audio monitor)

Markers

For consistency and to avoid confusion, we renamed timeline guides to markers, since the term guide was used interchangeably and therefore confusing, and they were in fact markers for a sequence clip. Markers can now have a duration that is shown in the timeline, and can be dragged in the timeline from the Markers list.

Other Highlights

Major Bug Fixes

• We fixed more than 15 crash reports
• Windows: Fix render failure when user name contains special characters
• Fix project corruption when copy-pasting a sequence or project file between projects

Packaging

• We fixed the VAAPI support in AppImage, allowing for faster decoding and render time
• Several updates made it into our binaries, like Qt 6.10.1 and FFmpeg 8.0

Last Minute Fixes

Several fixes that will be in the next release have already been included in the 25.12.0 binaries available on kdenlive.org. If you installed Kdenlive from your Linux distro, you will get those fixes with version 25.12.1 (release scheduled for January 2026).

Give back to Kdenlive

Releases are possible thanks to donations by the community. Donate now!

Need help ?

As usual, you will find very useful tips in our documentation website. You can also get help and exchange your ideas in our Kdenlive users Matrix chat room.

Get involved

Kdenlive relies on its community, your help is always welcome. You can contribute by :

• Helping to identify and triage bugs
• Contribute to translating Kdenlive in your language
• Promote Kdenlive in your local community

For the full changelog continue reading on kdenlive.org.

This is a effectively a guest blogpost where I, as usual, take the credit for the work someone else has done.

Last year ago set out making a home automation <--> Desktop Linux bridge over the Christmas holidays.

The idea is that if you're using home automation your PC that you're in front of has a lot of important information that can be used for adjusting automations; are you in a call, are your headphones on, and so on. I made a small daemon, named Kiot (derived from "KDE Internet of Things") that exposes this information about your PC to Home Automation software, like Home Assistant.

It worked well enough for all my use-cases, so after a bit of initial buzz and a few drive-by fixes it fell to the wayside whilst I worked on other things.

In the last month it got a new contributor, Odd Østlie (TheOddPirate) who has been like a rocket ship of new features; and a bit of a community with another member being active in testing and feedback.

We now track and expose:

• bluetooth

• audio devices, volume control and selection

• battery states for laptops and wireless peripherals

• gamepad detection

• active window information

• media player/mpris connection

With more integrations in pull requests.
There's also the start of a configuration UI, so there's no messing about with configuration files.

I'll do another post once we've made a 0.1 and a flatpak, but if you're interested in KDE + home automation, go check out his work at https://github.com/davidedmundson/kiot .

Last weekend I attended this year's edition of the KDE PIM Sprint which, this time, took place in Paris.

I arrived in Paris around 1 p.m. and first walked from Gare du Nord to the Île de la Cité to have a look at the reconstructed roof of Notre Dame. Then I checked in at my hotel and after a brief rest I went to the sprint venue, the office of enioka. There I was greeted by one of our hosts for the weekend and by a few KDE PIMsters who had already taken over the meeting room.

After firing up my computer, KMail complained that it couldn't access one of my IMAP accounts. The error said "authentication failed" and a second error message claimed that access to KWallet (which stores the passwords of the IMAP accounts) was denied. Using the website of the mail provider I verified that my credentials still work. Adding the IMAP account a second time didn't help. Still the same errors. And a look at KWallet also didn't give me a clue why it should deny access to the password of one of my IMAP accounts when two other IMAP accounts worked. Since access to this IMAP account wasn't that important during the KDE PIM sprint I decided not to waste more time on this problem. This proved to be a good decision because once I was back at home the account magically worked again. I blame weird security measures by the email provider.

In the meantime more people had arrived and we went for dinner. Afterward we went back to the venue and, now that most people were there, we went over the list of topics from last year's KDE PIM Sprint. Some progress has been made since the last sprint but many topics didn't see much work done. Any and all help is welcome!

Originally I planned to look into a bug that's been haunting me for some time: KMail shows seemingly random counts of unread messages in the folder list that have little to do with the actual number of unread messages in those folders. Because I'm using the latest stable versions of almost all KDE software (as provided by openSUSE Tumbleweed) I started to build the release/25.12 branch of KMail and its 30+ KDE PIM dependencies. This took the rest of Friday evening and part of Saturday morning. Shortly before midnight we called it a day.

On Saturday morning, after a joint breakfast in the office, we discussed a few more topics from our agenda. After that I decided to scratch my original plan and, instead, to help with making the KMime library fit for becoming a KDE Framework. I created a few MRs to replace the usage of bool parameters in the API with enums. Then I looked into adapting the users of KMime to the new API. Unfortunately, this proved more painful than expected because KDE PIM does not only depend on the master branch of everything else in KDE PIM (which I was very well aware of) but a lot of the KDE PIM projects also depend on the master branch of the ktextaddons library which is a kind of intermediate library between KDE Frameworks and KDE PIM with its own release schedule. For many of the KDE PIM projects I could simply lower the required version of ktextaddons to the latest stable release (as shipped by Tumbleweed), but for pimcommon this hack didn't work anymore because it used a new header from ktextaddons master. By then it was already Sunday afternoon and anyway time for me to pack my stuff.

On my way to Gare du Nord I passed by Sacré Cœur on Montmartre where to my surprise a choir of Santa Clauses and Santa Claudettes was performing French Christmas songs.

In conclusion, I got more useful work done during this sprint than during some other sprints, although the dependency requirements of KDE PIM annoy me a lot. I've been involved in KDE PIM for 25 years now although, admittedly, I rarely contribute to it in my spare time since I started to code for a living. To a large part the reason for this is that it would cost way too much of my spare time to build all of KDE PIM all of the time.

Thanks to enioka for hosting us and to Kevin for organizing the sprint. And many thanks to those of you donating to KDE which makes these sprints possible.

This weekend, I attended the KDE PIM 2025 Sprint (AKA meeting) in Paris.

First, what does PIM mean? Personal information management.

Second, what does Personal information management mean? It's the software for managing email, calendar, address book, etc.

Third, this is going to be long, so let me thank https://haute-couture.enioka.com/en/ for hosting us (their office  is in Rue du Mail which seems very fitting for a meeting improving e-mail software) and thanks to KDE e.V. for sponsoring travel and hotel for the meeting. If you can, please donate so that more meetings like this can happen. 

This was my first time attending a PIM sprint even though I have been a KDE developer for a long time and a KMail/KOrganizer user for possibly even longer. 

It is true that these softwares are not in the most polished state, but honestly I would not know how to handle my email without KMail.

Anyhow here's a list of things I did: 

We talked a bit about bugs handling and it turns out not a lot of people are having a look at bugs, so I volunteered to watch the pim-bugs-null@kde.org address in Bugzilla (where most/all related bugs are assigned to) so I can help a bit. Note that I only committed to quickly read over them to try to make sure "really bad things" don't get overlooked. "Normal" bugs will always exist in every software and those will be fixed when they are fixed :)

If you also want to help you can set yourself to watch that pim-bugs-null@kde.org address in https://bugs.kde.org/userprefs.cgi?tab=email. 

On the topic of bugs, I managed to fix "left-click does not work on links with target="_blank" in HTML e-mails" with an impressive 1-liner change. It should be available with KDE Gear 25.12.1.

On Friday night, I experienced "sending emails does not work". After a few hours of debugging and thanks to our sysadmins, we found out it was due to "Your SMTP configuration was wrong". It seems older KMail versions were a bit more gracious when your configuration was wrong, but now it fails (fair enoug, although ideally it could give a better error). Incidentally I was not the only one with this problem since a few hours later we got this bug https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=513284 that was basically the same. (My watching of pim-bugs-null@kde.org was already fruitful!)

On Saturday morning, I continued scratching my own itch and fixed a rather obscure bug where some context menu actions when right clicking on emails in KMail were not properly updated when expanding/collapsing threads.

KMime is undergoing API modernization and is slated to become a KDE Framework soon (TM). I helped a bit adapting code that uses KMime to the new API. 

On Sunday, I worked a bit on polishing address suggestion blacklisting on KMail (i.e. when I search for Foo, I don't want to get a suggestion to send an email to their old employer's email address). You can do that right now by right clicking on the "To" text field and selecting Completion Configuration and then going to the third tab. But that is a bit cumbersome (to the degree I had no idea that feature existed until the very same day). To make it a bit easier to discover, i have proposed adding a right click menu on the suggestions themselves that let's you blacklist that particular email address.

And now, a short list of things we did: (many more were done and will be explained in detail by other folks)

• Talk about switching the default backend to SQLite instead of mysql MariaDB. In general dropping servers (MariaDB/postgres) support would help making the code more maintainable. There are some people using it without problems, but Nico volunteered to do a test run during the sprint and he ended up with some problems, so there's still some things to debug there.
• Talk about doing a survey/adding more KUserFeedback data. We kind of agreed that first we need to know what question we really want to know the answer to and what would be the consequences of a given answer before spending time in designing a survey. But anyway if you use the KDE PIM software, please enable User Feedback in the settings, we promise we won't spy on you.
• New online accounts system. It should replace the not very useful accounts system that we now have (that also has a quite complicated dependency chain). It showed quite some promise in making things much more user friendly.

All in all it was a very productive meeting and I am happy to have attended.

On a closing note, one day we will have to speak about potentially sponsoring food for sprint attendees. We got travel and hotel sponsored, but I spent around 100 € on breakfast/lunch/dinner for that sprint (not going to any fancy place at all). Yes, I can spare that amount of money, but maybe some others in the community can not, and for sure we want them to also attend. One could even argue that having to spend money on top of spending a weekend and 2 work-holidays for the travel is a bit too much, it won't be me because I ❤️ KDE but someone could argue it 😁

KDE Gear 25.12 got just released.

This includes my fixes (or workarounds) for Konsole & Kate window activation on Wayland.

If you now start Kate or Konsole inside Konsole, the new processes will properly activate their windows to come on top of Konsole.

This works both for just starting new instances and for re-using already running ones.

For more details, see my older post about the implementation.

At the moment that only works for Konsole & Kate.

If that works nicely for our users, perhaps somebody will come up with a more generic way for that or we can move that workaround to some lower level of the stack.

:) For me that is already a nice Christmas present, I disliked that this was broken for years :)

Btw., thanks again for the amazing end of the year fundraiser results! €280k and counting :)

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At this year’s Akademy (the yearly conference and gathering of KDE), there were several talks about immutable Linux distributions born inside KDE. The first, and more covered in the news was KDE Linux, the distro with an officially sounding name. And the second one was KDE Neon Core, which sounds like a continuation of KDE Neon, but is quite independent of it.

Things shouldn’t come in twos. There needs to be another immutable KDE distro, so I’m announcing the …

Now, this is a bit of a joke.

This is not really going to be a new distribution (for real, not like KDE Neon claimed not to be a distribution back in the day :) ). I don’t have the expertise nor the time to make a distribution from scratch.

But, while listening to the presentations about KDE Linux and KDE Neon Core, I had the idea to see how many of the planned features for those distributions I could implement based on an already existing and quite popular distribution called … if you have a keen eye, you might have guessed based on the image above … NixOS.

Step 1: Immutability

At the crux of it, immutability (along with other related buzzwords) means that you can not have an update break your system. There are no half-updates, no mixing incompatible versions of packages, etc. And if something gets broken with the new version, you can always roll back your system to a previous version.

This comes out of the box with NixOS. It just does it in a different way to other distributions. Its package manager allows installation of as many versions of a single package as needed, and the user or a running application “sees” only the versions they are compatible with.

When you update your system, the old packages are still installed, and you can reboot the computer into the pre-update state (previous versions are called generations).

Booting into an old state doesn’t really do anything special, it just makes you “see” the versions of the packages that were active in that version of your system. You don’t even need to reboot most of the time – if you see that a new version of LibreOffice doesn’t open your file correctly, and you want to try with the previous version, just ask Nix to launch the old version for you. The old version of LibreOffice is still on your system even if you’ve not booted into the system version (generation) it was installed on.

Steps 2..n

My main computer is (and always will be) Debian, but I’ve been using NixOS on my laptop for months now. And it works quite well.

As NixOS can be installed or replicated from a single configuration file, I plan to create a repository that will hold the definition of the system on my laptop (aka, the reference installation of KDE Ni! OS :) ) and to keep it updated while I go through each of the steps of simulating other distributions’ features.

This way, anyone who wants to have KDE Ni! OS on their computer will be able to install it by installing NixOS and using this file for system definition.

The next step will mainly be for developers – it will be about replacing a system package with a version you (or somebody else) developed. For example, if you want the Plasma Vault to behave a bit differently, or to test a fix for a bug you found, any sane distribution should allow you to do that easily, and without endangering the system integrity (no sudo make install). So, KDE Ni! OS will have to be able to do it as well.

I hate waiting for compilations. For day-to-day it may only be a minute or two, but once you start doing another task, the context switching distracts from what you were doing before and breaks everything up. Life is too short to be waiting for computers.

Obviously the first answer is to have a faster machine, but having a super fast laptop and a super fast PC all the time contributes to e-waste which I also hate. Some of my test devices for touch and tablet work are 5 year old Intel atom devices that I still sometimes need to compile on to fix things.

The solution is distributed compiling, using multiple computers to share the work.

Icecream or distcc used to be the tools back in the day, but they're both quite dated and have other issues.

There's a relatively new kid on the block, sccache. sccache primarily serves as a way of keeping your cached compiled assets around (think ccache), but also sharing them across users. Sharing cached assets requires exactly matching paths and dependencies and compilers so it's not that great for my needs; but it seems it would be perfect for flatpak and immutable cases.

But sccache also has another trick up it's sleeve; distributed compilation.

The documentation for sccache is a bit overwhelming packed with enterprise level features https://github.com/mozilla/sccache/blob/main/docs/Distributed.md.
It wasn't that clear how to do something simple, so I thought it might be useful to share how I got things working nicely for me.

Installation

Sccache is probably available in your distribution, note that not all distros include the shared compiler part.

If not you can download a version from https://github.com/mozilla/sccache/releases/download

The nice part is it's statically linked with no external dependencies so you can throw it on anything, even if it's immutable like KDE Linux or even a Steamdeck or two.

The parts

Scheduler

The scheduler is the key part of the operation; the client sends requests to the scheduler which in return replies with a list of schedulers that can recieve payloads distributing them accordingly.

Simple

Create a file as follows:

scheduler.conf

public_addr = "0.0.0.0:10600"
client_auth = { type = "token", token = "dave_is_great" }
server_auth = { type = "token", token = "dave_is_great" }

sccache-dist scheduler --config scheduler.conf

Docker

As I want the scheduler always on, I run it on a small home-server, where I prefer to docker-ise everything.

docker-compose:

version: '3.8'

services:
  sccache-scheduler:
    build:
      context: .
      dockerfile: Dockerfile
      args:
        VERSION: "v0.10.0"
        SHASUM: bbf2e67d5e030967f31283236ea57f68892f0c7b56681ae7bfe80cd7f47e1acc
    image: sccache:latest
    container_name: sccache-scheduler
    ports:
      - "10600:10600"
    volumes:
      - ./scheduler.conf:/scheduler.conf:ro
    entrypoint: ["/usr/local/bin/sccache-dist", "scheduler", "--config", "/scheduler.conf"]
    restart: unless-stopped
    environment:
      - SCCACHE_NO_DAEMON=1

Dockerfile

FROM alpine:3.9.2

ARG VERSION
ARG SHASUM

RUN apk add clang
RUN apk add curl
RUN apk add --no-cache bubblewrap

RUN curl -L https://github.com/mozilla/sccache/releases/download/$VERSION/sccache-dist-$VERSION-x86_64-unknown-linux-musl.tar.gz > sccache-dist.tar.gz \
    && tar xf sccache-dist.tar.gz \
    && mv sccache-dist-$VERSION-x86_64-unknown-linux-musl/sccache-dist /usr/local/bin/sccache-dist \
    && rm -r sccache-dist.tar.gz sccache-dist-$VERSION-x86_64-unknown-linux-musl

RUN apk del curl

ENTRYPOINT ["/usr/local/bin/sccache"]

and the scheduler.conf as above.

Servers (build machines)

This is the part that does the building.
The config takes the address of the scheduler, but also the server's own IP address as a sort of "callback" address.

It needs to run as root in order to have capabilities to set up sandboxing and restrict it back down to something lower than where we started. The sitaution is a bit silly, but it is what it is.

server.conf

public_addr = "192.168.1.YOURIPADDRESS:10501"
scheduler_url = "http://192.168.1.SCHEDULERIPADDRESS:10600"
cache_dir = "/tmp/toolchains"
scheduler_auth = { type = "DANGEROUSLY_INSECURE" }

[builder]
type = "overlay"
# The directory under which a sandboxed filesystem will be created for builds.
build_dir = "/tmp/build"
# The path to the bubblewrap version 0.3.0+ `bwrap` binary.
bwrap_path = "/usr/bin/bwrap"

Then you can run sudo sccache-dist server --config server.conf

Systemd

As I want this running constantly on my desktop and laptop I use a systemd service.

/etc/systemd/system/sccache.service
[Unit]
Description=sccache scheduler
After=network-online.target
Wants=network-online.target

[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/bin/sccache-dist server --config /etc/sccache/server.conf
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=5s

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Clients

The final part is relatively simple, making local builds use the other build servers.

First we need to set up a config as follows:

.config/sccache/config

[dist]
scheduler_url = "http://192.168.1.SCHEDULERIPADDRESS:10600"
toolchains = []
toolchain_cache_size = 5368709120
auth = { type = "token", token = "dave_is_great" }

Cmake

Enabling requires just telling cmake to use the relevant wrapper with -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER_LAUNCHER=sccache -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER_LAUNCHER=sccache

kde-builder

And/or it to your kde-builder as follows:

.config/kde-builder.yaml

global:
  cmake-options: -GNinja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug -DCMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS=ON  -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=clang++ \
    -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER_LAUNCHER=sccache -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER_LAUNCHER=sccache 

and reconfigure the project(s)

Quirks and workarounds

The most annoying quirk is servers need a consistent IP address within your network. Servers register to the scheduler with a fixed IP address. When clients queue jobs they are given the IP addresses back from the scheduler and are expected to then talk to the build server(s) directly. Using hostnames doesn't work.

Note also if you change your local .config/sccache you may need to run sccache --stop-server on the client to relaunch. Confusingly in this case 'server' refers to a process on the client that compile jobs are thrown at.

Debugging

sccache --dist-status will show the connected schedulers and how many total active jobs

Managing job count

By default ninja schedules the same number of jobs as you have local cores for. It's unaware of the many other cores you have.
I have this in my zshrc to set the number of jobs to the total number on the scheduler at that time.

function getSccacheCPUs() {
        sccache --dist-status  | jq '."SchedulerStatus"[1].num_cpus'
}
alias ks='MAKEFLAGS=-j${getSccacheCPUs} kde-builder'

Comparison to icecream

Cons:

• The setup process is a lot more laborious than icecream's magic turn-up-and-compile structure
• No cool UI to see how many tasks are being compiled.

Pros:

• It's very robust to network issues. If the scheduler is down or no servers are available things build locally extremely transparently
• It also has it's own equivalent of a local 'ccache' which means you don't need to worry about daisy-chaing compilers wrappers to still have cached output.
• It's actively maintained, the last meaningful commit in icecream is years ago

KDE’s 30th birthday is coming up next year. For this year’s holiday season I therefore decided to compile a list of 30 reasons why I love KDE Plasma. It makes me so much more productive and work a lot more fun. While some of the items listed below aren’t unique to Plasma, it’s the combination of all of those things that truly makes it the best desktop environment out there. Tell me, what are your top reasons?

1. When I suspend my laptop, any video or music stops playing
2. I can use three fingers on my touch pad to switch virtual desktops
3. I get a notification when my wireless mouse is about to run out of juice
4. I can middle-click a window on the task bar to close it
5. I can have a sticky note in my panel for use as a scratchpad
6. I can middle-click the notification icon to engage “do not disturb” mode
7. There’s a handy little color picker widget for my panel
8. I can throw my cursor into the corner of the screen to peek at my desktop
9. I can keep any window always on top when I need to
10. I can create a QR code of anything I copy to my clipboard
11. When I take a screenshot, I can then just drag it to where I need it
12. I can change the screen brightness by mouse wheeling the brightness icon
13. I can drag a window to the top of the screen to maximize it
14. I can send a window to different virtual desktops by using a global shortcut
15. There’s a little live volume meter in each slider in the volume popup
16. I can bring up a little magnifier window around my mouse cursor
17. I can draw red lines on the screen using a desktop effect
18. I can use the back/forward mouse buttons on the task bar to change music tracks
19. When I wiggle the mouse, the cursor gets bigger and bigger, and there’s no limit!
20. Night light comforts my eyes in the evening hours
21. KRunner finds browser tabs in the mess of hundreds of tabs I have
22. I can raise the speaker volume above 100% when needed
23. I can wheel a window’s title bar to change its opacity to quickly compare stuff
24. I can make the Copilot key on my keyboard actually do something useful
25. I can use window rules to force apps to open exactly how I want
26. I can add custom global shortcuts for almost anything
27. System Monitor displays a tonne of info, including from my solar installation
28. I can speed up playback of pretty much any video from Plasma’s Media Controller
29. I can use Meta left click to move and Meta right click to resize a window anytime
30. I can quickly access recent files opened in an app by right clicking its task bar entry

… and that is just Plasma, not even mentioning fantastic apps like the Dolphin file manager, Konsole, Kate editor, and of course KDE Connect. Another way to show your love for KDE is by donating to our Year End Fundraiser and maybe even adopt an app!

Akademy is a special event for most of KDE people, it is opportunity for KDE developers, designers, users etc to meet and greet each other face-to-face. I have been attending most Akademies since year 2014. So of-course this year also I attended Akademy 2025 in Berlin. Last time I was in Berlin was right before pandemic happened, attending KDE Plasma Mobile Sprint in KDAB offices. It’s always lovely to visit this beautiful city!

Naïvely, I ran freebsd-update -r 15.0-STABLE install in my regular FreeBSD desktop. That was a mistake.

In principle freebsd-update is the way to update the installed system. In principle it works really smoothly, from binary release to binary release: it has a good manpage which tells you you can go from release to release. My FreeBSD laptop (which also runs Fedora 42 as more of a daily-driver OS) was running 14.3, so:

• freebsd-update -r 15.0-RELEASE upgrade Fetch all the things.
• freebsd-update -r 15.0-RELEASE install Install the new stuff.
• reboot Smooth sailing.

That is the naive and optimistic thing to do.

If you spotted “make sure you read the announcement and release notes” in the manpage, good for you.

After the reboot, I was dropped into a shell where nearly every command I typed in resulted in

ld-elf.so.1: Shared object "libsys.so.7" not found, required by "libc.so.7"

Good Bug Reports Help

Fortunately, Graham Perrin had already reported this with basically-the-same steps to get into trouble.

And based on that Matthew and Colin made a fix so that other people could first update their packages (e.g. pkg update on the system before using freebsd-update) to get the fixes in to the package-manager.

Good Workarounds, Also

In the same PR (Problem Report), Craig describes a workaround which almost worked for me. Because it’s a laptop, I needed a few extra steps. As an aside, /rescue is a directory where statically-linked rescue binaries live, which don’t suffer from shared-library misery.

• /rescue/kldload if_ure Load the kernel driver for the USB-ethernet port.
• /rescue/dhclient ue0 DHCP to get some network.

I have root-on-ZFS, and in single-user mode this comes up read-only, so switch read-only off. This is different from other (e.g. UFS, ext4) filesystems where mount -o rw,remount would be the thing to do:

• /rescue/mount To check what the name is of the ZFS mounted on /
• /rescue/zfs set readonly=off zroot/ROOT/default Make it read-write.

Edit 2025-12-17: Fixed typo’s in the path of the commands

After that, basically Craig’s steps:

• cd /tmp
• /rescue/fetch https://download.freebsd.org/releases/amd64/15.0-BETA2/base.txz Fetch the installation tarball.
• cd /
• /rescue/tar xzf /tmp/base.txz lib/libsys.so.7 Extract the missing library.
• freebsd-update install This one is the “normal” dynamically-linked one, which works now the missing library is there.

Post-Upgrade Mucking About

Since there wasn’t anything especially configured or complicated on this machine, I reinstalled the package-manager with a hammer and then upgraded all the packages:

• pkg-static install pkg Reinstall with a known-good tool.
• pkg update Fetch all the things.
• pkg upgrade Install all the things.

Somehow I’ve also gotten myself stuck in a “graphics driver causes kernel panic”, state. Which kind of limits the graphics side of things this week. Amusingly AMD GPU stability is listed as a release feature, but #391 and #393 issues tell a slightly different story. I’m glad of bz@’s proposed fix, although I’ll need to rebuild the kernel to try it (which literally means make buildkernel installkernel on FreeBSD, it’s that simple).