# What to choose? Production releases 11.x or 12.x?



## nunotex (Oct 17, 2019)

Hello,

I use FreeBSD as my main desktop and I use another pc as a small server with poudriere, www, nfs, ssh servers etc, only for home use.

I remember to upgrade 11.x to 12.x because I was bored and I feel the need to try it to see new features.

How a new FreeBSD user choose what production branch to install, use?

==> For example: I use an 10 year old laptop with 1GB RAM as desktop, what release should I use for better performance? 11.x or 12.x?

Thanks,

Nuno


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## Deleted member 30996 (Oct 17, 2019)

I could well be mistaken, but I don't think you're going to see much improvement from anything but an upgrade in RAM. Even my lowest-end 32bit Sony running FreeBSD has 2GB RAM but is still suitable for light desktop duty. 

All my laptops are Vista or Win7 era so it's not like older machines aren't any good.


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## Geezer (Oct 18, 2019)

nunotex said:


> How a new FreeBSD user choose what production branch to install, use?



The latest Release of course. 12.0 as it is now. And next month upgrade to 12.1.


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## Phishfry (Oct 18, 2019)

FreeBSD 11.3 is my preferred -RELEASE.
The 12.0-RELEASE has lots of changes. Some of them were troublesome and got fixed in 12-STABLE.
So I plan on going from 11.3 to 12.1.
I have 12.0 running on some servers to test it out.
One thing I noticed is the FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE installer image is 100Megabytes bigger than FreeBSD 11.3-RELEASE.
FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE outgrew a CD-ROM sizewize.


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## gpw928 (Oct 19, 2019)

nunotex said:


> ==> For example: I use an 10 year old laptop with 1GB RAM as desktop, what release should I use for better performance? 11.x or 12.x?


I ran FreeBSD on a Pentium 4 with 1 GiB of RAM as my deskside system for many years, until fairly recently.  I even ran X11.  But the window manager was lean (fvwm2) and I didn't use web browsers or other heavy GUI applications a lot.  I retired it to save on power consumption...
What I'm trying to say is that FreeBSD can work well on minimal hardware, and with only 1 GiB of memory, 11.x or 12.x won't matter nearly as much as your application footprint.
If you can wait a few weeks for 12.1, that's one less upgrade you will have to do in the future.


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## gnath (Oct 19, 2019)

If you really want regular output from production machine, then 11.3-RELEASE would be your choice. Like others my 2010 laptop has 2GB RAM on 'pkg system' running well with above. Home server may be upgraded to 12.1-REALEASE if you ready to take some extra attention. There is not much new features in OS for general use. Just for 'new' , may play with WM/DM & packagess.


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