FreeBSD 13.5 Beta 3 is out this weekend in being the newest weekly development version leading towards next month's stable release to cap off the FreeBSD 13 series.

FreeBSD 13.5 Beta 3 upgrades to OpenSSH 9.9p2 and has security fixes for the OpenSSH vulnerabilities disclosed this week.

Besides the OpenSSH update, the only other notable change this week for FreeBSD 13.5 Beta 3 is removing of the KDE desktop packages from the FreeBSD DVD ISOs. The KDE package removal from the DVD ISOs with FreeBSD 13.5 is due to a bit of odd timing as well as facing a battle of needing to fit within DVD size constraints.

FreeBSD will be transitioning to the KDE Plasma 6 desktop and in turn see the KDE Plasma 5 packages removed. But Plasma 6 isn't ready for FreeBSD 13.5. [1]The commit dropping the KDE packages from the DVD ISOs explains:

pkg-stage.sh: Remove kde entirely

The package set for FreeBSD 13.5 comes from the 2025Q1 branch, which doesn't have the new x11/kde (aka KDE 6) port; but shipping x11/kde5 (which is still in the 2025Q1 branch) doesn't make much sense either since a few weeks after the release that will no longer be available in either "latest" or "quarterly" package sets.

Just remove KDE packages from the 13.5 DVD entirely; this also makes the DVD image fit into 4.7 GB size limit of physical DVDs again.

Downloads and all the details on FreeBSD 13.5 Beta 3 via [2]the FreeBSD mailing list .

Next weekend the FreeBSD 13.5 release candidate is expected to debut. If all goes well FreeBSD 13.5-RELEASE will be out on 11 March and will be maintained through the end of April next year before closing out the FreeBSD 13 series.



[1] https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/commit/93b7f9301c56867ab1ebdf1ac245106c9bf592d4

[2] https://lists.freebsd.org/archives/freebsd-stable/2025-February/002715.html