 Tom here from Lawrence Systems and you can be one of the first to test drive TrueNAS 12.0 beta. Well, today's July 2nd and this was done on June 30th. So you may not be the first because well, I've already tried it as well. I'm running it with the beta release and we're going to dive into a couple of details. Talk about the release cycle of the new TrueNAS open storage system and some of the differences. But first, if you'd like to learn more about me or my company, head over to LawrenceSystems.com. If you'd like to hire a short project, there's a hires button right at the top. If you'd like to help keep this channel sponsor free and thank you to everyone who already has, there is a join button here for YouTube and a Patreon page. Your support is greatly appreciated. If you're looking for deals or discounts on products and services we offer on this channel, check out the affiliate links down below. They're in the description of all of our videos, including a link to our shirt store. We have a wide variety of shirts that we sell and new designs come out. Well, randomly, so check back frequently. And finally, our forums, forums.lauranceystems.com is where you can have a more in-depth discussion about this video and other tech topics you've seen on this channel. Now back to our content. On June 30th, 2020, we have previously announced the merger of FreeNAS and TrueNAS into a unified software image and the new naming convention FreeNAS is becoming TrueNAS Core. TrueNAS is becoming TrueNAS Enterprise and the schedule release for TrueNAS 12 was made available on the forums with the target date of June 30th beta and they hit their target. And that's what we're going to talk about. Now I have a more in-depth video and that's not this one, but this video right here is the more in-depth video where I dive into the big differences and major changes coming to the system and show you some of the examples and walk through them. What I wanted to talk about today is one, we're now at beta. Two, how do you get from nightlies to beta? I didn't know that answer, but yesterday Patrick had posted and Chris Moore responded to that exact question because when I was testing with the beta train, I realized there's not a way to go from the nightly train to the beta directly. So how do you get there? It's actually really simple. Chris Moore does post this. I'll leave a link down in the description below where you can just fetch into a manual update. Please note there's minor correction for HTTPS in there, which is in here. They updated the post. By the way, this is how you move. If you were using nightlies like I was on some test servers, this is how you move it to the beta train. All right. What does it look like? Well, not much different than in the video that I referenced here. It's pretty much the same, but there is one thing I really like. And I don't know if someone was listening to me, but I can't be the only one who complained about this at the other video. I said, hey, I really missed the shark. I like that shark. So if we hit update preferences, we get the shark back, which I don't know. I like that it makes me happy. I'm fine. I love all the new features, but I still like the shark. And I mean, the new logo is not bad, but it's not a shark. Anyways, I won't dwell on that. Clearly not that important, or at least maybe to me it's too important. Right here is a new release schedule, and this is what I wanted to talk about. So even though this is the first beta and it hit their June 30 target, there's a little bit of a differences. So where we're calling this beta in true nasty, this would have been referred to as a release candidate on the old one. And what they're doing is putting it a little bit more, how the business malign worked with the business ones. You were a little bit slower to roll things up because you're talking about critical production churnass systems. Now in the more enthusiast community, well, we're willing to try something that might be, you know, cutting edge and maybe a couple of little quirks here and there. So what they've done is they've kind of matched up here. And I think this is important. I'll leave a link to this as well. But of course, I link this right from the blog post. This is showing you that you can actually start testing when it's beta, or if you're a home user going, hey, I'm fine when it's a release candidate. There you go. Now actual release is going to be good for business users. So if you just want to be absolutely the most stable, just go with when the release has come out. But release is the same as it was on U1. And I know a lot of people do that. They're like, I don't like some of the quirkiness I find when they first release. And I usually wait until U1 of a major release because U1 is usually a bunch of bug fixes that come in for, you know, things that got out there and people tried. Now, why does this matter? Because we need beta testers. And why do we need them? Well, this is actually how the TrueNAS production system would go before. FreeNAS would be put out to the world. And a lot of us enthusiasts would go out there and use FreeNAS. And then the TrueNAS would get kind of the benefit of all that extra testing. So I want to encourage people, and myself included, to always use at least what may look like a beta, but it may be called release or release candidate. When I be putting them in production, well, more for myself. And I will wait for my clients and the business users may be a little bit longer. But me being someone who uses FreeNAS frequently, I'm not really scared of running the betas and the release candidates because they've been really solid and stable. And I'm familiar with doing all the little quirks if there are any and dealing with them. And on top of that, it is because of people who are active in the community and do this testing that the product improves. There's some people that just sit back and use only the latest version, which is perfectly fine. There's nothing wrong with that. Especially if you are someone who goes, I don't have time to deal with it, and I get it, some people don't. That means it's really not for you to run any type of beta or release candidate. You should only run full production where you're going, I want all the bugs sorted out. But for those of us that want to engage in help with product development, it is important to look at some of the release candidates and betas and use them, help iron out the problems. So those other people can use it. This is just how the community works. It's not me being critical of any one particular wherever you might fall in that community. It's just about how the cycle works. And I'll go ahead and read through all this. This is a Christmas post on it. I just wanted to raise awareness that it's out there, that the release cycle's a little bit different. So for those of you being, I don't know, I'm hesitant about a beta and want to wait for this, that's fine. But please note the differences between the way they're doing it in FreeNAS and the way they're doing it in the new unified system on there. Also, if you want to know all the new features, which I have highlighted in this video, and they're just listed again down here, rapid development, improved quality, earlier hardware enableance, simpler documentation. And Chris Moore even commented in this post that, yes, it is helping overall them get things done faster over at IX systems and keeping development. And I will reiterate this again for those who don't want to watch a longer video. No, you're not losing a bunch of features when you go from this new unified system. It is still open source. Actually, you're gaining features. They aren't creating some separate product that's where you only get paid features and they tease you. No, no, no. It's still the best and largest open source NAS project out there and it's only getting better. All right, thanks. And thank you for making it to the end of the video. If you like this video, please give it a thumbs up. If you'd like to see more content from the channel, hit the subscribe button and hit the bell icon. If you'd like YouTube to notify you when new videos come out. If you'd like to hire us, head over to laurancesystems.com, fill out our contact page, and let us know what we can help you with and what projects you'd like us to work together on. If you want to carry on the discussion, head over to forums.laurancesystems.com where we can carry on the discussion about this video, other videos, or other tech topics in general. Even suggestions for new videos, they're accepted right there on our forums, which are free. Also, if you'd like to help the channel in other ways, head over to our affiliate page. We have a lot of great tech offers for you and once again, thanks for watching and see you next time.