Hello
First, much encouragement to Debian kFreeBSD port maintainers for their/your effort to bring forward the Debian kFreeBSD port project despite obstacles such as Debian official adoption as default init an kernel-dependent option (systemd) which also increasingly gobbles other system components expelling out all non-Linux kernel ports, a pity because it destroys the options diversity and generates unnecessary and dangerous single-option dependences in Debian ecosystem (and that without going into commenting the systemd model design problems).
Looking for options to migrate from Wheezy by avoiding systemd, I am trying Devuan and Debian kFreeBSD (it is not a dichotomy, if both are in active development is better). I test 2 ISOs:
daily-images/kfreebsd-i386/20170330-0004/netboot-10/mini.iso
md5sum: 15c8b5fa604075354106f1fa564af4bd
sha1sum: aa05eb56fb859547ff63ca5ef0372c5acbcedb11
kfreebsd.eu/~stevenc_d-i/installer-kfreebsd-amd64/current/images/netboot-10/gtk/mini.iso
md5sum: d19b4d083afcea5a7f24d987557f09a2
sha1sum: 03942583a27ede2ba27ae30b96ead7ebe2612ab7
After reboot post-installation: XDM and Lightdm works, XFCE and KDE Plasma work, Internet (Ethernet) works, Firefox works, and all are in my language (Spanish). Well.
A first problem: the keyboard is working in US English, no Spanish. I choose Spanish in the installation, it is the selected (default) option in LightDM language menu (right upper corner), it is the language in ~/.dmrc, and it is the language according to "locale" in terminal... but in spite of everything, the keyboard is working in US English all the time (in XDM and XFCE login screen, in a desktop terminal, in the Firefox navigation bar,...): if I press <Shift><8>, <*> is wrote instead of <(>, if I press my <ñ> key (to the right of the <L> key) <;> is wrote. I do "setxkbmap es" in terminal the keyboards begins to work in Spanish, if I do 'su' in terminal in order to doing a root operation I have to "setxkbmap es" again.
Doing "apt-cache search", non-installable packages are listed, for example "wicd" not installable because in a "apt-get install wicd" its dependency "wicd-daemon" is not instalable (but listed in an "apt-cache search"), equal to "connman-ui" because "connman" is not instalable (but listed). I understand the huge task of filtering the repository packages, but list non-installable packages does not feel well.
From the desktop user perspective, an important problem is that there is not graphical network manager: "network-manager" is not avaible, "wicd" and "connman-ui" are listed but non-instalable, any option is avaible. Setting up wireless connections in terminal is not an option for beginners.
Kernel 10.1 is used in kfreebsd-jessie ( kfreebsd.eu/~stevenc_d-i/installer-kfreebsd-amd64/current/images/netboot-10/gtk/mini.iso ), not backport or "and a half"-version kernel update seem to exist, so I think kfreebsd-jessie is possible not being actively maintained because 10.1 seems affected by several security vulnerabilities (811279, 811278, 811277, 811280) that made it removed from "testing" branch according to
https://packages.qa.debian.org/k/kfreebsd-10/news/20160216T163912Z.html In "daily-images" is used a kernel 10.3 which I assume is kept up to date with FreeBSD security fixes (FreeBSD 10.3 is equivalent to "oldstable" in Debian sense, after FreeBSD 11 release in October 2016 - in Debian kernel 11 is in "experimental" branch-). Please correct me if I am wrong (it is difficult to follow the maintenance trail of unofficial Debian versions as kfreebsd port is actually).
I really like that Debian kFreeBSD will prosper and consolidated as a (official) Debian port with a guaranteed future, but the movements in the last years within Debian not bring much peace, and I am not sure that there is a large Debian kFreeBSD developers base capable of advancing with the project even taking it as a standalone project if Debian obstacles like systemd dependence of an increasing number of packages complicate the situation a lot.
Thank you very much!