It's pretty active, actually. Look at the release notes for FreeBSD major versions. Some folks think the release engineering team is too active and that major versions should be supported for more than ~5 years.
If you are working with FreeBSD in the cloud, you can use Terraform to provision on AWS and GCP. If you have to manage bare metal FreeBSD systems at scale (hundreds of systems), most devops folks use Ansible. There are playbooks out there for this. It's not too painful to work with.
If you are looking for Kubernetes on FreeBSD, don't. For on-prem Kubernetes you could deploy on Linux virtual machines on FreeBSD servers, managed using Ansible. But it's never going to be as fast as Linux. I wouldn't use it in production.
The best answer is to leverage FreeBSD for what it's good at : bare metal services like databases, build environments, file servers, and networking devices. And co-manage your deployment with Linux (Kubernetes) using Ansible/Terraform.
Love distrobox. Use it on my daily driver. If you are running an Ubuntu LTS / Debian stable / PopOS as your main operating system (because you want stability), but want to run bleeding-edge gui applications in debian testing (or even unstable) in an isolated container, you can. Running GUI applications in Linux containers is usually non-trivial to set-up, but distrobox makes it painless. Install with apt, export to the host operating system with 'distrobox-export --app blah'.
This is cool. What I really want is to be able to build an array of these. Like turn a stack of old fleet framework laptops (or lenovo laptops -- something cheap and plentiful) into a little closet Kubernetes cluster. A bit like people do with raspberry pi's (k3s). Has anyone seen work out there to this end?
Yes. We've lost the tall grass prairie to corn. But there are still vast portions of short and mixed-grass prairie in the southern great plains on land that was never suitable for crop production. The Texas and Oklahoma panhandle region, for instance. The only thing you can grow there is cows. These places are critical migratory habitat for grassland bird populations moving from Canada to the tropics. And even some endemic shorebirds like long-billed curlew. These same landscapes are also where most of the new wind energy development is landing. And new development is happening very quickly. Too quickly to monitor what it means for wildlife populations that are used to flat, open plains with only cattle to contend with.
If we arent careful, we'll lose the shortgrass prairie to energy development just like we lost the tallgrass prairie to corn.
The direct impact of turbines on wildlife (e.g., from direct strikes) may be negligible. But the secondary effects of carving-up large blocks of intact grasslands in the Great Plains with infrastructure like service roads, wallpapering desert soils with panels, or placing high-capacity transmission lines, are not. This clearly contributes to habitat fragmentation and scientists have not thoroughly studied how recent infrastructure change is influencing habitat for wildlife.
I'm not arguing that increasing green energy production like wind and solar should stop. Because climate change is arguably a larger existential threat to the planet. But we do need to do a better job planning where infrastructure lands so we can mitigate habitat fragmentation. Habitat fragmentation doesn't really factor into the planning calculus at all.