And it is finally the time of the year again, when we look back at 2019, thinking about all the good and bad things it brought us.

As usual, I would like to use this opportunity to say a big Thank You to everyone who contributed to the project this year, supported our developers and myself and helped us to achieve our goals. Nothing would be possible without you. Please keep us going with your donations!

The Stats

We have brought you twelve Core Updates - each packed with lots of new features, improvements and some with just security fixes. A special thank you for Intel again, which kept us especially busy with their hardware bugs, their deceiving marketing campaigns to play down those problems, and of course no support in terms of providing good fixes. We unfortunately had to invest a lot of time in assessing how these vulnerabilities affect IPFire systems and what is best to do about them. All of that held back development and frankly was the most frustrating thing to deal with this year.

But on the plus side, we found some time to invest into an updated web proxy and our reworked Intrusion Prevention System which probably was the single biggest project this year. Routed IPsec VPNs, DFS for Wireless Access Points in higher 5 GHz channels, a new GUI to configure VLANs and finally a rewritten Quality of Service were more of the bigger things that we released this year.

We had a number of Core Updates which only shipped a kernel, either with fixes for Intel's problems or the famous SACK vulnerabilities. Although these might not seem very exciting to you users and the change logs are a short and cryptic read, they are the most important updates that we release. They are what makes IPFire IPFire. A secure and rock-solid firewall OS.

I do not really have to tell you this, because you are all installing your updates swiftly - with only a couple of exceptions. Earlier this year we asked you to migrate from an old 32 bit installation to 64 bits, because we can only provide best security on that platform. And you listened! When we had two thirds of the systems still running on 32 bit, this has now changed to two thirds being on 64 bit.

Twenty-Twenty - A New Decade

We have achieved a lot in 2019 and I am very proud of everyone for putting so much hard work in.

My wish for 2020 is, that we are staying awesome and going even bigger. Join us, help us to reach our goals in whatever way you can help us out. If that is either by contributing your time to code, finding and reporting bugs, fixing bugs, writing documentation, improving our project infrastructure, or simply use IPFire and support us with your donation.

Every contribution is greatly appreciated!