pfsense

Raised as a usability problem by 9 people on Hacker News over 12 years (2015–2026), in 9 threads.

People raised many different problems with pfsense, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 9 complaints

Hard to tell when services have actually started, and getting errors and logs is painful2026-04-13
Upgrade left system unbootable; user felt helpless without familiar tools and had to hunt obscure fixes2023-10-26
IPv6 unusable because config assumes a fixed prefix, so rules must be rewritten on each change2023-08-05
Too many scripts and processes are involved in managing its state, making migration hard2021-04-14
UI is terrible; raw database dumped into HTML tables2021-03-30
Web interface was frustrating to use, so the commenter moved away from it2020-08-26
Custom boot fixes are overwritten on upgrade, and features disappear without warning2018-07-30
Router OS is dumbed down with GUI clutter for novices2016-10-04
Related options are scattered across many config pages, forcing browsing to find them2015-10-06