The FreeBSD Bug Report That Wouldn't Die (And Didn't)

- 2 minutes read - 385 words

A few weeks ago, I filed anthropics/claude-code#30640 — a bug report about Claude Code’s native installer being unusable on FreeBSD as Anthropic soft-deprecated the npm install path.

The issue management bot tried a few times to close things but I kept it alive. Ultimately, I decided to enlist the FreeBSD community. To my great fortune, Graham Perrin found my plea and worked to promote the problem on Reddit. He also took on the thankless task of moderating the Reddit thread.

Between Graham’s work, both of our Mastodon posts, and my FreeBSD forums post, enough souls made enough noise to get Anthropic to do some work to help us retain functionality!

As of now, the issue has 49 comments and 65+ upvotes. More importantly, several commenters showed up not just to say “me too” but to say they’d contribute patches, bug reports, and fixes to make Claude Code work on FreeBSD. That’s not just a complaint thread — that’s a community telling Anthropic: “We will do some of the work if you let us.” I’ll say more about that below.

First, the Anthropic team acknowledged the issue. @szwang passed feedback to the team and said more news was coming. That’s not a commitment. But it’s more than the bot gave us.

After a few weeks, I was elated to see the report from ant-kurt indicating that they were going to make sure that Claude Code worked through the Linux compatibility layer, “Linuxulator.” I noticed that a lot of the feedback got more technical and more insightful after Claude Code’s code leaked a couple weeks ago. The leak shifted something in the mood: the idea of community collaboration suddenly felt less theoretical.

Contributor ChiefMarlin implemented a wrapper to help people get up and running. I’ve not yet tried it out, but will soon.

To my mind, the community engagement on this one bug report is a proof-of-concept for what Anthropic should be curating. My issue drew attention; Anthropic confirmed their deprecation plans and identified the bun runtime as the sticking point; other developers produced FreeBSD bun ports and wrapper code. With engagement and a modicum of code sharing, the FreeBSD community was able to get software they want running.

The community showed up ready to fix it. Anthropic just has to open the door and the source.