It's crazy how much negativity there is in comment threads like this. I would get it if FreeBSD was a product you paid for, or someone was evangelizing about how you're missing out if you don't get the FreeBSD laptop experience, or something.
As someone who liked FreeBSD in the past and curious to check it out again, I'm glad to have this handy list.
What is sad is that even though Linux now has hardware support that is miles ahead of Windows, we've exchanged one problem with another, because nowadays most of the hardware I see is only supported on Linux and nothing else.
Even on PCs, latest generation AMD graphics cards (already >1yr old) are not supported in _anything_ other than Linux (and Windows). This is just sad.
FreeBSD uses a compatibility layer to run the Linux graphics drivers, though it lags behind Linux. So if FreeBSD currently does not support the graphics cards, it will soon. It looks like they are currently porting over 6.11: https://github.com/FreeBSDFoundation/proj-laptop/issues/41
It is the _only_ OSS operating system that supports AMD cards from this decade, and it does so by having to emulate the Linux kernel API, and yet _still_ it lags years behind Linux itself. I've chosen this example for a reason -- this is exactly what I'm sad about.
Windows is cleaning up a lot of legacy drivers. A bunch of printers (+ scanners) that predate updates to the printer driver framework in recent versions of windows just don't have functioning drivers anymore, despite being perfectly functional.
All these devices work out of the box on linux, more or less.
Most devices that you can buy for under $400 now run on ARM chips (frequently Mediatek). We're talking tablets (with keyboards), convertibles, even outright laptops (i.e. "netbooks"). These things qualify as computers. They are replacing traditional laptops, just as those replaced desktops.
If we're looking at sub-$400 computers, especially on ARM, it seems like we have to include the large segment of ChromeOS devices that only run Linux out of the box (or at all, generally).
Most devices in that class I see run some vendor flavor of Android or ChromeOS and not Windows, so definitionally speaking they do run Linux out of the box.
It's not as polished as linux obviously, especially for desktop usage but the maintainers are very much on the ball (and they do a lot of work to get things to compile and work, there's a lot of linuxisms they have to work around).
> this simplicity also comes specifically because there's less contributions.
Not entirely. A rather large amount of Linux's mess stems from the fact that it was a hobbyist project in its foundational years. It was never clean or well designed, at any point in its life. Go look at Linux 1.2.0 vs FreeBSD 2.0
Even when Linux began to get traction, it had already developed an ingrained culture that didn't particularly care about "nice" code or architectural solutions. The BSDs inherited their culture where such things were prioritized. You're right that things get messier as they get larger, but the gap between the two is much, much larger than can possibly be accounted for. Things like Linux not respecting NICE values have very little to do with surface-level problems like stylistic inconsistencies in the source code.
>It's crazy how much negativity there is in comment threads like this
I think it's because this chart continues a trend I've noticed with BSD zealots. Namely, there's some sort of reality distortion effect at play.
Consider that there are obvious bullshit scores on TFA, like giving a laptop 9/10 when the fucking wifi doesn't work. In reality, this should be 5/10 or arguably 0/10. After all, what use is a laptop without wifi? If my laptop's wifi didn't work I wouldn't just buy a usb-ethernet adapter and never bring it anywhere; I would get a new laptop because a laptop without WiFi is useless.
On top of that there was a while here where every BSD thread had:
- a comment about how BSD powers the PlayStation, Netflix, and other FAANGs, except those corps don't contribute enough back because of the license so won't you please subsidize these giant corps by donating to BSD?
- people who argue BSD is superior because it's "more cohesive" and "feels cleaner" or similar
- OpenBSD zealots claiming it's 110% secure because trust me bro
Mostly I'm just tired of people claiming BSD is this amazing new thing with no flaws, when reality is that it has got some niche use cases, I suspect lots of its developers don't even dogfood it, and is otherwise superceded by Linux in nearly every meaningful way.
I have no problem with BSD, and I have two boxes in my basement running freeBSD right now, but I'm not delusional about BSD's limitations.
> Mostly I'm just tired of people claiming BSD is this amazing new thing
I don't think I've heard anybody claim BSD is new.
> Netflix, and other FAANGs, except those corps don't contribute enough back because of the license
I believe Netflix has upstreamed a lot to FreeBSD. They don't do it because the license compels them, they do it because upstreaming your changes makes maintenance easier.
> If my laptop's wifi didn't work I wouldn't just buy a usb-ethernet adapter and never bring it anywhere
I'm going to guess with this rant that you weren't using Linux in the olden days, because that's what it was like. The workaround isn't using wired ethernet by the way..you can get a USB wifi adapter or you can buy an m.2 wifi card. On on one of my machines I got a cheap m.2 Intel ax200 (just checked, about $15 on eBay) because it runs faster on FreeBSD than the one that shipped with my laptop.
>I'm going to guess with this rant that you weren't using Linux in the olden days, because that's what it was like.
I've been using Linux and BSD in one form or another since 2003, and I definitely used wpa_supplicant on the command line to connect my Thinkpad to WiFi. And you're right, it did suck. It was not a 9/10 experience by a long shot.
Regarding your wifi example. I did have to replace it with an intel one on my Lenovo because wifi would not work with something connected to Bluetooth (might have been USB . I don't recall). This is on Windows by the way. I just replaced it instead of fighting it. Same reason people prefer AMD on linux but this is changing with better Nvidia support.
FreeBSD actually has a similar thing, you can run Linux wifi drivers inside a VM and pass through the adapter. There's a port called wifibox that does this.
You can even forward the Unix domain socket for wpa-supplicant from the guest to host, so all the normal tools that talk to wifi cards via that socket work transparently.
> I would get a new laptop because a laptop without WiFi is useless.
You can run Linux in a VM and PCI passthrough your WiFi Adapter. Linux drivers will be able to connect to your wifi card and you can then supply internet to FreeBSD.
Doing this manually is complicated but the whole process has been automated on FreeBSD by "Wifibox"
I think what you're seeing is partly a consequence of how capable Linux has become. Linux is in a weird phase where it can still be enjoyed by hobbyists/enthusiasts/eccentric types, which were arguably its original audience, but now you can also Zoom and do work and install Steam on it, which gives it less appeal from the niche/hobby angle. The software ecosystem in Linux is also increasingly homogenizing, which helps with the "practicality" aspect, but also diminishes the niche appeal. BSDs are in a position to snap up that audience that appreciates engineering elegance/design and uses the computer as an end unto itself (not just as a means to an end). This audience isn't necessarily bothered by wonky laptop WiFi, and may even enjoy tinkering with it as a hobby project. Just my take.
Replacing the wifi card isn't necessarily easy. I'd rather not buy and use a USB dongle for it if I can just get it out of the box.
I remember doing those kind of things nearly two decades ago now, I don't expect to have to do that in 2026. If people want to, that's fine, but the parent comment is right here: giving it 9/10 without working wifi is ridiculous.
Fun fact: My old Lenovo Y50 only supports like 3 specific WiFi cards else it doesn't even POST. And I think none of them work with upstream Linux drivers (I think, have only 2 different ones and neither worked ages ago and I changed laptops a while ago and haven't retested). Actually I think one didn't have bluetooth work (the non-standard one) and the other needed the broadcom-wl package.
Paradoxically, given their otherwise positive standing, Lenovo has keept allowlists on their BIOS for specific devices on specific ports. For example, I have a T460 that has an m2 slot that only works with two specific WWAN modules.
Seriously. I'd rip the wifi hardware out of the laptop with a spoon if it somehow got me a laptop that handles sleep mode properly. I can't even imagine what that would be like with a Unix (aside from a Mac).
I would argue that much of the mentioned zealotry is a sort of kneejerk response to cult-like behavior from some Linux adherents. It’s mostly defensive; these people want continued variety in the FOSS desktop space and feel that’s threatened by Linux.
If you don’t care about administrating your computer and just want to use some software on some hardware, the BSDs are not that great. But if you do, the experience is better on the BSD land because cohesiveness reduces cognitive debt.
Also I wouldn’t make hardware support an OS quality metric. Linux get by with NDA and with direct contributions from the vendors. Which is something the BSDs don’t want/don’t benefit from.
>If you don’t care about administrating your computer and just want to use some software on some hardware, the BSDs are not that great.
Yes this is my opinion also. BSD seems more suited to people for whom fiddling with the OS itself is the point, rather than the OS being a tool to get other things done.
I fall firmly into the latter camp. I'd rather chew glass than manually set flags in rc.conf
I like the word tune rather than fiddle. The BSD are very stable. You adjust some configuration, and then updates without having to change your tools or your config with every release. The config are not provided out of the box but the manuals can be very informative.
A lot of current GNU/Linux complexity have no benefits for most users and may be an hindrance when they want to slightly alter their use cases.
The first column may have valid use cases, but I strongly doubt those cases include casual usage. Simple tools that work well is better than complex tools that solves everything.
* Openbsd does not like containers or being a vm host
From the link: "Note: The inbuilt WiFi chip is not natively supported by FreeBSD, so you will need to (temporarily) use a USB WiFi or Ethernet dongle, or (as I will explain) copy some files from a different system to the Macbook. You could also just transplant a different chip into the system."
You say "works perfectly". I do not think it means what you think it means.
To be fair, Linux also has trouble with the Broadcom chip, the driver needs to be installed as a separate step on most distros.
It's MIT licensed now, which isn't particularly useful when it comes to Pi (there's some Broadcom crap in that boot loader so it won't be open sourced) but otherwise is kind of interesting.
Broadcom (and to a lesser extent, Realtek) devices had always been anywhere between hit-or-miss and completely unworkable on Linux, LONG before Raspberry Pi came around.
Interesting. I use FreeBSD on my desktop too but it's really a desktop so I don't have to bother with WiFi or bluetooth. I generally dislike laptops for ergonomic reasons, and I never bring my computers anywhere anyway so I just buy NUCs. Not having to buy for a display, keyboard, trackpad, battery helps keep the price down.
I like it for several reasons. It's a holistic system which means it's much easier to understand, not a collection of random parts thrown together. There is only really one (big) distro so documentation is easy to come by and consistent. I love the way the updates of the system are uncoupled from the userland software so you can have rolling packages but a stable OS.
Also the ports collection is great (being able to manually compile every package with different flags where needed). And jails. And ZFS first-class citizen. Also I like the attitude. Less involvement from big tech, less strive to change for change's sake. It feels a lot more stable, every new version there's only a few things changed. It's not that with every major update I have to learn everything anew again because someone wanted to include their new init system (like systemd), configuration tools (like ifconfig -> ip), packaging system (like snap) etc. Things that work fine are just left alone.
It has some really good ideas also, like boot environments. But it's not linux. It's not meant to be.
But yeah if you want everything all figured out for you, don't use FreeBSD. Just take a commercial linux like ubuntu. You'll need to tinker a bit, which I like because it helps me understand my system. FreeBSD is a bit like Linux was in the early 2000s, it mostly works but you often have to dive into a shell for some magic. The good thing is having ZFS snapshots as a safety net though. Never really get caught out that way.
Yeah you run into this head on trying to use BSD. It’s too much glue and compat work. By the end of it you no longer have a coherent system, you’re back to Linux.
I use FBSD on an old-ish Lenovo W540 without too many hiccups. No, it’s not for everyone and never was. I wouldn’t suggest to anyone to run a BSD as a daily driver, or at all, unless they have a good reason to. Once you cross that line you need to know what and why.
> Once you cross that line you need to know what and why.
This is counterbalanced by the fact there is often one straightforward solution to every problem you run into, and those have been abundantly discussed online. Written as someone who just gave it a try.
It’s also that so many real-world use cases of BSDs entirely avoid these issues. If they were dominant concerns they would be addressed in a very professional manner, like the rest of the system. But the target market for these things just doesn’t overlap. Maybe there is a market for a BSD-esque approach to solving these things, but honestly? Meh.
That kind of seems crazy to me, considering OpenBSD has worked perfectly fine with every wifi capable device I've tested it on. Granted, most of them were older machines.
Is this just an artifact of FreeBSD primarily focusing on server hardware rather than consumer/end-user stuff?
Basically no one supports Broadcom SoftMAC WiFi cards very well, but OpenBSD just doesn't. I have a 2015 MacBook Air with a BCM4350 where the recommended fix is to go buy a FullMAC card from a similar vintage MacBook Pro and just cope with the fact that the card barely fits in the case and can't be secured properly.
Why? Nothing wrong with running your network interface in a VM. There are reasons for doing so even if drivers aren't an issue. Qubes OS does this, for instance, for security reasons.
Windows also does. Almost everything is a VM in windows these days.
It's just how things work these days. If you'd say "I run my VPN client in a docker container" it would raise a lot less eyebrows. Yet it's not very different, really.
Though conceptually I'd frown at having to run Linux. I'd prefer upgrading the hardware to a supported chip.
I agree that 9/10 is a bit of a strange score there, but it's not all that bad: You can get a $15 wifi dongle and use that instead. It occupies a USB port and looks a bit ugly, but it's still a fairly easy workaround.
Some years ago, I was workig with FreeBSD on an old laptop. The laptop had a wireless adapter that ostensible should be supported, but was not.
After some digging, I realized the driver was just missing some PCIe device identifiers. I added them to driver and bam my WiFi is working without issue.
I tried to submit a bug report and patch, and it got positive feedback at first any changes even got committed. But then I learned why it’s better to not even try.
Apparently this was a known issue, but only in the heads of the FreeBSD wireless developers. They had their reasons for not adding the device, but the reasons did not appear to be documented in mailing lists or docs until my thread. At that point I realized it’s not worth it to try and contribute to such large projects as I just lack the decades of institutional knowledge of the system.
Anyway, I’m not sure it ever got released. I believe there’s an umbrella bug somewhere left after the version my patch supported went out of support.
That is cool in ways, but many manufactures change the internals without changing the model number and so I'm not sure how much I can trust it. There is a recycled computers place near me that will sell me some of those cheap, but how can I be sure the one I'm buying is the same as the one tested (if indeed I can find any of those model numbers at all - which is a factor of what companies near me are recycling this month)
In my opinion pre alder lake intel is the sweet spot for FreeBSD. Not sure about AMD but anything before 2020 should work just fine. Just avoid CPUs with heterogenous core configurations for now.
I'd say Juana Manso laptops are usable with FreeBSD. sure, you lose brightness control, you can't see how much battery remains, (I didn't try wifi but the 9650AC chip seems to be supported), but it is usable. audio works, USB works, video works when you load the Intel drivers.
I have the latitude 7490 and it worked great with Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. The only issue is some hardware design issue where lifting it with one hand will cause it to freeze (possibly some stress causing a shock or a displacement).
This happened exactly to me also, I suspect some flexing in the motherboard or other component; right now it is complaining about the RAM and reseating hasn’t fixed it. Great laptop otherwise however!
Consider balling up some electrical tape underneath the Ram stick. This solved this very specific issue with my laptop that was flexing too much and crashing.
Years ago, there was a project combining Debian with the kernel from FreeBSD. That never made sense to me and the project seems to have died meanwhile. More sensible, IMHO, might be to bolt the FreeBSD user space unto the Linux kernel. That way one would get fairly broad and current hardware support and could still enjoy a classic Unix look&feel and stable ABI.
Moreover, many laptops working on Linux perfectly, are not Ubuntu certified. Lenovo Legion series generally works well, but it is not in the Ubuntu list. Id we'd make a list of all 8/10 or more compatible laptops, it would be huge.
> More sensible, IMHO, might be to bolt the FreeBSD user space unto the Linux kernel.
A lot of BSD utilities that are not POSIX has really close interaction with the kernel. OpenBSD’s *ctl binaries are often the user-facing part of some OS subsystem. Linux subsystem often expose a very complex internal that you need to use some other project to tame down
I personally feel like the race to support a vast array of hardware is very costly for such a small team and might be a waste of their precious resources.
Of course I love FreeBSD and want it to be supported on my desktop or laptop but at what cost?
Here is the question I have always wanted to ask:
Why not make the ultimate compromise and say: you will be able to run FreeBSD on almost all laptops but it is gonna be through let say an Alpine Linux hypervisor and we are gonna ship it with all the glue you need to have a great experience.
About every CPU has great visualization capabilities nowadays and the perf are amazing.
Now some might start screaming at the idea but you already run your favorite operating system through a stack of software you do not trust or control: UEFI, CPU microcode, etc.
I believe we need OS diversity and if so much of the energy of project is spent on working on an infinite hardware support, how much is left for the real innovation?
I agree. Linux has a wealth of hardware drivers and the time would be better spent on a translation layer or do it via running a VM or even using LLMs to port the drivers over to FreeBSD en masse. That way BSD team can focus on their unique strengths.
Now to be fair, in a few ways I think it is ahead. Now if you said "catch up to Linux in hardware support" I would fully agree.
Last I heard, its VM (swap/memory) processes is still better, but seems many Linux people avoid swap space these days. FWIW, I always have swap on any system that allows it.
And Jails, IMO nothing on Linux comes close to how good FreeBSD Jails is.
Incus is pretty damn good to be fair. You can mix and match VMs and containers, the terraform provider "just works", the setup is fast and easy, it plays well with ZFS. Now I wouldn't be surprised if it still lags jails (or Illumos Zones) in robustness or some capabilities but I'm a happy user of them now.
ThinkPads:
- W520/W530/T520/T530/X220/X230/T420s
- T480
- T14 GEN1 (Intel)
- T14 GEN1 (AMD)
I needed to replace MediaTek WiFi card on T14 (AMD) into some Intel WiFi one.
Hope that helps.
Regards,
vermaden
As someone who liked FreeBSD in the past and curious to check it out again, I'm glad to have this handy list.
Even on PCs, latest generation AMD graphics cards (already >1yr old) are not supported in _anything_ other than Linux (and Windows). This is just sad.
And it looks like they're adding 802.11ac support to some realtek drivers too: https://www.freebsd.org/status/report-2025-10-2025-12/#_linu...
[X] doubt.
All these devices work out of the box on linux, more or less.
And they do not run Linux out of the box.
It's not as polished as linux obviously, especially for desktop usage but the maintainers are very much on the ball (and they do a lot of work to get things to compile and work, there's a lot of linuxisms they have to work around).
FWIW I use them both, FreeBSD and Arch , but let’s not pretend the layers of crap tacked onto the Linux kernel is some pinnacle of computing.
I doubt anything can get the scale of Linux and not have some mess.
Not entirely. A rather large amount of Linux's mess stems from the fact that it was a hobbyist project in its foundational years. It was never clean or well designed, at any point in its life. Go look at Linux 1.2.0 vs FreeBSD 2.0
Even when Linux began to get traction, it had already developed an ingrained culture that didn't particularly care about "nice" code or architectural solutions. The BSDs inherited their culture where such things were prioritized. You're right that things get messier as they get larger, but the gap between the two is much, much larger than can possibly be accounted for. Things like Linux not respecting NICE values have very little to do with surface-level problems like stylistic inconsistencies in the source code.
I think it's because this chart continues a trend I've noticed with BSD zealots. Namely, there's some sort of reality distortion effect at play.
Consider that there are obvious bullshit scores on TFA, like giving a laptop 9/10 when the fucking wifi doesn't work. In reality, this should be 5/10 or arguably 0/10. After all, what use is a laptop without wifi? If my laptop's wifi didn't work I wouldn't just buy a usb-ethernet adapter and never bring it anywhere; I would get a new laptop because a laptop without WiFi is useless.
On top of that there was a while here where every BSD thread had:
- a comment about how BSD powers the PlayStation, Netflix, and other FAANGs, except those corps don't contribute enough back because of the license so won't you please subsidize these giant corps by donating to BSD?
- people who argue BSD is superior because it's "more cohesive" and "feels cleaner" or similar
- OpenBSD zealots claiming it's 110% secure because trust me bro
Mostly I'm just tired of people claiming BSD is this amazing new thing with no flaws, when reality is that it has got some niche use cases, I suspect lots of its developers don't even dogfood it, and is otherwise superceded by Linux in nearly every meaningful way.
I have no problem with BSD, and I have two boxes in my basement running freeBSD right now, but I'm not delusional about BSD's limitations.
Or possibly because it has a good track record. If you'd like to point at actual vulnerabilities go ahead.
I don't think I've heard anybody claim BSD is new.
> Netflix, and other FAANGs, except those corps don't contribute enough back because of the license
I believe Netflix has upstreamed a lot to FreeBSD. They don't do it because the license compels them, they do it because upstreaming your changes makes maintenance easier.
> If my laptop's wifi didn't work I wouldn't just buy a usb-ethernet adapter and never bring it anywhere
I'm going to guess with this rant that you weren't using Linux in the olden days, because that's what it was like. The workaround isn't using wired ethernet by the way..you can get a USB wifi adapter or you can buy an m.2 wifi card. On on one of my machines I got a cheap m.2 Intel ax200 (just checked, about $15 on eBay) because it runs faster on FreeBSD than the one that shipped with my laptop.
I've been using Linux and BSD in one form or another since 2003, and I definitely used wpa_supplicant on the command line to connect my Thinkpad to WiFi. And you're right, it did suck. It was not a 9/10 experience by a long shot.
FreeBSD actually has a similar thing, you can run Linux wifi drivers inside a VM and pass through the adapter. There's a port called wifibox that does this.
You can even forward the Unix domain socket for wpa-supplicant from the guest to host, so all the normal tools that talk to wifi cards via that socket work transparently.
You can run Linux in a VM and PCI passthrough your WiFi Adapter. Linux drivers will be able to connect to your wifi card and you can then supply internet to FreeBSD.
Doing this manually is complicated but the whole process has been automated on FreeBSD by "Wifibox"
https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-work/journal/browser-based...
I tried it myself and it worked pretty well for a wifi card not supported by FreeBSD.
So, no need to get a new laptop :-)
Why would you not just replace the wifi card or use a USB one? You're greatly overemphasizing how much this matters.
I remember doing those kind of things nearly two decades ago now, I don't expect to have to do that in 2026. If people want to, that's fine, but the parent comment is right here: giving it 9/10 without working wifi is ridiculous.
WiFi on a laptop is table stakes. I'd rather use an operating system that works without dongulation.
Also I wouldn’t make hardware support an OS quality metric. Linux get by with NDA and with direct contributions from the vendors. Which is something the BSDs don’t want/don’t benefit from.
Yes this is my opinion also. BSD seems more suited to people for whom fiddling with the OS itself is the point, rather than the OS being a tool to get other things done.
I fall firmly into the latter camp. I'd rather chew glass than manually set flags in rc.conf
A lot of current GNU/Linux complexity have no benefits for most users and may be an hindrance when they want to slightly alter their use cases.
The first column may have valid use cases, but I strongly doubt those cases include casual usage. Simple tools that work well is better than complex tools that solves everything.* Openbsd does not like containers or being a vm host
You say "works perfectly". I do not think it means what you think it means.
To be fair, Linux also has trouble with the Broadcom chip, the driver needs to be installed as a separate step on most distros.
Here's the real problem.
It's sad how a company that spawned the raspberry pi in earlier times got so evil so quickly.
https://github.com/eclipse-threadx
Copying some files from a different machine is not that burdensome. The point is, it works.
I like it for several reasons. It's a holistic system which means it's much easier to understand, not a collection of random parts thrown together. There is only really one (big) distro so documentation is easy to come by and consistent. I love the way the updates of the system are uncoupled from the userland software so you can have rolling packages but a stable OS.
Also the ports collection is great (being able to manually compile every package with different flags where needed). And jails. And ZFS first-class citizen. Also I like the attitude. Less involvement from big tech, less strive to change for change's sake. It feels a lot more stable, every new version there's only a few things changed. It's not that with every major update I have to learn everything anew again because someone wanted to include their new init system (like systemd), configuration tools (like ifconfig -> ip), packaging system (like snap) etc. Things that work fine are just left alone.
It has some really good ideas also, like boot environments. But it's not linux. It's not meant to be.
But yeah if you want everything all figured out for you, don't use FreeBSD. Just take a commercial linux like ubuntu. You'll need to tinker a bit, which I like because it helps me understand my system. FreeBSD is a bit like Linux was in the early 2000s, it mostly works but you often have to dive into a shell for some magic. The good thing is having ZFS snapshots as a safety net though. Never really get caught out that way.
Which, ironically, is what Linux users have been saying for ages with respect to Windows, but the market share speaks for itself.
I use FBSD on an old-ish Lenovo W540 without too many hiccups. No, it’s not for everyone and never was. I wouldn’t suggest to anyone to run a BSD as a daily driver, or at all, unless they have a good reason to. Once you cross that line you need to know what and why.
This is counterbalanced by the fact there is often one straightforward solution to every problem you run into, and those have been abundantly discussed online. Written as someone who just gave it a try.
> half of networking doesnt work, and it's the more important one for laptop(wifi)
I think they need to revise the scoring
Is this just an artifact of FreeBSD primarily focusing on server hardware rather than consumer/end-user stuff?
I'm not sure how good it is as I don't use wifi but it's supposed to be much better.
It's just how things work these days. If you'd say "I run my VPN client in a docker container" it would raise a lot less eyebrows. Yet it's not very different, really.
Though conceptually I'd frown at having to run Linux. I'd prefer upgrading the hardware to a supported chip.
In the old days I kept a couple Realtek USB adapters around that would almost always work out of the box or with ndiswrapper
See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47704816
And that setup part can be largely automated: https://github.com/pgj/freebsd-wifibox
(The computer itself doesn't care much about the complexity. It's a computer.)
Some years ago, I was workig with FreeBSD on an old laptop. The laptop had a wireless adapter that ostensible should be supported, but was not.
After some digging, I realized the driver was just missing some PCIe device identifiers. I added them to driver and bam my WiFi is working without issue.
I tried to submit a bug report and patch, and it got positive feedback at first any changes even got committed. But then I learned why it’s better to not even try.
Apparently this was a known issue, but only in the heads of the FreeBSD wireless developers. They had their reasons for not adding the device, but the reasons did not appear to be documented in mailing lists or docs until my thread. At that point I realized it’s not worth it to try and contribute to such large projects as I just lack the decades of institutional knowledge of the system.
Anyway, I’m not sure it ever got released. I believe there’s an umbrella bug somewhere left after the version my patch supported went out of support.
The more accessible software becomes the more infra is required to support it, and the more complex and convoluted the software will be
The best resource to check support is https://dmesgd.nycbug.org/dmesgd
Years ago, there was a project combining Debian with the kernel from FreeBSD. That never made sense to me and the project seems to have died meanwhile. More sensible, IMHO, might be to bolt the FreeBSD user space unto the Linux kernel. That way one would get fairly broad and current hardware support and could still enjoy a classic Unix look&feel and stable ABI.
A lot of BSD utilities that are not POSIX has really close interaction with the kernel. OpenBSD’s *ctl binaries are often the user-facing part of some OS subsystem. Linux subsystem often expose a very complex internal that you need to use some other project to tame down
Of course I love FreeBSD and want it to be supported on my desktop or laptop but at what cost?
Here is the question I have always wanted to ask: Why not make the ultimate compromise and say: you will be able to run FreeBSD on almost all laptops but it is gonna be through let say an Alpine Linux hypervisor and we are gonna ship it with all the glue you need to have a great experience.
About every CPU has great visualization capabilities nowadays and the perf are amazing.
Now some might start screaming at the idea but you already run your favorite operating system through a stack of software you do not trust or control: UEFI, CPU microcode, etc.
I believe we need OS diversity and if so much of the energy of project is spent on working on an infinite hardware support, how much is left for the real innovation?
Now to be fair, in a few ways I think it is ahead. Now if you said "catch up to Linux in hardware support" I would fully agree.
Last I heard, its VM (swap/memory) processes is still better, but seems many Linux people avoid swap space these days. FWIW, I always have swap on any system that allows it.
And Jails, IMO nothing on Linux comes close to how good FreeBSD Jails is.