FreeBSD To See Better Laptop Support With Investment Backed By AMD, Dell & Framework

[phoronix]

Phoronix: FreeBSD To See Better Laptop Support With Investment Backed By AMD, Dell & Framework

Following AMD and FreeBSD Foundation collaborations and the Sovereign Tech Fund making a big investment into FreeBSD, the FreeBSD Foundation and Quantum Leap Research have announced a $750,000 USD commitment to improve laptop support on this BSD operating system with backing by Dell, AMD, and Framework Computer...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeBSD-Better-Laptops

[Espionage724]

I'm much more excited about year of FreeBSD desktop!

Only thing really kind-of stopping me from going all-in with it currently is a 2004Scape (RuneScape) and nodejs/npm issue: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/n...ertions.94869/

At the very least, I hope that investment helps speed-along wireless AC support! That'd be nice with laptops.

[Errinwright]

Now if only they would invest similarly into RedoxOS

[mxan]

$750,000 and what's the bet the wifi support is still gonna be shit

[Vistaus]

$750,000 and what's the bet the wifi support is still gonna be shit

$750.000 is probably going to be enough to pay two full-time devs, but no more than that.

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

Dell being involved is the most interesting and curious piece of this news to me.

[kiffmet]

Better Intel and AMD graphics driver support.

Hell yeah. When it comes to providing a somewhat up-to-date port of the Linux graphics drivers, OpenBSD currently takes the lead by a huge amount. On the other hand, FreeBSD is very capable when it comes to running x86 AND x86_64 Linux programs. Currently, you can't have both, but this might change now.

[LockedPotato]

My only experience with FreeBSD was with GhostBSD. Basically FreeBSD with Mate and some default programs with a graphical installer. It worked fairly well. The main showstopping issue was that while my wireless chipset was supported... Basically, it could scan for networks and try to connect but it would fail 9/10 times. It would try for a while and then just stop and not connect. If I did it over and over eventually it would connect and stay connected. Must be a bug in the driver for my chipset but man was it annoying.

[lhilden]

Hopefully, they'll beef up the current half-baked ACPI implementation. Currently, support for WOL (Wake On LAN) and resuming from ACPI S3 suspend in the network device drivers is sporadic--especially for desktop chipsets. https://wiki.freebsd.org/ACPI

[Espionage724]

Hell yeah. When it comes to providing a somewhat up-to-date port of the Linux graphics drivers, OpenBSD currently takes the lead by a huge amount. On the other hand, FreeBSD is very capable when it comes to running x86 AND x86_64 Linux programs. Currently, you can't have both, but this might change now.

I saw FreeBSD had a kernel 6. (something) drm-kmod package on Ports for updated Linux drivers; my UHD 630 worked fine (actually a little better with WoW through Wine and glxgears FPS vs Linux) with the slightly-older Package drm-kmod at 5.15. Not too sure about how VK, Mesa, and other stuff is though.