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

[grahamperrin]

… Must be a bug in the driver for my chipset but man was it annoying.

Apologies.

In an ideal world, driver pages (manual section 4) would have well-populated BUGS sections.

In reality, some pages fall short.

Documentation is difficult.

[grahamperrin]

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

The Dell connection has been public, albeit not widely publicised, for some time. Maybe fair to describe it as low profile (from a Dell perspective); nonetheless, significant.

HTH

[sophisticles]

Many of the features talked about as being for laptops are also present on modern OEM desktops and workstations. So it's really about just bringing FreeBSD's hardware support out of the server closet and more closely aligned with what people have on or under their desks, be it an OEM desktop or laptop, especially if they're using modern WIFI network protocols.

That's the problem with volunteer labor. The volunteers are all contributing support to the hardware their benefactors are interested in, while the rest of the hardware and lesser used features the less resourced groups are interested in is slow to materialize. Since the highly resourced volunteers mostly work for corporations interested in FreeBSD as a server, that's where most of the developer time is going. Not everyone has the skills and mindset needed to hack on real hardware drivers and support code even with support documentation. Doing it without documentation is an even more highly rarefied space.

The problem with volunteer labor is you get what you pay for.

If you want a quality product you need to be able to pay intelligent, skilled, employees a competitive wage and you need to have a cohesive vision of where you want the product to end up.

When you pay people to work, they have to do what you instruct them to do, when they work for free, they pretty much do what they want.

Which is why so many open source projects are such a fire drill.

[sophisticles]

It would be great if one of the desktop oriented BSDs, like Ghost, or revive the old PC-BSD, got a huge influx of money and experienced help so they could make an OS that would finally drive a stake in the heart of Linux once and for all.

[LockedPotato]

It would be great if one of the desktop oriented BSDs, like Ghost, or revive the old PC-BSD, got a huge influx of money and experienced help so they could make an OS that would finally drive a stake in the heart of Linux once and for all.

OpenBSD would have a better shot with a lot cash funneled into it. FreeBSD is a decade behind Linux. But regardless, there's so many big companies behind Linux now that one big contribution has zero chance of overthrowing Linux. Besides, there's no reason to. I assure you, whatever beef you have with Linux there's an equivelent or worse problem with these OS'. They're not well funded and they lack basic support for things like modern sleep on laptops. OpenBSD is better off than FreeBSD but it's still far behind Linux.

[grahamperrin]

… or revive the old PC-BSD, … drive a stake in the heart of Linux …

I loved PC-BSD. If not for PC-BSD, I probably wouldn't be here (using FreeBSD-CURRENT) today.

I'm not with the anti-Linux sentiment. Coexistence is fine.

[fithisux]

Yay!!!!!!!!!!

I hope some good soul does the same for ReactOS or Plan9 or HaikuOS or Genode.

All of them could be a dream

[kylew77]

When I was first interested in BSD, I looked at DragonflyBSD because I heard it had the best modern graphics stack. I then heard it was still odd about certain things about my GPU (either RTX 3060 or RX 6600 XT) and didn't bother trying it (maybe Fedora 37; they're awesome for time-keeping!)

Recently I tried to ditch Linux, went to Windows (even on my server), didn't like it on my server, have to have the same OS on my workstation and server, and thus took a hard look at what BSD to pick. GhostBSD is a fork of FreeBSD; I don't like the idea of forked OSs. OpenBSD I've often seen related to network-related security and firewalls; that sounds great on my server, but I wanted something I could use on both it and my workstation. I only knew of DragonflyBSD because of improved graphics, and figured that's probably the only reason people use it (ez). I heard of FreeBSD a lot, and it was the last BSD choice I knew of Looked at the handbook over a few times, understood everything (enough; I used Arch btw ), and felt confident enough to install it single-OS bare-metal on my laptop.

The most confusing thing was trying to figure out if the dvd image could be written to a USB drive; like I figured it could, but why would there be a memstick one and why's it smaller? Found a comment where someone said the official Announcement posts says it can, I went to it, and sure enough it said it so I did it (I later used memstick and it was the same)

Went with it, did late hours of messing with it over 2 weeks, reinstalled 4 times (proud it was that low), and would be running that on everything convenient! I made it work and liked the results. I got into FlightGear, my joystick didn't just-work, and I spent an absurd amount of time figuring out how to make it work, with success!

I've done things I didn't think I'd ever have to do (some of it was extra fun), ranging from relay-bridging a router for faster wifi, probably doing the unheard with i915, finding I could play Super Mario Bros chip on my mobo speaker at boot, being able to obtain the lowest latency and fastest I/O and boot I've seen on this computer yet; with all-motivation to get it right however many times it took and KISS. And FreeBSD delivered!

I'm only not running FreeBSD right now because I couldn't get 2004Scape (Runescape) working (nodejs/npm/swc issue;hammered at it most of those 2 weeks trying though!). Fedora 41 beta looked pretty cool so I did Workstation, and felt extra motivated to do 41 beta on my server too (Windows was getting extra stale ). Basically I'm just waiting for someone to give a hint that problem is or can be fixed and I'll be back on FreeBSD probably same-day! (but Fedora 41 Beta Workstation and Server are pretty good and I recommend trying them and help with testing!)

---

In-short, I don't agree that OpenBSD should have gotten that money, and feel FreeBSD deserves it!

I agree that DragonFlyBSD has some awesome tech and it could use some funding. I had no idea it was keeping up with the Linux graphics stack that well. I am also a 2007scape fan and am running Antix linux dual boot on my ThinkPad right now for that reason. Same thing for DuckStation PS1 emulator that doesn't have OpenBSD support.