Is anyone using it on the desktop as well?
I always wanted to give it a try, but then I'm hesitant because of lacking hardware support. I remember struggling with Intel KMS support in one of the earlier releases. Is this still a problem?
On my laptop, a Lenovo T420, I run PC-BSD -CURRENT (http://iso.cdn.pcbsd.org/11.0-CURRENTMAR2016/edge/amd64/), which eliminates the need to build src and packages. I also run PC-BSD -CURRENT on my work desktop with a Radeon card and two monitors. I could potentially expand my workstation builds to these with pkg, but PC-BSD is more or less hands off which I want on these devices.
Open source video needs work, but as of this week that has started heating up and we may start closing in toward DragonflyBSD in terms of Freedesktop/Linux equivalence by the time FreeBSD 11.0 ships https://github.com/iotamudelta/freebsd-base-graphics/tree/dr...
Battery time, suspend/hibernate, etc?
Performance-wise, I did not notice much between Arch linux, what I was using before, and this. My setup is very light, Emacs+Xombrero on TWM. I notice, though, a certain performance problem with video in browser, but that may well be Gstreamer plugins that run slower than Linux on *BSD, I can't comment, as I don't know the internals. But VLC works just fine.
Hardware support isn't as complete as Linux but it isn't bad at all either. Chances are anything that's older than 2-3 years will work out of the box, anything newer may or may not require a little tinkering.
Otherwise the hardware is supported very nicely. Only scroll support for the trackpoint was a bit of a pain to get working.
FreeBSD has no issues with any of the high end hardware we run and the oldest to newest hardware we have is one to three years old.
Much like many people on HN, I suspect, I do most of my work /and/ my play at the command line. Once you're there for a significant amount of your time you begin to get a respect for tight integration in the BSD base system and the superb documentation which is included. Because of the docs, I can reasonably work in an environment where I have no Internet access for an extended period of time without feeling like I'm suffering. In the Linux world, I find myself spending more time looking things up on search engines and less times looking things up in the manual. This simply isn't the case with FreeBSD, which means I'm less tied to being online and more tied to getting stuff done.
YMMV but I love FreeBSD as a desktop/laptop OS. I know many people also use OpenBSD on laptops because of superior driver support for some hardware, but the Linux emulation in FreeBSD allows me to guarantee no matter what I'm trying to do it will work, so I stick to FreeBSD vs OpenBSD for my uses.
(Need to update that post: drm-i915-update-38 has been merged into -CURRENT; EFI loader in -CURRENT fully supports ZFS now)
tl;dr everything works except:
* Bluetooth (but I don't ever use it on laptops)
* the SD card reader (I haven't needed that either)
* resuming from sleep (that's unfortunate, but with X240's big battery I don't need to put it to sleep :D)
I want to run the same OS on my desktops as my servers to minimize expensive brain context switching, so I'm not into the pc-bsd concept, however, numerous people recommended it as a desktop flavor of freebsd. You MIGHT have better luck with hardware drivers or software integration on pc-bsd, if you have problems with freebsd. Maybe. Think of it like freebsd is to pc-bsd as debian is to ubuntu, sorta.
As for my non-significant problems, there was some weirdness with haskell and long term (days, weeks) stability of xmonad, so I switched over to awesome as my window manager with an identical keyboard layout.
I have no experience with desktop environments on freebsd on my desktops... no interest. I need something that switches between emacs, terminal, and browser, that's the total extent of my environment. I'm told freebsd can run KDE and Gnome, although I don't want them. I point this out because some people define desktop by hardware, or by end user use, or others define that word as "runs gnome", and I can only verify the first two definitions.
My work now has me using OS X, but I keep the FreeBSD machine on a vpn because I love working on it. If you're thinking about, I'd highly recommend looking into the FreeBSD and OpenBSD support for your laptop. Otherwise just buy an x220.
I don't know about Intel KMS, I use FreeBSD on portable netbook and my work-station (Dell laptop - came with Ubuntu) and everything is superb. You will need to dig some stuff like rc.conf, but documentation is very clear and once you modified it, you're 100% that it will work after reboot. I still don't remember and know from memory how to enable acpi support on Linux (backlight control on laptops, it worked out of box on both laptops on BSD). if you don't have much time to read about it, install bsdconfig from ports it's a nice command line application that helps you select necessary features of the system.
If anything, it's definitely worth giving BSD a try just to get some new experience! I'm also highly impressed with DragonFlyBSD, worth reading their documentation to learn that BSD systems are ahead of Linux when it comes to security and system design.
Here, have some resources (includes my blog): https://www.b.agilob.net/freebsd-on-netbook-acer-aspire/ https://www.b.agilob.net/qt5-on-freebsd/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DragonFly_BSD http://networkfilter.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/security-openbsd... https://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/01
I do not use suspend/resume though due to disk encryption which is ineffective if your suspended laptop gets lost.