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Comment by loeg | Hacker News Reader

FreeBSD dev here — I don't like this line of argument. It is always used to rationalize any defect in FreeBSD. Sometimes we just have defects! That's just the truth of things; we don't need to pretend we're defective on purpose. Many developers run FreeBSD on their daily driver laptops or workstations because it is (perhaps tautologically) one of the best platforms to develop FreeBSD on.

Our wifi support isn't 100% and this is a weakness. I believe that desktop usability is a large part of why Linux is as successful as it is today, and the modern laptop is so similar to the modern server that it's a bit of a moot distinction.

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I don't think the person you responded to was claiming or implying that FreeBSD's wifi support is incomplete on purpose. Rather giving a reason for why resources have not (yet?) been expended in that area.

I have FreeBSD running on my home desktop workstation and everything is working fine, but I wouldn't try to install it on my laptop. Laptop hardware is just too variable and non-standard. Touchscreens, esoteric Wi-Fi chipsets, fingerprint readers, brightness controls, bluetooth, power management, suspend on lid close... I'd be quite surprised if FreeBSD supported all of this out of the box, so I stick with Ubuntu.

That's a very charitable read of GP's remarks. Kudos for the generosity, but I didn't get the same impression from the statements and the context. The phrases GP is repeating aren't novel; they're repeated time and time again in any messageboard discussion that ever touches on a missing feature in FreeBSD. You could say FreeBSD is missing SATA support (just for example; it isn't really) and someone would chime in with "FreeBSD isn't trying to be all things..."

As far as laptops, it all tends to be a bit specific to the model. There aren't too many different wifi chipsets these days; bluetooth is pretty simple from the software side of things. Power management and lid suspend work on most systems (as they say, resume is the hard part). Brightness controls should also work well. I don't know about fingerprint readers. Recently we landed Thinkpad PrivacyGuard support from software, for example. It's not particularly significant in isolation, just as an example of random modern laptop features that might exist in only a handful of models, which we still try to support in FreeBSD.

Please try to be charitable online and consider not engaging if you can't bring yourself to. Nobody can give 100% of the context needed to satisfy everyone that might be reading it. We all seem to want everybody to read our own contributions charitably but don't want to give others the same benefit. Makes interaction not fun.

> Please try to be charitable online

I do. I think you misread the comment you replied to in an uncharitable way if you arrived at the conclusion that your subsequent reply was responsive.

> Nobody can give 100% of the context needed to satisfy everyone that might be reading it.

That was never the criticism. Your response is a non sequitur.

If suspend works and resume doesn't, I have some serious questions about the definition of works.

Ah, it's sort of a running joke. Like "the fall doesn't kill you — it's the landing."

Our resume support is hit or miss, to be completely fair. I don't even try to use it myself due to bad experiences in the early days with Linux in 2000's and lack of need. Shutdown and startup is fast enough for my travel laptop that I don't care; and my workstation I never turn off. But I recognize a lot of people do really care about suspend/resume, and it works for some people but not everyone.

Being honest about a defect/weakness like this while being a FreeBSD developer gives me (as non-FreeBSD user) faith in your platform.

I've recently tried NixOS and I'm impressed. Have you considered adopting Nix into FreeBSD?

Thanks! I also appreciate honesty about faults, so this is sort of a golden-rule thing for me. I'm glad I'm not alone :-).

I don't know anything about Nix. So the short but perhaps unsatisfying answer is that I have not considered adopting Nix.

I really wanted to run FreeBSD in my T470s and the lack of hardware support pushed me over to Ubuntu. I loved setting up FreeBSD and it felt snappy for a lot of stuff but it would be cool if some of the devs who do live on laptops would just release a package they tune for their particular hardware.

It's not quite a canned package, but we try to keep the Laptop support wiki up to date:

https://wiki.freebsd.org/Laptops#T-Z

And for the T470s in particular (yes, it's somewhat sparse, and the links suggest a non-ideal amount of effort required, but purportedly it seems to work at the end): https://wiki.freebsd.org/Laptops/Thinkpad_T470s

How difficult would it be to flesh out this rough spot? For others, it seems like a FreeBSD dev might not at all be able to get ac support for hardware with the drivers as locked down as they are. But if I knew the problem was tractable I might try my hand at it someday. Could be a good resume driven project.

I can't begin to answer this question, sorry! I mostly don't work on network drivers at all, and the 80211 family/stack is its own beast that I am utterly unfamiliar with.

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