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Comment by kube-system | Hacker News Reader

I haven't tried FreeBSD on a laptop, but I've always wanted to....

> FreeBSD supports a wide range of network cards (including an increasing number of 802.11n chipsets)

Is this out of date or should I not even try installing on a laptop with an ac chipset?

Last I knew, the wireless stack lacked 802.11ac support entirely. I think some drivers for 802.11ac hardware could operate in 802.11n mode, but I might be mistaken.

Could also always try OpenBSD, they have support for some 802.11ac chipsets, but check the drivers first

I think OpenBSD has support for some 802.11ac chipsets, but they don't operate at 802.11ac speeds.

For example see the CAVEATS section here: https://man.openbsd.org/iwm.4

Status quo ~2 years ago before FreeBSD 13 was that many 802.11ac cards worked but the ac features did not yet (and/or you’d have to install wpa_supplicant through ports to enable certain compilation flags), so you’d get a fraction of possible speeds or have to jump through hoops. Not sure what the more recent developments here are.

Yeah....sadly WiFi driver development fell behind in *BSD about 8 or 10 years ago. It made firewalls like pfSense and SmallWall less useful if you wanted an all-in-one network solution. You had to start to moving WiFi to APs from various vendors. It's ok when you have a small foot print with few walls (apartment or townhouse or condo). But a larger home, backyard/outdoor space, or garage/network closet spaces might need extra APs or relocation of AP(s). I do otherwise love pfSense and SmallWall despite what my $DAYJOB is. 10GbE NIC is really great too in *BSDs.

Having Freebsd on my laptop since 2 years...the only point of critique is wireless, thank you freebsd-foundation for that...you probably don't care since you all use macOS.

That's an odd and misinformed attack on the foundation. They're actively sponsoring WiFi work, the first half of which recently landed in tree. You can see what they're involved in on on their website: https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-work/projects/

> They're actively sponsoring WiFi work

Yes since three years without any outcome....that's why the critique toward the foundation and NOT the project.

https://i0.wp.com/itsfoss.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/fre...

As I said in the previous post, the first half of it just landed within the last month. iwlwifi[0] and dozens of linuxkpi commits[1] over the past couple of months by bz@. My frame.work laptop works generally well with -CURRENT (and presumably with stable/13, since iwlwifi's been mfc'd) with some wifi stability issues that have been reported.

[0] https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/log/sys/contrib/dev/iwlwifi [1] https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/log/sys/compat/linuxkpi

And as i wrote, wireless is criminally underdeveloped on freebsd, not just a problem for laptops but firewalls/access-points too. 802.11n came out 12! years ago...and no i don't even talk about ac here.

There's currently no 802.11ac support, but this is in-progress. There's usually an update about WiFi support in the FreeBSD Foundation quarterly reports, and some major changes were merged into CURRENT a few weeks ago.

I’m a bit out of date on FreeBSD land but tbh probably both. It references FreeBSD 11 not being out yet so the article is several years old. FreeBSD does tend to lag behind a bit when it comes to WiFi support though so it wouldn’t surprise me if 802.11ac support is patchy.

It runs great on my Thinkpad X1 Gen 6. Everything works.

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