I’ll get back to FreeBSD when the most popular wifi card by a wide margin (iwlwifi, Intel AX200/AX2xx) will start working. That’s a shame, FreeBSD was long known for quality networking, and now what?
Ah, even 802.11n is not supported! This is a 2009 standard. So we are left with 802.11a/b, which is 2003. The wifi of 21 years ago.
I'm curious - what do you do, or what use-case do you have in mind, that renders 16 Mbit/s throughput "completely unusable"? I never required 16 Mbit/s throughput for... anything related to my work. It's enough even for high-quality video conferencing.
FreeBSD was never designed for consumer hardware networking. There were a few "desktop distros" but all have more or less died, and the few FreeBSD-based "storage distros" moved to Linux after FreeBSD changed its upstream for ZFS. And I'm saying this as someone who made a lot of effort to use FreeBSD on laptop over the years, and a current user of 15.0-CURRENT on ThinkPad.
But FreeBSD was and is THE choice for high-bandwidth wired networking. Netflix is both an early adopter and an active contributor to FreeBSD's networking codebase. They hack FreeBSD[0] to achieve cool numbers over and over[1][2].
Intel's device mentioned by you - AX200 - works "fine" on my ThinkPad, for a few months now. The device was on supported hardware list for more than a year prior, but the actual driver wasn't covering all vendor/device id pairs (different flavors of hardware or behavior all known as "the same" chip; this is a major problem with consumer devies since chip outages started). That said, by "fine" I mean that I can use the card and finally can connect to 5GHz networks and avoid disruptions related to 2.4GHz congestion. But FreeBSD is still incapable of utilizing speeds offered by modern WiFi specifications. Even with 5GHz connection, only throughput typical for 802.11n can be expected.
At this point, I guess that modern WiFi (as protocol/specification) support will only mature in form of drivers ingested from Linux, and emulated via LinuxKPI[3]. And it's great! I'm using Ryzen's Radeon features and DRM stuff on FreeBSD thanks to the LinuxKPI compatibility layer, for a few years now.
It's great that whenever FreeBSD can suck some non-GPL codebase from Linux via extending its "compatibility layer" - there's no major hostility. FreeBSD failed with evolving WiFi support on it's own. KPI worked great with amdgpu/DRM, and I have high hopes that Linux codebase will allow FreeBSD to evolve its WiFi support most reasonably.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4TZxj-Dq7s
[1] (400Gbps PDF) https://people.freebsd.org/~gallatin/talks/euro2021.pdf
[1] (400Gbps video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o-HcG8QxPc
[2] (800Gbps PDF) https://people.freebsd.org/~gallatin/talks/euro2022.pdf
[2] (800Gbps video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o-HcG8QxPc
(I understand that it is mostly a server OS, and usually there is no wifi on servers, but still).
That’s a little sad, because FreeBSD pioneered the wifi stack, it was better than Linux back in the days.
Drivers are not a BSD problem inherently. More one of that vendors are not contributing to other mainstream OSes.