The FreeBSD Foundation's Laptop Support and Usability Project | Hacker News Reader

The FreeBSD Foundation's Laptop Support and Usability Project

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193 pointsmikece73 comments

So, is there a laptop that has good support for FreeBSD support out of the box?

My requirements are: suspend/resume, being able to drive a 5K monitor over USB-C, wifi.

I found https://wiki.freebsd.org/Laptops but I don't know how up-to-date it is.

I can't speak to it driving a monitor over USB-C as I don't use one, but I'm currently running 15.0-RELEASE on a refurbished Dell Latitude 7280 that has worked flawlessly out of the box so far.

Somebody else did a nice writeup [0] on their experience with FBSD on the same laptop.

[0] https://adventurist.me/posts/00352

We’ve been working with Ed and team at FreeBSD on this, and have a document showing what works currently on Framework Laptops: https://github.com/FrameworkComputer/freebsd-on-framework

This is great. I've been checking on it periodically. I'm using the Framework 13 Ryzen AI 300 and the Framework Desktop so not quite there yet. Interested in taking FreeBSD for a spin when the support is there.

Small correction: the AX211 card in the Framework 12 is able to connect to networks, not just scan. What you're missing is that a bunch of the Wi-Fi firmware blobs were removed from the base system between FreeBSD 14.2 and 14.3, and since 14.3 came out in June 2025 I assume that's what was tested. An upgrade from 14.2 to 14.3 would also have kept working, just not a fresh install of 14.3 or 15.0.

A user needs some other working network connection first. I used my Android phone's USB tethering — all that takes is a quick `dhclient ue0`. Then one can run `fwget` to get the firmware that will make the Wi-Fi work fully: https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?fwget%288%29

Source: very happy Framework 12 owner (currently dual-booting Windows 11 Enterprise and FreeBSD 15.0 + Wayland + KDE) :)

I have tried this very same combination - F12 + FreeBSD + KDE on Wayland and WiFi works to me out of the box (even during installation!), but a lot of things doesn’t work for me - suspend and resume doesn’t work at all (even when I blacklist WiFi kernel module - suspend starts working, but resume doesn’t). A lot of apps on KDE also crash for me - every time I try to run Konqueror or Falkon they crash immediately).

I mean some of that is even hard to get with Linux tbh especially sleep.

It is? I don't think I've had a problem with that in years, though I tend to avoid Dell and a few other manufacturers.

You’re describing basically any modern ARM Mac ;-) except for the running FreeBSD bit. But hey MacOS is BSD ish?

Darwin is a BSD derivative, yes.

FreeBSD status on Apple Silicon, https://wiki.freebsd.org/AppleSilicon

The table lists very limited support for M1 and not even lists newer variants! I guess it was only to be expected, asahi Linux also has challenges and of course FreeBSD has less eyeballs than Linux

Linux is pretty much good to go on M1 or even M2 now. No joy on anything newer than that though.

Is Asahi Linux alive?

They just posted a progress report this month. Seems very much alive.

I'm curious why Apple doesn't support this effort: they have done a lot of the work and it won't exactly harm their market share.

I'm curious why you think Apple would support any effort that does not benefit their bottom line?

There's a case for it when it comes to FreeBSD specifically, since macOS uses some code from FreeBSD.

NeXTSTEP did but that was in the 90s. When Apple bought NeXTSTEP (and Jobs returned to the helm of Apple), they used that OS as the basis for macOS X.

Due to GPL, they release the sources to the BSD code they use. Everything else is proprietary.

Likewise Sony used BSD for PlayStation OS. They publish the sources to the changes to BSD they made, the rest is proprietary.

There's no GPL in the BSD sources used by Apple or Sony. They are free to release their operating systems as closed source; Sony does this. Apple releases Darwin sources "out of the goodness of their hearts", meaning, back in the 2000s they wanted to capture mindshare amongst the tech community for whom Linux was the strongest contender. Now that the future has refused to change, the year of the Linux desktop never materialized, and macOS has become the default developer's workstation OS, Apple has been much more sparing with Darwin source drops and may cease them altogether.

https://www.playstation.com/en-us/oss/ps4/

https://opensource.apple.com/

GPL where applicable. If it's MIT or just "as is" then no, they won't but they definitely publish the sources to what they are required to. Since FreeBSD is "as is" 4.4BSD licensed, they aren't required to publish the sources of Orbis.

Why would BSD use GPL?

BSD has a BSD license. It doesn't require source code releases.

Only the kernel is BSD licensed, other tools in user land are GPL. Don’t be dense.

BSD utils in macOS are BSD licensed.

This is a wonderful self-own.

Perhaps the person you are responding to is dense enough to know that Apple uses a BSD licensed userland: https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/file_cmds

Or perhaps they know that the entire system is built with Clang and LLVM and not GCC.

Apple distributes very little GPL code (like bash) and even then it is only GPL2 (older versions).

There's zero business case because they want to sell you a laptop and subscription to iCloud.

Improving FreeBSD will make it easier to run BSD on non-apple hardware which will eat into their bottom line.

The number of people who will buy a Mac to run BSD is a rounding error, and those people won't buy iCloud subscriptions anyway.

> Improving FreeBSD will make it easier to run BSD on non-apple hardware which will eat into their bottom line.

The number of people who want to run FreeBSD on their laptops probably numbers in the hundreds. Not exactly a threat to Apple's bottom line.

On the other hand, some of those people are FreeBSD developers who create and maintain code that Apple would like to have the option of using. That relationship is worth something to Apple.

>On the other hand, some of those people are FreeBSD developers who create and maintain code that Apple would like to have the option of using. That relationship is worth something to Apple.

It wasn't that long ago that we used to have to endure HN commenters spamming the same copypasta every time BSD was mentioned: "did you know BSD runs your playstation and netflix and <...>. You should donate money!"

Evidently it's not worth more than the cost of assigning engineers to this, otherwise Apple would already be doing it.

I don’t really follow any of this cynical humor but

> otherwise Apple would already be doing it.

The gap between what Apple ought to be doing, even if for no other reason than its own good, and what Apple actually does is sometimes pretty wide.

I'm curious why you think Apple making their hardware work with more operating systems does not benefit their bottom line.

Aside from that the answer is "Corporate Goodwill." That actually is a bottom line number that gets reported.

> I'm curious why you think Apple making their hardware work with more operating systems does not benefit their bottom line.

Because they sell and advertise MacOS. Not "compatible with a wide range of OSes" (like say raspberry pis).

People buying a laptop due to goodwill and openness does happen (I bought my framework 13 due to that), but that's not a game Apple has played since Woz left - and for the worse, I think.

Apple hasn't done any work that would be useful.

Weird to see this downvoted, because it's totally true. Apple imports FreeBSD's userland periodically but not its kernel/drivers, and thus has nothing to do with how well FreeBSD works on PC hardware: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Myths#FreeBSD_is_Just_macOS_Without...

> Apple imports FreeBSD's userland periodically but not its kernel/drivers ...

OS-X/macOS runs an entirely different kernel called XNU[0][1], which is why userland tools can be imported whereas FreeBSD kernel and device driver code cannot.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU

1 - https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu

Any is a bit too strong. Apple has does (and still does) some useful work with clang/llvm, and a few other tools that BSDs use. However this is indirect at best.

Apple is struggling to make MacOS functional, why would they contribute engineering time to another OS?

I still remember when MacOS being based on BSD had the community excited about the future

MacOS was never based on BSD. Apple developed the USB drivers for BSP so they could copy it into their OS, but that very different from based on BSD. (It is likely some other parts are copied as well)

MacOS was absolutely derived from BSD through NeXTSTEP.

Large parts have been rewritten: they very different and don't show any BSD heritage.

That may be true but a large core of it is still BSD. In fact, it’s so BSD that one could create a BSD distro based off FreeBSD and achieve binary compatibility on x86. Which is exactly what RavynOS [0] has done. There’s a lot of BSD under the hood of macOS still today in Darwin. A mix of FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD.

[0] https://github.com/ravynsoft/ravynos

> MacOS was absolutely derived from BSD through NeXTSTEP.

The OS-X (now branded as "macOS") kernel was not, and is not, a derivative of the FreeBSD kernel, or any other BSD, even though macOS/OS-X has a FreeBSD kernel component due to its Mach heritage. The userland tools are however BSD. OS-X's kernel is XNU and from the XNU GitHub repo[0]:

  XNU kernel is part of the Darwin operating system for use 
  in macOS and iOS operating systems. XNU is an acronym for X 
  is Not Unix. XNU is a hybrid kernel combining the Mach 
  kernel developed at Carnegie Mellon University with 
  components from FreeBSD and a C++ API for writing drivers 
  called IOKit. XNU runs on x86_64 and ARM64 for both single 
  processor and multi-processor configurations.

I recommend the book "Mac OS X Internals"[1] for a detailed analysis of same.

EDIT:

In theory, XNU could simultaneously run the existing FreeBSD subsystem alongside Linux and/or MS-Windows ones. In practice, this would be a herculean effort fraught with difficulty.

See QNX[2] for another example of a micro-kernel OS architecture.

0 - https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu

1 - https://books.apple.com/us/book/mac-os-x-internals/id4343583...

2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QNX

Apple outlines the architecture here - https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Da...

>Darwin is based on proven technology from many sources. A large portion of this technology is derived from FreeBSD, a version of 4.4BSD that offers advanced networking, performance, security, and compatibility features. Other parts of the system software, such as Mach, are based on technology previously used in Apple’s MkLinux project, in OS X Server, and in technology acquired from NeXT.

Exactly.

>>Darwin is based on proven technology from many sources. A large portion of this technology is derived from FreeBSD, a version of 4.4BSD that offers advanced networking, performance, security, and compatibility features. Other parts of the system software, such as Mach, are based on technology previously used in Apple’s MkLinux project, in OS X Server, and in technology acquired from NeXT.

> Exactly.

  Darwin != XNU
  userland tools != Darwin

Also, Mach[0] was created by CMU 40 years ago and is not "based on technology previously used in Apple’s ..." no matter what Apple claims.

Since you quoted from the provided archive, so shall I.

  The fundamental services and primitives of the OS X kernel
  are based on Mach 3.0. Apple has modified and extended Mach
  to better meet OS X functional and performance goals.[1]

Apple named the above "XNU". Since Mach[0] is a micro-kernel architecture, which FreeBSD is not and never has been, there must exist:

  The BSD portion of the OS X kernel is derived primarily
  from FreeBSD[2] ...

What I originally stated was:

  The OS-X (now branded as "macOS") kernel was not, and is
  not, a derivative of the FreeBSD kernel, or any other BSD,
  even though macOS/OS-X has a FreeBSD kernel component due
  to its Mach heritage.

In response to your assertion of:

  MacOS was absolutely derived from BSD through NeXTSTEP.

Note my identification of the FreeBSD kernel component being a component, not the kernel itself.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_(kernel)

1 - https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Da...

2 - https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Da...

I think you’re getting hung up on semantics and you’re hyper focused on the kernel.

Nothing you said contradicts my point and in fact, corroborates it. So I’m not sure what your point is.

Yes, Darwin is a mix of Mach, xnu, and BSD code. No where did I say macOS is the FreeBSD kernel. No where do I mention kernel. So while you argument for why I’m wrong is lengthy, it still says it was derived from BSD. Which is exactly what I said. There are parts of FreeBSD in macOS kernel. There are parts of XNU and Mach. There are parts OpenBSD and NetBSD. Majority of the base OS (including userland) is BSD.

The first version of MacOS X Server was based on an unreleased version of NEXTSTEP which in turn used 4.4BSD and Mach 2.5. Around BBB 1997-1998 a lot of userland was synced with bits from not just FreeBSD but the other BSD distributions, if my memory serves me correctly. MacOS X moved to Mach 3. That’s a very very long time ago though, and Apple obviously did a _lot_ of their own CoreOS engineering, things like launchd and XPC don’t have FreeBSD equivalents.

But hey, Darwin is open source so if someone wants to do go on a provenance archeological dig, it could be done!

Interesting article on the failure of Darwin as an open source project: http://www.synack.net/~bbraun/writing/osfail.html

I would expect if anyone even considered it, they’d immediately reject the idea, as they clearly believe that Apple retains ownership of the computers they “sell” and should control the software you could run on them.

Users buying Macs to put BSD on them are less likely to buy things in the Mac App Store.

Apple's attitude towards other OSes running on their hardware is less "supportive" and more "barely tolerates". Also as a general rule Apple doesn't contribute much to open source outside of some high profile projects like Swift and Webkit.

As somebody using a Linux distro compiled with Clang, I consider the work on LLVM to be Apple’s greatest contribution to Open Source.

I have seen others say that CUPS is.

And there is libdispatch, mdns, etc.

Anyway, they contribute more than you think.

Apple publishes the sources to the GPL BSD code they have to but that’s where the support ends.

Apple has no interest in assisting a competing operating system.

Isn't it Apple's policy to not support OSS projects, unless they're Apple's own OSS ones?

ie anything Apple didn't create/release themselves

Im about to buy a used thinkpad. Guess what I install on it .. yeah if the wifi driver is working well Im all in

I laid my hopes to rest to see some actual support for somewhat current desktop or even laptop hardware with bsd in my lifetime.

Think it's been 15+ years since I first tried and hardware only got more complicated and closed than back then

> It was 65 quid with about a fiver in postage and there are a ton of them.

I’ve bought a few of this vintage (7490’s specifically) and they are plentiful, cheap, and perfectly useable. I put Ubuntu on them, works great.

(random anecdote) My first and last experience with FreeBSD laptop was trying to use 3.x (!) on a Dell Inspiron 3500 (PII-350 maybe?), no sound modules were precompiled or included or whatever. Took about 3 days for `make world` to finally finish rebuilding... and then sound still not work. Red Hat 6.x "just worked" in all regards.

I mean. Judging by 3.x, that was literally 25-27 years ago. Not sure what that has to do with the project that exists today?

Let me know when you can get a Dell XPS 13 (2024/25) working with FreeBSD out of the box without the need to hunt documentation down for the following.

- audio - wifi - biometrics - GPU drivers that work well.

Unless you're trying to run your XPS on FreeBSD 3.x, I don't see what that has to do with either comment in this thread. Really really old OSs had problems. Current OSs also have problems, including that no OS supports all hardware, but I don't really see any connection between an anecdote about sound problems literally last century and missing drivers today.

Everything I mentioned many would consider to be essential parts of their system that should work, and would then fall under "Support and Usability" initiatives.

I guess I'm pointing out that his experience 20 something years ago is still relevant today, even if there's a lower barrier to entry now.

Do the biometrics work on Linux? Last time I had a laptop with a fingerprint reader the whole thing was controlled by some Broadcom thing that was hostile to anything not made by Microsoft. A fingerprint reader is a highly optional feature so it's not a problem if it is not working.

Yeah, I was also thinking of pointing out that I own a Dell XPS and AFAIK its fingerprint reader has never worked on Linux and the GPU is... well, it works these days, but Nvidia still isn't exactly the nicest thing on Linux.

My fingerprint worked out of the box on Linux Mint, as did NVIDIA Prime with the mobile 3080. Hibernation is historically (and still is) the main issue in linux land for me. * And I believe those hibernation issues are related to corrupted graphics stacks because Nvidia, ha.

OTOH I don't know of a single person using biometrics even on windows laptop. Is it a popular feature?

I use biometrics pretty much everywhere they're available.

Currently use my laptop's fingerprint reader under Linux.

Why is windows the reference - Macbooks are mostly unlocked by biometrics.

That's the answer I'd give to someone asking me to just run linux when I'm ranting about some commercial OS.

But I think the point of FreeBSD is more to provide something that you wouldn't get otherwise, and justifies going above and beyond to get it properly working.

My own anecdote is running the 4x and then 5x versions on my cobbled parts crappy desktop as a student and getting excelent perfs for how cheap it was, while still having linux level CJK and multi-input support and stellar stability.

I wouldn't do that anymore, but hope it stays an option for those with other specific needs that a BSD OS would help.

I still found it interesting and not worthy of the downvotes.

Yessssssss!!! I would love to help out in any way I can. I’m no good at kernels and stuff but I’m a Linux/unix man and I know graphics.

I would love to see a FreeBSD Workstation edition akin to like Fedora or Ubuntu where things just work (mostly).

Wayland took too long. We’re still stuck on Gtk. KDE Plasma team is making moves. I just want a nice, BSD, desktop experience without all the enshitification of copilot or Apple knowing what’s best for me.

I have Lenovo W530 from around 2012 or so. It has Nvidia K1000M card, full of RAM, i7. I kept upgrading it over the years and used Windows.

I have decided to get back to FreeBSD, I used it as desktop 2002-2009 or so.

Downloaded 15.0, start install, wifi driver works perfectly, out of the box. Promising start, never seen before with FreeBSD.

Installed. Next, lets go to setup, graphics and Wayland. And here we started again, same story, hundred magic params to add, nvidia drivers doesn't work properly, install older version, is incompatible with Wayland etc. Need to go back to Xorg, another set of problems.

Ok, if I spent another 8 hours and asked for help in forums as it was 20+ years ago, I could have probably made it work. Until the next issue showed up.

So I decide to drop it, download CachyOS. Start installer. It detects K1000M, installs old version of Nvidia drivers, KDE, sorts out all compatibility issues, everything just flies, flawlessly. As never before, not even Ubuntu or Fedora.

CachyOS guys, thank you, you made an incredible work on getting it all to this state. Absolutely great.

Now don't get me wrong, I love FreeBSD, used it as my main driver for years in early 2000s, started my career with it and it has sweet spot in my heart, forever. It's just that laptop support is not there, still terrible, as it was 20 years ago. PS last laptop I used it successfully on, was Sony Vaio VGN-FS550 from 2005!

You could try something like GhostBSD if you wanted an easier experience, but I've avoided nvidia like the plague since 2010 so not sure how well old nvidia cards are being supported.

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