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Comment by dzogchen | Hacker News Reader

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.

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 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

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.

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.

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