FreeBSD is going to take its desktop use quite a bit more seriously going forward.
FreeBSD has long been a top choice for IT professionals and organizations focused on servers and networking, and it is known for its unmatched stability, performance, and security. However, as technology evolves, FreeBSD faces a significant challenge: supporting modern laptops. To address this, the FreeBSD Foundation and Quantum Leap Research has committed $750,000 to improve laptop support, a strategic investment that will be pivotal in FreeBSD’s future.
↫ FreeBSD Foundation blog
So, what are they going to spend this big bag of money on? Well, exactly the kind of things you expect. They want to improve and broaden support for various wireless chipsets, add support for modern powersaving processor states, and make sure laptop-specific features like touchpad gestures, specialty buttons, and so on, work properly. On top of that, they want to invest in better graphics driver support for Intel and AMD, as well as make it more seamless to switch between various audio devices, which is especially crucial on laptops where people might reasonably be expected to use headphones.
In addition, while not specifically related to laptops, FreeBSD also intends to invest in support for heterogeneous cores in its scheduler and improvements to the bhyve hypervisor. Virtualisation is, of course, not just something for large desktops and servers, but also laptop users might turn to for certain tasks and workloads.
The FreeBSD project will be working not just with Quantum Leap Research, but also various hardware makers to assist in bringing FreeBSD’s laptop support to a more modern, plug-and-play state. Additionally, the mentioned cash injection is not set in stone; additional contributions from both individuals and larger organisations are obviously welcome, and of course if you can contribute code, bug reports, documentation, and so on, you’re also more than welcome to jump in.
This will be unpopular and is of course just my opinion, but… who cares? *BSD is just not going to be a factor for laptops, full-stop. Linux will gain a majority share before any BSD even registers in the mobile market, and face it, Linux won’t ever have a major impact on the mobile market either, except phones of course. I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but I would be surprised if any BSD is prominent even in the server market – my experience is that new server installs are either MS or Linux now, and companies don’t consider BSD for various reasons, one big one being administration commonality. To be clear, I have nothing against FreeBSD at all and admire the work done there, but maybe the laptop market isn’t the best place to put money for them. And from the vendor side, it’s going to be the same old story – they will put their driver investments where it has the best return for them, meaning Windows and Linux.
I care. I use laptops exclusively and much prefer FreeBSD to Linux. WiFi didn’t work reliably for me previously, nor did power management. Touchpads also has looked functionality.
Basically, the issues they’ve outlined all plagued my attempts.
I can’t wait for these efforts to bear fruit, and I absolutely will be switching back from Linux if they’re successful
I KIND OF agree. Putting money/time into developing drivers for outdated hardware seems a waste to me. Yes it might keep alive an otherwise eco trash laptop, but that niche is filled already, as you say, by Linux.
I’d much prefer they focused on modern/new hardware. That was I could conceivably use it for genuine work. And from there maybe even form agreements with OEMs so it can be a pre-installed option (like Ubuntu on certain dells).
If they Really want to get ahead of the curve, target Snapdragon X Elite and get ahead of Linux and Windows
who cares? *Linux is just not going to be a factor for laptops,
Oh, sorry. I was thinking like in the 2000’s
Linux support on Laptops is actually worse than ever. Tons of manufacturers with stuff like custom ACPI states, never going to make a mainboard chipset driver for Linux, and Linux just hides the fact by reverting to standard power states and then users report terrible battery life. Wouldn’t even recommend old hardware over finding something new and certified for Linux as Linux maintainers have not proven capable of maintaining old drivers without introducing bugs when their driver ABI changes. Of course, those aren’t widely reported because it’s Linux, just endless help threads in every forum about how their AMD laptop screen won’t power on after sleep after updating to kernel x.x.18 and similar issues all the time.
Ha, I love how all of these news turn into threads with haters venting their spleen about how Linux is horrible to use and no one could ever have a good time running it. Well, I don’t know who they try to convince, but let me tell you I’ve had a few laptops the past 25 years, from different vendors. The only hardware that didn’t make my life miserable was Apple’s, but that was ruined by the software experience long ago, and now I’m not sure I want to try using Linux on Apple Silicon… because if its proprietary status makes it’s a bad experience, I’ll pay premium to ascertain that.
My work laptops have always run Windows, and I’ve had Thinkpad, Dell, HP, Asus, Lenovo and other manufacturers’ takes on the laptop PC. Apart from the battle beast that was the Thinkpad, pretty much all of them made my life miserable with power management, mostly with sleep and hibernation. My current work PCs won’t go to sleep, for example, and while there are many people talking about the same issue in “endless help threads” on windows or microsoft forums, the only solution that works is to… reboot the PC. So yeah, so much for “sleep” usefulness under that amazing OS. And every workplace is plagued with people struggling with one part or another of their computers, mostly under windows. People don’t use Windows because they love it. People use Windows because the workplace (and often governments as well) has chosen MS Office as the standard for communicating information. That’s the state of things and I’m ok with it. But pretending Linux is worse than Windows on the power management side of things is just BS. Linux might be junk, but then so is the main OS people use on PCs. Nothing to envy there, nor on the package management front, nor on the GUI front… Basically, the only redeeming feature of Windows is the Office suite. Scratch that, and no one cares anymore.
Googling Quantum Leap Research shows they take government contracts, which likely means this is some investment specifically for their own use case and meeting government requirements. For everyone else it’s still just another Posix complaint, Linux, but worse OS. BSDs main use case is always going to be a free OS for commercial products without those pesky source code sharing obligations of the GPL.
FWIW FreeBSD always has done this sort of announcements. They are a tiny dev community, compared to Linux at this point. So they need to sort of remind people they’re still alive.
Their wireless stack is just awful. So any improvement is welcome.
And of course, instead of focusing on supporting certain configurations and supporting them well (so OEMs can build a well-supported product around these configurations), they’ll try and support everything under the sun and support it poorly (not as poorly as now, but still poorly), so some neckbeards can poorly repurpose random dumpster-dived Windows laptops to FreeBSD laptops.
These people just don’t want to look over the fence and see how Valve or Apple are doing it.
kurkosdr,
That’s a tough call. I do understand your point about focusing resources, there’s truth to that. But honestly if I wasn’t able to boot up installers & live cds on the hand me down “windows pcs” that I already owned, then I would have been far less likely to use linux, which started out as dual booting. I’m pretty settled right now, but there was a point in my life when I was trying several x86 operating systems – dozens of them, I did not go buy new hardware for them. I couldn’t afford to do that even if I wanted to.
These days virtual machines might help new users demo the OS before buying custom hardware for it, but don’t underestimate how many people are not willing/able to buy new hardware but do have a used computer sitting around. I think this needs to be reflected in the balance,
According to the press release,
“Quantum Leap Research, LLC develops capabilities for the benefit of the United States Government in advance of a defined need. Quantum Leap is focused on tackling some of the most complex problems faced by the Department of Defense and the U.S. Intelligence Community.”
I wonder if this investment is related to a U.S. DoD strategy.
I noticed that too. What is interesting though is that $500k of the $750k is coming from the FreeBSD Foundation itself with only $250k coming from Quantum Leap. So, while this could be a DoD driven strategy, it is certainly a massive change in focus for FreeBSD generally as well. I am not sure how much money FreeBSD has but a half-million must be a massive chunk of it.
@Alfman
Isn’t this the harsh reality. I can’t see it changing in the near future, we still purchase all laptop and most hardware with some form of Windows installed, and then extend the life of redundant hardware by switching to a Linux or a very occasionally a BSD. As of today in our organisation, under 4% of users run MacOS, about 4% of users run Linux as default, 17% of users have a dual boot option Windows/Linux, the rest are Windows exclusively, and I believe those pure Windows user numbers are lower in our organisation than is typical.
As someone who just finished installing raw[*] FreeBSD-14 on an old Macbook Air, this is welcome news. Because of GPL, including support for Broadcom’s wifi meant configuring a custom kernel. And while the touchpad kinda works, multi-button clicking is hit-and-miss so I’ll be using a compact USB mouse.
All in all, I’m now happy to have a portable version of the setups I have at home and at work. And this means this particular Macbook Air will continue to be usable long after Apple drops (dropped?) it from the macOS support list.
Keeping fingers crossed for what this laptop collaboration might yield.
[*]
I tried both NomadBSD and GhostBSD and they are very impressive efforts. But since my habits are old and crusty (FreeBSD + plain X11 + vtwm) and since the wifi issue meant “opening the hood”, starting from raw FreeBSD was easiest.
How old is your Macbook Air? I am typing this from Linux on a 2013 Macbook Air. I was about to put Linux on a 2017 Macbook Air as well. Are either of these FreeBSD candidates? Honestly, I did not even consider that FreeBSD would work on these machines. Does audio work? Webcam?
tanishaj: it’s a Mid-2012 Macbook Air [ A1466 EMC 2559 ].
Yes, audio works.
Never used cam (covered by 10-yr-old piece of tape) so haven’t checked that. sorry.
Would not be surprised if less-older models would also be supported (but – yeah – FreeBSD support tends to lag behind Linux support – hence the value of this collab project! )
Hope that helps.
They need to be getting more support from Apple as Mac OS has deep BSD roots
They aren’t that deep don’t confused BSD with Darwin.
One of the big differences between macOS and BSD are the drivers. This work probably overlaps very little with Apple’s interests. I mean, getting OTHER hardware to work with anything is in direct opposition to Apple’s interests.
It’s always surprised me there wasn’t more of an effort to piggy back on Darwin/Mac drivers during the intel era. As we saw with the hackintosh community, there was quite a wide range of hardware support in there.
That always surprised me too. Actually, I was always confused how little attention Darwin got in general.
Think back to when Darwin was Open Sourced. GNUstep already existed. At the time, it seems obvious to me that somebody would pick up the ball and create a macOS clone. Architecturally, macOS ( through its NeXTstep heritage ) was designed to be cross-platform. We could have had an ARM version before Apple did.
As you say, the Hackintosh movement did extend and expand the hardware supported by macOS. But there was never an effort to have anything else run on top of that layer other than Apple’s proprietary offering.
But neither Darwin nor GNUstep ever got any traction at all really. Why? Is it because macOS is free of charge? Is it just because people care more about “free” than about “freedom”?
FreeBSD got the compiler/stack from macos for a few releases now. So I’d say that’s a big return.
I daily drive a ThinkPad W530 with NVIDIA graphics and FreeBSD.
It works fine. Zoom/Teams with webcam from within Chrome. 3D acceleration on X and Wayland.
Just had to replace my wifi card with an Atheros.
It sleeps, wakes up, etc..
Zero limitations.
Getting like GameScope Session running on this with stability, would be amazing. I wonder if they’ll ever get there.
I tried FreeBSD (GhostBSD actually) and while I was impressed how much cohesive than Linux it vibed, the problem is that most software is in binary form for either ubuntu or fedora. I don’t like to be testing if there is a version of my favorite tool for BSD.