[mlu]

I know FreeBSD (or *BSD in general) is still used heavily in server environments.

Is anyone using it on the desktop as well?

I always wanted to give it a try, but then I'm hesitant because of lacking hardware support. I remember struggling with Intel KMS support in one of the earlier releases. Is this still a problem?

[kev009]

I run FreeBSD -CURRENT on a Lenovo C30, which is a dual Xeon E5 workstation platform. Key to my use for the past 1-2 years with a 30" and 3 24" monitors is the nvidia binary video driver. Prior to this setup I ran Gentoo. I find FreeBSD more conductive toward the things I want to work on, but I am also much more interested in working on FreeBSD src than I was Linux kernel. I maintain a small repo that does everything I want at https://github.com/kev009/digital-life

On my laptop, a Lenovo T420, I run PC-BSD -CURRENT (http://iso.cdn.pcbsd.org/11.0-CURRENTMAR2016/edge/amd64/), which eliminates the need to build src and packages. I also run PC-BSD -CURRENT on my work desktop with a Radeon card and two monitors. I could potentially expand my workstation builds to these with pkg, but PC-BSD is more or less hands off which I want on these devices.

Open source video needs work, but as of this week that has started heating up and we may start closing in toward DragonflyBSD in terms of Freedesktop/Linux equivalence by the time FreeBSD 11.0 ships https://github.com/iotamudelta/freebsd-base-graphics/tree/dr...

[wowtip]

Does it work fine for you as a laptop OS?

Battery time, suspend/hibernate, etc?

[gkya]

I've an elderly Asus notebook nowadays as my PC, with 10.2 on it that I installed rather recently. It's battery is long-dead (I use it as a workstation mostly), so I can't comment on that, but suspend/hibernate does not work for me. FreeBSD does not have hibernate, and suspend, AFAIK, does not work with Xorg, so it's practically useless. There are some posts that demo how to do it, by unloading troublesome stuff before suspend and reloading them later, but I didn't get around to trying that yet, because suspend does not resume, and hard reboots give me the shakes without a backup, I couldn't port my backup script to't yet.

Performance-wise, I did not notice much between Arch linux, what I was using before, and this. My setup is very light, Emacs+Xombrero on TWM. I notice, though, a certain performance problem with video in browser, but that may well be Gstreamer plugins that run slower than Linux on *BSD, I can't comment, as I don't know the internals. But VLC works just fine.

[kev009]

Running it on a laptop is a bit of a science project still, if you want a seamless experience it's not really there, but it can be done. At this point you can use up to Haswell intel graphics with suspend/resume.

[PeCaN]

I run it as a desktop OS on a Lenovo G700 and those all work fine.

Hardware support isn't as complete as Linux but it isn't bad at all either. Chances are anything that's older than 2-3 years will work out of the box, anything newer may or may not require a little tinkering.

[krylon]

I only recently got myself a used ThinkPad X220 that is now running PC-BSD. I tried a stock FreeBSD 10.2 first and could not get suspend/resume to work properly, so I tried PC-BSD, where suspend/resume works; then again the latest PC-BSD is based on FreeBSD 10.3, so a stock FreeBSD 10.3 might have worked as well; but now I am too lazy to re-install.

Otherwise the hardware is supported very nicely. Only scroll support for the trackpoint was a bit of a pain to get working.

[toomanythings2]

I run FreeBSD on my workstation since 2004 and am at 10.3-RELEASE right now. I'm a web developer and run several VMs, different browsers, all development work including graphics, as does the staff of ten at my office.

FreeBSD has no issues with any of the high end hardware we run and the oldest to newest hardware we have is one to three years old.

[tristor]

I use FreeBSD on my personal laptop. I picked up an X230 used on eBay and upgraded it so that it has 2x256GB SSDs in a ZFS mirror and 16GB of RAM. More than enough horsepower to do anything I need, and FreeBSD ensures that it's used most efficiently.

Much like many people on HN, I suspect, I do most of my work /and/ my play at the command line. Once you're there for a significant amount of your time you begin to get a respect for tight integration in the BSD base system and the superb documentation which is included. Because of the docs, I can reasonably work in an environment where I have no Internet access for an extended period of time without feeling like I'm suffering. In the Linux world, I find myself spending more time looking things up on search engines and less times looking things up in the manual. This simply isn't the case with FreeBSD, which means I'm less tied to being online and more tied to getting stuff done.

YMMV but I love FreeBSD as a desktop/laptop OS. I know many people also use OpenBSD on laptops because of superior driver support for some hardware, but the Linux emulation in FreeBSD allows me to guarantee no matter what I'm trying to do it will work, so I stick to FreeBSD vs OpenBSD for my uses.

[floatboth]

I'm using it on a Thinkpad X240: https://unrelenting.technology/articles/freebsd-on-the-think...

(Need to update that post: drm-i915-update-38 has been merged into -CURRENT; EFI loader in -CURRENT fully supports ZFS now)

tl;dr everything works except:

* Bluetooth (but I don't ever use it on laptops)

* the SD card reader (I haven't needed that either)

* resuming from sleep (that's unfortunate, but with X240's big battery I don't need to put it to sleep :D)

[mlu]

Thanks for the blog article. My laptop hardware is quite similar to yours. I might give FreeBSD a try again!

[VLM]

No (serious) problems here.

I want to run the same OS on my desktops as my servers to minimize expensive brain context switching, so I'm not into the pc-bsd concept, however, numerous people recommended it as a desktop flavor of freebsd. You MIGHT have better luck with hardware drivers or software integration on pc-bsd, if you have problems with freebsd. Maybe. Think of it like freebsd is to pc-bsd as debian is to ubuntu, sorta.

http://www.pcbsd.org/

As for my non-significant problems, there was some weirdness with haskell and long term (days, weeks) stability of xmonad, so I switched over to awesome as my window manager with an identical keyboard layout.

I have no experience with desktop environments on freebsd on my desktops... no interest. I need something that switches between emacs, terminal, and browser, that's the total extent of my environment. I'm told freebsd can run KDE and Gnome, although I don't want them. I point this out because some people define desktop by hardware, or by end user use, or others define that word as "runs gnome", and I can only verify the first two definitions.

[eatonphil]

I used FreeBSD exclusively for a some months on my primary laptop, a Lenovo Ideapad. I never did get wifi working properly (I believe support for my chip is in 10.3 or 11.0) so I had to buy a ten dollar dongle. FreeBSD does not support integrated graphics. I think I got around this by disabling one of the graphics cards. But I'm not certain. I also couldn't get power management or sleep mode working. So I got used to shutting down every time I put it away.

My work now has me using OS X, but I keep the FreeBSD machine on a vpn because I love working on it. If you're thinking about, I'd highly recommend looking into the FreeBSD and OpenBSD support for your laptop. Otherwise just buy an x220.

[akerro]

Yes, I'm using FreeBSD on my netbook. I tried some Linux distros there, but they were too slow. My netbook came with Fedora, where yum was terribly lagging, it was taking even 40minutes to upgrade 20pacakges (what happened weekly), I tried Debian with LXDE, it was faster, but I wasn't able to watch youtube, video was lagging on 460p. GF was using it as portable PC to listen to podcasts etc, but starting any application like firefox, thunderbird or clementine was taking way too long. When Debian switched to systemD, I decided to give FreeBSD a try after 10 years with Debian/Arch and CentOS on server. I was impressed that command line installation of FreeBSD was simpler than Manjaro with GUI. Honestly, application startup of Firefox, Thunderbid was much quicker, youtube videos work with 720p (nearly full screen of the netbook :D). I had some problems setting up my dev environment there, like Qt5 is said to work out of box, but I had to make some manual fixes to get it working system-wide. Setup of Xorg and SLIM was something different than SDDM on ArchLinux.

I don't know about Intel KMS, I use FreeBSD on portable netbook and my work-station (Dell laptop - came with Ubuntu) and everything is superb. You will need to dig some stuff like rc.conf, but documentation is very clear and once you modified it, you're 100% that it will work after reboot. I still don't remember and know from memory how to enable acpi support on Linux (backlight control on laptops, it worked out of box on both laptops on BSD). if you don't have much time to read about it, install bsdconfig from ports it's a nice command line application that helps you select necessary features of the system.

If anything, it's definitely worth giving BSD a try just to get some new experience! I'm also highly impressed with DragonFlyBSD, worth reading their documentation to learn that BSD systems are ahead of Linux when it comes to security and system design.

Here, have some resources (includes my blog): https://www.b.agilob.net/freebsd-on-netbook-acer-aspire/ https://www.b.agilob.net/qt5-on-freebsd/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DragonFly_BSD http://networkfilter.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/security-openbsd... https://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/01

[mlu]

Thanks for the detailed answer. I'm certainly going to have a look!

[mioelnir]

Running FreeBSD at work on my workstation (10-STABLE) and oncall laptop (11-CURRENT) on the regular Dell hardware the company hands out.

I do not use suspend/resume though due to disk encryption which is ineffective if your suspended laptop gets lost.