[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.