[loeg]

They almost certainly mean 802.11g or n, not the archaic a. FreeBSD has generally good 802.11n support. It lacks 802.11ac.

Yes, if you absolutely need 802.11ac wifi in particular, FreeBSD isn't a great choice. But many modern 802.11n NICs (and 802.11ac NICs, in 802.11n mode) "just work" out of the box, including the 'iwm' devices mentioned in the article, on more recent versions of FreeBSD.

FreeBSD 12.0 dates to 2018 — this is like installing Fedora 29 in 2020.

[3fe9a03ccd14ca5]

> It lacks 802.11ac.

Why in the world would it lack support for one of the most ubiquitous, not to mention fastest, wireless standards? I mean, it’s been out since 2013.

[loeg]

Time, resources, interest; lack of open datasheets and corporate sponsorship from the hardware vendors making the parts. These things don't just happen magically; people make them happen. Linux finally has enough market power that vendors willingly write drivers for it, but I remember a very similar situation with Linux in the 2000s when Microsoft was the only player around with that kind of market clout.

[Aengeuad]

Speaking from memory as it's a little difficult to search for but there's no fully FOSS ac driver available for Linux which might be why the BSDs have none, Linux has open source ac drivers of course but they still require proprietary firmware blobs and the performance is terrible compared to the proprietary drivers (think 350Mb/s with OpenWrt compared to 800Mb/s on stock router firmware). Atheros released fully open blob free 802.11n drivers in 2008 with their ath9k driver, although no other manufacturer followed suit. I've heard that there may be licencing or patent restrictions preventing blob free ac drivers from being released but again it's a little difficult to try and verify this.

[labawi]

FOSS driver and open firmware are separate issues.

Binary drivers executing on the CPU are a no-go for me. OTOH, I consider device firmware blobs user(OS)-loaded on power-on to be strictly safer than a stored blob, though less convenient in some ways.

Devices these days have firmware, usually on flash-able storage, as they don't make it right the first time. Would you rather have a wifi chipset, that can be permanently infected after an exploit / evil-maid / malware on PC, or one that can equally be exploited, but is as clean as ever after a power cycle, because the OS needs to load firmware every time?

[loeg]

This isn't the reason FreeBSD doesn't have 802.11ac. We're not picky about firmware blobs.

[szemet]

Doesn't mt76* count? It is in since 4.19.

http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1808.0/04276.html

I know, because I've immediately bought an usb wifi dongle for my desktop with this chipset. (and it is working perfectly OOB with every linux kernel for me since then).

[travbrack]

Because running freebsd on a laptop is an edge case. Most people run it on servers. It’s not trying to be everything to everyone like Linux is.

[loeg]

FreeBSD dev here — I don't like this line of argument. It is always used to rationalize any defect in FreeBSD. Sometimes we just have defects! That's just the truth of things; we don't need to pretend we're defective on purpose. Many developers run FreeBSD on their daily driver laptops or workstations because it is (perhaps tautologically) one of the best platforms to develop FreeBSD on.

Our wifi support isn't 100% and this is a weakness. I believe that desktop usability is a large part of why Linux is as successful as it is today, and the modern laptop is so similar to the modern server that it's a bit of a moot distinction.

[umanwizard]

I don't think the person you responded to was claiming or implying that FreeBSD's wifi support is incomplete on purpose. Rather giving a reason for why resources have not (yet?) been expended in that area.

I have FreeBSD running on my home desktop workstation and everything is working fine, but I wouldn't try to install it on my laptop. Laptop hardware is just too variable and non-standard. Touchscreens, esoteric Wi-Fi chipsets, fingerprint readers, brightness controls, bluetooth, power management, suspend on lid close... I'd be quite surprised if FreeBSD supported all of this out of the box, so I stick with Ubuntu.

[loeg]

That's a very charitable read of GP's remarks. Kudos for the generosity, but I didn't get the same impression from the statements and the context. The phrases GP is repeating aren't novel; they're repeated time and time again in any messageboard discussion that ever touches on a missing feature in FreeBSD. You could say FreeBSD is missing SATA support (just for example; it isn't really) and someone would chime in with "FreeBSD isn't trying to be all things..."

As far as laptops, it all tends to be a bit specific to the model. There aren't too many different wifi chipsets these days; bluetooth is pretty simple from the software side of things. Power management and lid suspend work on most systems (as they say, resume is the hard part). Brightness controls should also work well. I don't know about fingerprint readers. Recently we landed Thinkpad PrivacyGuard support from software, for example. It's not particularly significant in isolation, just as an example of random modern laptop features that might exist in only a handful of models, which we still try to support in FreeBSD.

[wbl]

If suspend works and resume doesn't, I have some serious questions about the definition of works.

[vinceguidry]

Please try to be charitable online and consider not engaging if you can't bring yourself to. Nobody can give 100% of the context needed to satisfy everyone that might be reading it. We all seem to want everybody to read our own contributions charitably but don't want to give others the same benefit. Makes interaction not fun.

[Fnoord]

Being honest about a defect/weakness like this while being a FreeBSD developer gives me (as non-FreeBSD user) faith in your platform.

I've recently tried NixOS and I'm impressed. Have you considered adopting Nix into FreeBSD?

[loeg]

Thanks! I also appreciate honesty about faults, so this is sort of a golden-rule thing for me. I'm glad I'm not alone :-).

I don't know anything about Nix. So the short but perhaps unsatisfying answer is that I have not considered adopting Nix.

[unsatchmo]

I really wanted to run FreeBSD in my T470s and the lack of hardware support pushed me over to Ubuntu. I loved setting up FreeBSD and it felt snappy for a lot of stuff but it would be cool if some of the devs who do live on laptops would just release a package they tune for their particular hardware.

[loeg]

It's not quite a canned package, but we try to keep the Laptop support wiki up to date:

https://wiki.freebsd.org/Laptops#T-Z

And for the T470s in particular (yes, it's somewhat sparse, and the links suggest a non-ideal amount of effort required, but purportedly it seems to work at the end): https://wiki.freebsd.org/Laptops/Thinkpad_T470s

[ianai]

How difficult would it be to flesh out this rough spot? For others, it seems like a FreeBSD dev might not at all be able to get ac support for hardware with the drivers as locked down as they are. But if I knew the problem was tractable I might try my hand at it someday. Could be a good resume driven project.

[loeg]

I can't begin to answer this question, sorry! I mostly don't work on network drivers at all, and the 80211 family/stack is its own beast that I am utterly unfamiliar with.

[cosmodisk]

Was about to write the same. I suppose WiFi support to an average FreeBSD user is as useful as floppy disk reader drivers to Win 10 users.

[Koshkin]

Linux it is, then.

[dmix]

Linux desktop is great in 2020, especially if you buy the right hardware with solid support, the experience is totally smooth and super-high performance with stuff like ArchLinux.

Boots up immediatley, no annoying MacOS updates or having to install XCode while having multiple versions of core unix packages, because it pre-installs a bunch of out-of-date ones you replace immediately with brew. This causes problems, especially for newbies new to working with terminals, as it falls back onto the old ones when stuff isn't linked or set up properly.

Nothing beats having a clean minimal /usr directory with only the stuff you decide to install and extremely fast startups with good battery use.

I get Macbooks for work but use a Linux one on the side (which I used for 5+ yrs when I was working freelance) and I plan to convince my boss to let me get a thinkpad or dell for the next laptop update.

[lsiebert]

So I used to be a Linux mint/ubuntu/fedora user (I distro hopped a bit), but I really like how homebrew on macs is per user account rather than system wide, and I can just delete the folder to reset it for the most part (minus running programs, some GUI casks, and shortcuts). AFAIK, apt-get and most if not all linux package managers only work system wide, and I can't install something just for a specific user. Maybe arch is different? Homebrew definitely has issues though, agreed.

Incidentally I ran all of those distros on a T430... which still works fine when I boot it up. Thinkpads are great linux machines, and just great easily repairable machines in general.

[microtonal]

AFAIK, apt-get and most if not all linux package managers only work system wide, and I can't install something just for a specific user.

Not all. Nix and guix allow you to install packages into your own profile as an unprivileged user. Best of all, packages that are installed by multiple users are shared in the Nix store.

[michaelmrose]

Per user installs are unnecessary for most users. Firstly most machines are single user. In multi-user machines installing additional software/libraries system-wide has no downsides. If a particular piece of software can't be installed globally without conflicting with other software it probably needs stronger isolation than your user account and you have multiple better options to achieve this.

The sole case that leaves are cases in which your company doesn't allow you the necessary privileges to install software which is an organizational challenge not a technical one.

That said something like nix can allow you to install software per user.

[Galanwe]

I think you should not compare package managers like that.

The way I see it, a system is a stack: that is you put a number of layers on top of each other.

The kernel is a layer at the very bottom, on top of which you stack a distribution. This distribution is managed through a package manager. On top of this distribution you could stack a user package manager.

In this view, you cannot compare apt or yum to home brew, they don’t belong to the same layer.

If you think about it, that makes sense. User package managers have to rely on the underlying layer to provide tools for e.g. compiling user packages.

Now I agree that in real life, the limit between layers can be more blurry:

- system package managers distribute end users softwares. Because most desktops are single user so having an extra layer is often not necessary.

- some system package managers are re-purposed to be stacked as user package managers. E.g. you can use gentoo prefix.

Still, to have a clear picture in mind the layers should be considered.

That being said, there are a bunch of user package managers you can also use on Linux. Have a look at spack for instance. I think the nix package manager can be used like that also.

[ianai]

FreeBSD vm for everything within a Linux host for hardware support.

[markjdb]

Because there are not many people with the ability to add 802.11ac support to drivers, the resources to do so (datasheets, test hardware), and the time required. The 802.11 stack does support at least some 11ac features.

[favadi]

Fedora 29 works great with T480 though.