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by umanwizard 2323 days ago
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.
1 comments
loeg 2323 days ago
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.

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wbl 2323 days ago
If suspend works and resume doesn't, I have some serious questions about the definition of works.
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loeg 2323 days ago
Ah, it's sort of a running joke. Like "the fall doesn't kill you — it's the landing."

Our resume support is hit or miss, to be completely fair. I don't even try to use it myself due to bad experiences in the early days with Linux in 2000's and lack of need. Shutdown and startup is fast enough for my travel laptop that I don't care; and my workstation I never turn off. But I recognize a lot of people do really care about suspend/resume, and it works for some people but not everyone.

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vinceguidry 2323 days ago
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.
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loeg 2323 days ago
> Please try to be charitable online

I do. I think you misread the comment you replied to in an uncharitable way if you arrived at the conclusion that your subsequent reply was responsive.

> Nobody can give 100% of the context needed to satisfy everyone that might be reading it.

That was never the criticism. Your response is a non sequitur.

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