[napsterbr]

> Currently, FreeBSD lags behind in key areas such as [...] laptop-specific functionalities like suspend/resume

Many years ago I migrated to FreeBSD and absolutely loved it. I was forced to migrate back to Linux once I started a job and ended up staying with Linux to this day.

A few months back I decided to give FreeBSD another shot. The one thing that was an immediate deal breaker was being unable to suspend/resume on my desktop computer. For my workflow, that's an unnecessary waste of power / energy.

Just wanted to share this testimonial to outline the importance of suspend/resume for non-laptop hardware. Almost every time I see this discussion, it's focused on laptops.

By the way, I'm extremely excited about this initiative to make FreeBSD more attractive to non-server users in general (not only new ones). That will surely be a huge benefit to the entire community. If I can't run FreeBSD on my machine, I won't runt it on my servers.

[_lvbh]

Am I the only one that never uses suspend/resume? If I'll be away from my laptop, I save everything and shut it down. If something is running, I plug it in and lock the screen.

[kotojo]

I don't think I've ever powered a computer down completely outside of troubleshooting issues or restarting for updates since the 90s.

[devilbunny]

I did, routinely, with my ThinkPad until a month or two ago. See, it would surreptitously turn itself back on (to hit Windows Update!) and kill its battery overnight. I tried turning everything off; didn't work.

Just over a month ago, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41442490 was posted. I went into the BIOS, changed the "sleep mode" to "Linux" (at least ThinkPads still consider this), and... in sleep mode, I lost about 2-3% of battery overnight. Tops. I still hibernate for most situations, as I don't use the laptop much, but when I know I'm going to be using it often, it's nothing, and it works the way things were supposed to.

[hbogert]

The regressions in standby/suspend are staggering inthe last 3-5 years. Peak stability was with my t480s, just proper s3 support. Currently it's hit and miss with this silly s0ix shenanigan.

[umanwizard]

Idk about “the only one” but surely that’s rare. Why would you want to take the time to save, quit, reboot, and reopen everything instead of closing your laptop which takes less than a second?

[avidphantasm]

Been using Mac laptops for over 20 years and almost never turn off my laptops. Not being able to suspend/resume is an absolute dealbreaker.

[PhilipRoman]

I used to do the same, but being able to put my laptop on a shelf for a week or two and get back to what I was doing is really convenient. It's basically as if you had instant fast boot with no downsides.

[ktosobcy]

Since getting a MBP I'm not shutting it down. Not sure what magic they are doing (some very deep sleep) but shutting it down't is absolutely not needed... When I step away I just close the lid and then open in it 1h or a couple of days and have everything as it was ready to work in split second...

[10000truths]

Suspend-to-disk does pretty much that - it saves the contents of your RAM to swap. Suspend/resume should be transparent to most applications, perhaps excepting those that rely on a real-time network connection.

[Merad]

I mostly live in the windows world, and since at least Win 7 its sleep and hibernate have been reliable enough that I use them regularly. When I'm deep into a project for work I can easily have a dozen apps open. Having to reopen them multiple times a days is (to me) just a waste of time when sleep works great.

[Saris]

I think you're part of a small group for sure.

I only use suspend/sleep because it's much faster to get back to what I was doing. If I shutdown I have to open everything again and some things (Fusion 360 for example) take a good 30-60 seconds to open the program and documents and be in a usable state.

[Brian_K_White]

I run xubuntu as my main os on my laptop for many years now and I never suspend. Always full shut down.

I do let it sleep when plugged in but that's just sleep not suspend/hibernate. So on my desk at home it's usually just a mouse wiggle to resume where I left off. But when I shut down it's a shut down.

I don't know why people say it's some kind of deal breaker neccessity. I have it available and don't use it.

[EasyMark]

I would just never turn off my computer if I had to do this. It’s far too much effort. I much prefer suspend, it’s a nice compromise between power saving and convenience of always on

[_yb2s]

Why not? I can’t see any reason to waste time booting when your computer can be ready to go in an instant, with everything you were working on undisturbed.

[tmtvl]

Depends on which computer we're talking about. I always fully power down my laptop, but my desktop I just suspend to RAM.

[beanjuiceII]

seems like that is not very convenient, and convenience is one of the reasons i use technology

[BSDobelix]

Your not, it's the first thing i do (disable suspend/hibernation).

[alisonatwork]

Nope, I don't see the point now that we have SSDs and fast boot. Browsers, IDEs, even stuff like Notepad remembers where it was after a reboot so it's not like you'll lose any in-progress work you couldn't be bothered saving.

[ranger_danger]

I disagree. There are still tons of apps that don't "save state" exactly where they left off, including browsers. I absolutely dread restarting every time I am forced to do it for kernel updates, because that means I have to re-open all the same programs and navigate back to where I was again. And I don't like saving any browser history so that means re-logging into a handful of sites, doing the 2FA dance etc etc., it's really a big hassle.

[alisonatwork]

If you have chosen not to save your browser history then obviously the history will not persist - the feature you opted not to use has been disabled as designed. If you set your browser up to have persistent history (the default for all mainstream browsers) and ensure the option to restore tabs on browser restart is enabled (I think also the default nowadays due to rise of mobile) it really does just work. Worst case after an epic crash that even the browser itself doesn't recognize Ctrl-Shift-T will get you back, even if you had dozens of open tabs in multiple windows, even after a reboot.

For other stuff, if you always have the same set of programs open and always put them in the same place, your window manager should restore that for you after a reboot on UNIX. It's been two decades since I used X frequently but even back then window managers could pin apps to fixed screen positions. On Windows default positioning has often been a bit less predictable, but there are custom window managers there too if you really want it. In any case the default window manager has plenty of keyboard shortcuts to very quickly open and arrange apps how you want them.

My work laptop boots to logon before I even get the charger, mouse and monitor plugged in, and after typing my password I'm back with my browser and IDE running, VPN connected, WSL up etc in less than a minute, usually while still mid smalltalk/greetings with my colleagues.

With the move to cloud-saved everything and the expectation of users that all their data should always be synced across all their devices, you need to go out of your way to find and/or configure apps to not automatically persist settings and state these days. For some apps I make that decision deliberately because I don't trust the middle man (e.g. bookmarks and tab sync) but that's a personal choice I make to forgo convenience for privacy. If the FreeBSD (or Linux) desktop experience is not doing this kind of stuff out of the box, then I think that's one of the first things it could do to meet the expectations of people coming from Windows/Android.

From my perspective suspend/restore is perhaps fine if your laptop never leaves the office, but I usually find myself more annoyed than delighted when it kicks in by accident. Your battery life starts to hinge on literally the efficacy of your laptop's physical hinge, which if you bash your computer around a lot during commute is less dependable than an on/off switch. And nothing worse than having your back suddenly get hot because your laptop decided to wake up while you're cycling in multi-lane traffic, especially if your morning schedule has you in meetings instead of charging at your desk.

[ranger_danger]

In general I disagree with what you're saying, there are still tons of programs that don't have any cloud syncing, plus not everyone wants to use that. There's also many WM/DEs that do not re-open running programs or keep window positions, including basically all the ones I use. Plus I also run many programs as different users, for privacy/isolation purposes, which no DE can handle in that case.

I also have historically (and still) had major issues with suspend/resume when a discrete GPU is involved or some other hardware device that linux can't resume properly, I always end up having to just reboot anyways which defeats the purpose.

[loeg]

Yeah, me either. I don't have much faith it will come back. I just leave computers running 24/7. Low power C-states are really good these days.

[yapyap]

yeah pretty much

[redprince]

> If I can't run FreeBSD on my machine, I won't runt it on my servers.

How does offering a laptop or desktop OS experience relate to being a great server OS?

Anyway, the last time I was using FreeBSD on a client was in the late 90s. I am still running FreeBSD servers. It never bothered me that running that particular OS on a laptop maybe could be a challenge. The FreeBSD project has limited resources in terms of money and developers and I'm quite content seeing that going towards building a great server OS.

Diverting people and money towards a better laptop support just means competing with Linux and I don't see FreeBSD bringing something really compelling to the table. At best it'll just do everything Linux already does.

[amaccuish]

For some, but I like having the same thing run everywhere, there's less mental load.

[jmclnx]

I use to be a FreeBSD user ages ago, but stopped at v5. I tried again at v8 and loved it, but back then I had to remove it due to disk space.

But one think bothered me. They love to patch some packages, a notable one is ssh. I wish at least in that case they trust the OpenBSD folks :)

But one thing I like a lot is jails and I had a jail for GIMPS and an ssh portal to transfer files to/from work. I think jails are much better than Linux docker and friends. I wonder if creating jails have gotten easier since v8 ?

Now all I have is laptops, and I have stayed away because of I heard of poor laptop support. I toy with giving FreeBSD a shot again, but will wait for the outcome of the Laptop project they started.

[napsterbr]

> I wonder if creating jails have gotten easier since v8?

I think iocage was released after v8, so yes, definitely! Not only creating, but managing jails as a whole. In many ways, iocage can be compared to docker when it comes to container management.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

It really depends hard on the quality of the systems firmware, i.e. the BIOS/UEFI, no matter if laptop or desktop/thinclient.

I recently got some obsolete/EOL thinkcenters for homelabbing fun. They do S3(suspend to RAM) with everything I've thrown at them. Even most exotic stuff like https://genode.org/ (though only running 'live' from the USB-Image that they offer, didn't install so far). FreeBSD did it, NetBSD did it, various Linux Distros did it, without exception. The one currently running does it, too, without having had to setup anything.

Be it via the little power-button on the front, or some hot-key combination choosable from the UEFI, OR simply another hot-key delivered by the keyboard. In my case that blue thing between ALT-GR and right-CTRL+F12, then slapping any key afterwards turning it back on. (might by undesirable if you have cats, kids, whatever)

Anyways, WITHOUT exception! I did try this like mad, off'n on off'n on like a stroboscope, at least a 100 times.

[mmsc]

One of the problems with suspend/resume is simply: nobody is looking at it or trying to improve it. There is no progress because nobody has tried. The current recommendation is "if suspend/resume doesn't work, disable all of the drivers until you work out which one (of many?) is causing the issue, and work on a fix - sure, people could do that, but most won't - and not even knowing which driver is the issue is annoying.

Until recently, rc scripts (think initd on Linux) had functionality that could be executed on system resume, but not on system suspend - like stopping a service on suspend. Why? Simply because nobody added that functionality for ages [0].

Similarly, drivers often have suspension but not resume capabilities (why?) which means they need to be added by someone who actually tries to use suspend/resume. [1] is an example of this (around midway through the section).

I recently took the time to get FreeBSD set up on my MacBook Pro from 2015, and it took quite a few kernel patches to get it working - many of which I don't think should have been missing already [2].

Webcam support is another issue; at the moment, webcamd is unmaintained because the developer passed away. Even then, it is just an emulator for Linux's USB subsystem and relies on some random person's GitHub for v4l2-loopback support using a branch called "my-build"[3].

Wifi is also an issue, with the best option for fast wifi support being the usage of a nano Alpine Linux VM, and using Linux's drivers [4]. If your wifi device is even supported, it's probably quite slow.

If all three of these things ever progress, I can see FreeBSD being more accepted by the masses. It is a great OS, but for personal computing, there are clear issues.

0: https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/commit/2cf8ef5910fd37...

1: https://joshua.hu/FreeBSD-on-MacbookPro-114-A1398#building-w...

2: https://joshua.hu/FreeBSD-on-MacbookPro-114-A1398

3: https://github.com/swills/v4l2loopback/tree/my-build

4: https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=wifibox&apropos=0&...

[MichaelZuo]

It’s crazy to expect every single user interested in using this feature to individually test the possibilities.

There’s no one collecting and collating driver compatibility information?

[rjsw]

They are welcome to copy the V4L2 code from NetBSD.

[mmsc]

Which falls into the problem of "nobody is looking at it or trying to improve it."

FreeBSD foundation recently got a million dollar cash injection. Maybe they can look into using it there.

[crest]

Suspending desktop systems is unusual, but these days traditional ACPI S3 (and S4) suspend is missing from more and more systems in favor of the far less efficient modern suspend just so your notification terror continues around the clock.

[rootnod3]

I think what FreeBSD and any other systems need is either compatibility or something similar to NixOS. Declarative systems management seems ripe for BSD derivatives.

But it has to be done right. As much as I love GUIX for example, GUIX is hampered by not being able to support a lot of hardware by design.

[Y_Y]

Guix supports plenty of hardware if you run the mainline kernel.

https://gitlab.com/nonguix/nonguix

[riffraff]

What is in the guix design that makes it unable to support a lot of hardware?

[IWeldMelons]

Yes borked suspend is a big deal for me too.