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by Decabytes 33 days ago
How do the various BSDs run on framework laptops?
4 comments

I dual boot OpenBSD on it, and it's been doing fine. The out of the box experience is pretty bare although the default window manager cwm is surprisingly nice once you get to know it. Note that apmd, the power management daemon used to manage CPU speed and low-battery suspend, is not enabled by default. The high-DPI screen required some adjustments in Xresources (I haven't dared try a multi-monitor, mixed DPI setup).

NetBSD seemed okay to but I've only used it a little bit. It actually set up X pretty well for the screen using some built in script with heuristics to determine font size from the screen metrics.

There's been a bunch of progress on FreeBSD, and OpenBSD isn't that much worse
No wifi driver for Framework 16. Was fun installing (and surprisingly quick) and playing around a little. But unfortunately that's a dealbreaker for me.
Power management, webcam, trackpad, accessories, etc tend not to be a good fit for niche BSD and Linux. Stick to desktop or server.
Trackpad? I've had OpenBSD on ~6 laptops, old and new, but the trackpad always worked fine
Do you disagree with my comment? Or just about trackpad?
huh? I've been running Arch exclusively on my laptops for at least 7 years
Thinkpad? Or dell?

How is the battery life?

Let's see, System 76, previously Dell and Samsung.

All the pretty much the smallest and lightest I could find. So not fantastic, but good enough. For me, battery life is much lower on the list than "small and lightweight" and "works well with Linux".