If you’ve been waiting for the right moment to try FreeBSD on a laptop, take note – 2025 has brought transformative changes. The Foundation’s ambitious Laptop Support & Usability Project is systematically addressing the gaps that have held FreeBSD back on modern laptop hardware.
The project started in 2024 Q4 and covers areas including Wi-Fi, graphics, audio, installer, and sleep states. 2025 has been its first full year, and with a financial commitment of over $750k to date there has been substantial progress.
↫ Alice Sowerby for the FreeBSD Foundation
I think that’s an understatement.
As part of this effort, FreeBSD introduced support for Wi-Fi 4 and 5 in 2025, with 6 being worked on, and sound support has been greatly improved as well, with new tools and better support for automatic sound redirection for HDA cards. Another major area of improvement is support for various forms of sleep and wake, with modern standby coming in FreeBSD 15.1, and possibly hibernate in 15.2. On top of all this, there’s the usual graphics drivers updates, as well as changes to the installer to make it a bit more friendly to desktop use cases.
The FreeBSD project is clearly taking desktop and especially laptop seriously lately, and they’re putting their money and developers where their mouth is. Add in the fact that FreeBSD already has pretty decent Wayland support, and it the platform will be able to continue to offer the latest KDE releases (and GNOME, if they figure out replacements for its systemd dependencies).
With progress like this, we’re definitely going to see more and more people making the move to FreeBSD for desktop and laptop use over the coming years.
I’m here for it! FreeBSD as a desktop OS has been “good enough” since 14.x at least, and got so much better with 15.0. I don’t currently use it on a laptop but I’m going to give that a go in the coming weeks. As much as I love the *idea* of OpenBSD on a desktop or laptop, the reality is that it’s not performant enough for my needs, though it remains rock-solid as a server and network appliance OS. FreeBSD performs better on the desktop than Linux in my experience, and it can only get better from here. If it wasn’t for my addiction to PC gaming I would run nothing but BSD across the board.
Morgan,
I think this will be the real blocker, “a final boss”:
We might be squabbling over systemd, but one of the things it brought was much more stable suspend/hibernate/resume cycles.
The kernel (or at least the “init”) needs to account for every app, every user, and every device.
And when the system comes back online, it has to “replay” all these actions so that the music continues playback where it left from. It might require a nudge (maybe login token expired), but otherwise things need to be seamless.
This is not an easy task.
Well, it makes me happy. It feels like we’re in a Linux monoculture and I’d be glad to have FreeBSD as a desktop/laptop daily driver.
On my ThinkPad W530, it is pure perfection. On FreeBSD, battery life is 5:30 with 32GB RAM and a very old battery (at 75% capacity). It took me some script work to get around NVIDIA Optimus and custom powerd settings, audio output switching, etc..
I can boot Windows in virtualbox and freebsd as host or vice versa making for a very versatile system. Its the most wonderful setup Ive ever had.
On my ThinkPad P1 Gen4, I need to reboot to switch GPU and, unless I do an ACPI call to cut power to the A2000, the palm rest gets warm and battery life is low even on the igpu. Also the Intel drivers sometimes use a lot of CPU and the battery life is too short on X11 (havent tried wayland yet), but everything is supported.
I look forward to testing 15 on both machines!