With the release of FreeBSD 13.0 on the horizon, I wanted to see how it shapes up on my Lenovo T450 laptop. Previous major releases on this laptop, using it as a workstation, felt very rough around the edges but with 13, it feels like the developers got it right.
It would be good for the desktop Linux world if FreeBSD managed to become even a little bit more mainstream among desktop users. Linux pretty much has the open source desktop world all to itself, and some competition would be very welcome.
Agreed.
The main barrier I see is that whilst it’s easy for a relatively advanced user to set it up for the desktop, FreeBSD by default is set up more like a server, and the two “distros” (GhostBSD and the one whose name escapes me) intended for desktop users are patchy, at best. Probably, they just need more manpower for QC, but they do need it.
I’m glad to see FreeBSD approaching the level of OpenBSD and NetBSD on being more workstation-friendly out of the box. Based on this article it’s more or less the same amount of work to get the same setup on OpenBSD, though I personally find the latter’s installer more user-friendly and consistently one of the most straightforward and simple installers in the FOSS world.
I have a Lenovo Yoga netbook on the way from eBay that I had intended to use for a portable OpenBSD machine to replace my tired old IdeaPad S10-3T, but I think I’ll give FreeBSD a spin on it too just to compare the two.
You should consider writing an article on your experience running BSD on it, especially as it pertains to laptops: power management and battery life, hardware support, connectivity, etc. This is something that is rarely, if ever, covered and would be quite interesting to read.
The only way that OpenBSD is more user-friendly IMO is that you can explicitly select X11 to install and be run on boot.
I consider OpenBSD fdisk, disklabel and pkg_add to be abominations. Other than that, however, I love it.
I had decided it was time to play with FreeBSD again, and was trying out 13 rc1 a few days ago, but only got as far as SDDM loading, but as soon as I log in, I end up with a black screen and an X instead of KDE.
I should try slapping it on one of my old Thinkpads…
Try explicitly selecting X11. It seems to automatically select Wayland at first, which doesn’t work yet.
Once you’ve done that you shouldn’t have to do it again.
I can confirm that since 12.2 works on a T450s, 13.0 should work on a ThinkPad.
Wayland seems to like to piss me off for random reasons. The previous time was it defaulted to it and Tomb Raider refused to run…
We shouldn’t be using it by default yet if it insists on breaking crap.
Agreed.However, it does seem to be in better shape in GNOME than in KDE generally. Maybe 5.22 will fix that.
I’ve always wanted to get a BSD Desktop running on some old hardware, usually OpenBSD or NetBSD, but every attempt has been scuppered by driver issues on whatever laptop I’ve chosen. I’ve some old Toshiba Core Duo laptops here screaming for a functioning BSD.