Since X11 has moved to legacy status, it’s only a matter of time before the BSDs are going to have to make the move to being Wayland-first as well. This applies particularly to FreeBSD, which has been focusing on improving its suitability for desktop and laptops lately. The good news is that Wayland has been available on FreeBSD for a while now, and setting it up with a KDE desktop is a breeze.
Dolce Far Niente has a quick and easy guide, updated today, that walks you through the steps of setting up KDE with Wayland on a fresh FreeBSD 15.x installation. I’m keeping this on my to-do list, but I’m not committing yet because we’re getting quite close to the first incentive of the OSNews fundraiser, where I have to install, run, and use vanilla Windows 11 (including Office and Outlook) for a month. No point in setting up FreeBSD when we’re about to hit that incentive.
Regardless, this is going to be the future of FreeBSD for desktop and laptop use, so you if you’re already a FreeBSD user, you might as well try and see if Wayland works for you today.
You should have swapped the Windows 11 and tattoo goals. One is a lot more painful than the other.
I gave this a spin on my Skylake era mini-PC with Intel HD 530 graphics. The instructions worked but KDE Plasma was choppy as hell and pretty much unusable. I reinstalled from scratch following my own guide Thom had reported on a while back, but substituting Plasma and SDDM for Xfce and LightDM, so I could try out Xorg. I had the same result — choppy, slow, sometimes freezing windows and mouse movements. This was the same both in Wayland and Xorg, at my monitor’s native 170Hz as well as 60Hz, so it’s not a Wayland bug. On this same PC, FreeBSD with Xfce on Xorg is flawless and blisteringly fast. So, it seems Plasma is not quite ready on FreeBSD.
Just to rule out a hardware issue (though Xfce working fine precludes that), I’m going to do the same test on my main workstation, a Ryzen 5600GT system with Radeon 7700 XT graphics. I’m curious to know if KWin has some sort of issue with older Intel graphics, though that machine has had zero issues running KDE Plasma on the various Linux distros I’ve put on it. Or, if it is as I suspect, an issue with the current state of Plasma/KWin on FreeBSD itself.
Plasma is buttery smooth on Wayland on my Ryzen laptop with integrated graphics. I can’t notice any difference between FreeBSD or Fedora with KDE on Wayland.
I just wish the WiFi on it worked better, rather than randomly dropping and requiring resetting the WiFi for it to work again. I’d jump ship to FreeBSD at a moment’s notice if it wasn’t for the Wifi issues I’ve experienced with my laptops
I just finished installing on my Ryzen desktop and wow…it’s definitely an issue with Intel/KWin/FreeBSD because it’s smooth as hell here. Some combination of the three on the other system is the culprit, but I wouldn’t know where to begin debugging it. As I said before, Xfce on Xorg on the same installation is perfectly fine, there’s no reason Plasma should have an issue. And Plasma/KWin is fine on Linux on this hardware, so it’s something about FreeBSD too, likely the i915kms driver.
I haven’t had any issues in the past with Wi-Fi on FreeBSD, but all of my wireless devices are old. My laptops and mini-PC are all Broadwell and Skylake era with their factory Intel wireless chipsets. I haven’t had access to Ryzen laptop for some time, having sold my last one to buy parts to build my main workstation.
One weird thing though; my case fans are on full speed in FreeBSD, that doesn’t happen in any other OS. I guess I would need to tweak powerd settings?
I have a Sandybridge-based laptop that I would get weird a Wi-Fi issue where it would always try to connect to the Xfinity hotspot instead of the actual Wi-Fi network I had configured in wpa-supplicant (Same device, but it wasn’t my account so I couldn’t ask them to turn off the Xfinity hotspot).
My Ryzen laptop drops the WiFi and I have to reset the network for it to work again, only for it to stop working literally within minutes. Maybe 15.1 will have a fix? I haven’t this same issue reported elsewhere. I think in both cases it just seems to be specific to my laptop. I think this weekend I’ll throw FreeBSD on it again and see what happens.
Morgan,
Simplicity is underappreciated, stick with Xfce! Haha.
There’s got to be a way to find the culprit with Plasma. You probably already did basic checks, but I’ll ask anyway. Is there any disk activity happening? Enough free memory and no swapping? Did you run a CPU monitor at high polling intervals, were there spikes and what processes caused them?
I would start with these and then dig deeper with a profiler, but this is probably asking a lot for regular users who aren’t devs. If the problem is between userspace and kernelspace, an strace dump may be able to see it. I wish I could be helpful but I don’t really know enough about BSDs to provide instructions, my diagnostic experience is rather Linux specific.
Well I’m not sticking with FreeBSD, this was just to play with the method Thom posted about, so it’s moot. But see above my reply to @Drumhellar, no issues whatsoever on an all AMD system so I’m guessing it’s something to do with the i915kms drivers in FreeBSD. I actually tried to open the system monitor but I couldn’t get it to respond to mouse input a few minutes after Plasma was running. Basically, it started fine, got a little choppy when I opened a window, then mouse clicks took several seconds to get a response in the interface, then the mouse cursor froze altogether and the only thing I could get the keyboard to do was the three-finger-salute to reboot. Same with both Wayland and Xorg so not a protocol issue. It’s looking like a KWin/driver thing from what I can tell.