The FreeBSD Foundation's Laptop Support and Usability Project
14 comments
·December 19, 2025styanax
yjftsjthsd-h
I mean. Judging by 3.x, that was literally 25-27 years ago. Not sure what that has to do with the project that exists today?
dzogchen
So, is there a laptop that has good support for FreeBSD support out of the box?
My requirements are: suspend/resume, being able to drive a 5K monitor over USB-C, wifi.
I found https://wiki.freebsd.org/Laptops but I don't know how up-to-date it is.
nrp
We’ve been working with Ed and team at FreeBSD on this, and have a document showing what works currently on Framework Laptops: https://github.com/FrameworkComputer/freebsd-on-framework
zeech
I can't speak to it driving a monitor over USB-C as I don't use one, but I'm currently running 15.0-RELEASE on a refurbished Dell Latitude 7280 that has worked flawlessly out of the box so far.
Somebody else did a nice writeup [0] on their experience with FBSD on the same laptop.
walterbell
FreeBSD status on Apple Silicon, https://wiki.freebsd.org/AppleSilicon
roywashere
The table lists very limited support for M1 and not even lists newer variants! I guess it was only to be expected, asahi Linux also has challenges and of course FreeBSD has less eyeballs than Linux
LeFantome
Linux is pretty much good to go on M1 or even M2 now. No joy on anything newer than that though.
mikece
I'm curious why Apple doesn't support this effort: they have done a lot of the work and it won't exactly harm their market share.
OsrsNeedsf2P
I still remember when MacOS being based on BSD had the community excited about the future
dzogchen
I'm curious why you think Apple would support any effort that does not benefit their bottom line?
E39M5S62
Apple is struggling to make MacOS functional, why would they contribute engineering time to another OS?
null
rjsw
Apple hasn't done any work that would be useful.
(random anecdote) My first and last experience with FreeBSD laptop was trying to use 3.x (!) on a Dell Inspiron 3500 (PII-350 maybe?), no sound modules were precompiled or included or whatever. Took about 3 days for `make world` to finally finish rebuilding... and then sound still not work. Red Hat 6.x "just worked" in all regards.