Why laptop support, why now: FreeBSD's strategic move toward broader adoption

Personally, I think this is a good call. People have a tendency to go with what they know and feel competent in. As people move more and more toward using laptops as their primary or only workstation device, the chances that admins or enthusiasts will choose FreeBSD as their go-to server diminishes if FreeBSD isn&#x27;t what they&#x27;re doing their primary computing through. Constant context switching is also made more difficult when you&#x27;re using a very similar, yet oh so slightly different system, where many familiar commands are present, do basically the same thing, but take different arguments, have the same arguments do different things, or behave in very subtly different ways from your main computing device. Of course, I&#x27;m assuming the admin or enthusiast is using Linux on their main machine.<p>I actually think the structure of BSD projects could be better suited to building laptop support than something more fragmentary like Linux. It doesn&#x27;t have the same resources, but it can wield those resources in a more concerted manner to support specific models very well, in a way that the structure of the Linux project doesn&#x27;t facilitate nearly so well.<p>Could be interesting if handled well.

As a long term FreeBSD user (since 2.0) and advocate, my view is that FreeBSD should focus on its niche as a rock-solid server operating system. For most developers buying a MacBook and SSH-ing into a server is probably the right answer (or running a VM if you really need something local). The level of effort to match the MacBook user experience feels like a lost cause (Linux has been trying to do this for decades with significantly more resources) and it would feel more useful to use this funding to focus on the server side.

For the last 5 years, I have replaced FreeBSD on servers with Linux. The main reason is that Linux, is a lot less work. The time spent on upgrading for example Debian is significantly less than FreeBSD which has a cumbersome process which requires some manual human interaction a few times during the process. Another thing is that behaviour of some applications I write are different on FreeBSD compared to Linux. One pain point I recently struggled with was RocksDB with Rust, data got corrupted.. But the same code works great with Linux.<p>I really like FreeBSD, but I do not have time for it anymore. I really think FreeBSD is important, and I appriciate all the great work. But it needs to help me save my time.<p>I think spending effort and money on getting it to run better on laptops will not help adaptation. We have macs, which are a lot better than anything else at the moment. Even Linux on a laptop is a painful experience.

I think that a major problem is that you can&#x27;t legally force vendors to open source the drivers they distribute. Most importantly wifi drivers which are critical to making an operating system that people can actually use.

&gt; organizations prioritizing endpoint security increasingly look to FreeBSD for its secure and stable environment<p>What is the story there? I&#x27;ve heard nothing about it. It would be an incredible development.

Microsoft triumphed back than because it try to conquer students, desktops, old big-iron Unix players fall because they ignore it, so the move is logic but the main issue for FreeBSD are not much laptop&#x2F;wifi but mere modern iron generic support and power management just for the hw, for the software the issue is that maintaining a FreeBSD desktop means more work to keep the system up to date than Arch.<p>Since they have no license issues they should focused on:<p>- zfs crypto root (native or geli, does not matter) by default, supported in the installer;<p>- boot environments support with zfs clones, as normal way to update the system;<p>- zfs integrated jails for software development (like IllumOS zones) focused on exposing a controlled set of package in a local cloned FHS to offer the equivalent of NixOS&#x2F;Guix shell;<p>- easy creation of custom images, as easy as NixOS;<p>- curated minimalistic desktop offer (Emacs&#x2F;EXWM, i3 or another tiling WM, fluxbox with ALL relevant modern desktop stuff (like dunst already there for notifications, udiskie for manage removable storage, a nice network manager GUI of some kind, ...) and a good XFCE setup by default. There is no need for more, but there is a big need of sane defaults and meta-packages selections.<p>These would be the real &quot;basic stuff we need to succeed&quot; like the SUN OpenSolaris Indiana move back then, ditching from the old SXDE&#x2F;SXCE model for a modern FLOSS familiar one, but with the best tools GNU&#x2F;Linux do not have.

I could be alone in this, but I think getting containers (OCI, Docker) running on FreeBSD seems like a better direction - I totally get that Docker is a Linux kernel thing but the idea of a file system with layers, registries etc could be a thing right?<p>I love FreeBSD but cannot really use it in a production environment until I can deploy containers on it as that is pretty much the defacto for our workflow.<p>Maybe it is impossible.

Laptops are the new desktops for many organisations, so this is actually quite relevant.

Can &#x2F; does asterisk-BSD share many hardware drivers with Linux? IMHO that&#x27;s the only way asterisk-BSD is to have any hope of catching up in the laptop space.

$750000 seems very little amount for this task. I think they should somehow attract companies to invest in FreeBSD development.<p>Apart from laptop support, FreeBSD is missing important things on server side suck as lack of support for Kubernetes. This is hindering FreeBSD adoption, too.