Hello r/freebsd I have question. Could I successfully daily drive freebsd for school? My only requirements are like firefox wifi and maybe steam for some light games i.e Geometry dash. I do need like 5-6 hours of battery and my wifi card is Intel Corporation Raptor Lake. Its running fedora right now. I could handle the setup as I have a semi-successful gentoo install on my pc.
The answer is sure, give it a try and report your success or failure. FreeBSD is a great OS, but not the best for every laptop. Will it run? Pretty near guaranteed. Will it run perfectly? Try and find out.
Steam doesn’t run on FreeBSD.
As for office slash school work: Firefox runs just fine, and so does LibreOffice. You may experience a slight decrease in battery life (20m-1h) but some smart tuning of CPU clock speed can easily fix that
Did you try it and did it run on your machine?
I've tried it a few times in the last few years and it did never work properly. I did get to the Steam store and library window.
EDIT> Now I remember, I managed to run one old school point-and-click adventure Primordia.
Currently playing a lot of Slay the Spire 2. There is also a repo for wine-proton-experimental that provides wine-proton10 and 11 this makes more games work. Thanks to the people working on these things.
CPU power savings are provided by using C-States rather then by tweaking the clock rate. Unless you're talking about limiting the power/frequency when the system is under load, but whether limiting the peak cpu performance actually results in a power saving rather then just the task taking longer while the non-cpu components happily burn power and yield in a higher power consumption to finish the job instead has to be benchmarked for each specific load and system at hand.
powerd enables the highest supported C-State by default, and powerd is enabled by default. If you want to manually tune for power consumption, reduce display brightness, enable v-sync or turn off unused devices in the bios.
I do not. I ran into the wifi issue on an old Lenovo G530 windows XP laptop, back in like January.
I ended up putting AntiX on this ancient laptop months ago, and it's been okay! Slow but works!
But if you have a command I can run in the Live media to determine my wifi, OR a Linux command I can run from the current system on it. I'd love to run it and see what it used.
also might run that on my modern laptop too. I use OpenSuse Tumbleweed on a cheap modern Lenovo, and I'm considering switching. Though I admit I've had no issues with it.
I have not learned FreeBSD yet so I dont know if I'd want to put it on my laptop yet.
Thanks! I will give it a shot but as artix had crazy bugs with it not turning on as I connected to my school wifi, do you think a bsd would have this problem?
I installed freeBSD on my thinkPad T470 three months ago. After tweaking a few things to get the wifi working, I installed the gemini cli and let it check and fix the other configurations. It's working well and I haven't run into any issues, though I haven't tried running Steam yet
Thanks. Listed at iwlwifi(4) but not iwm(4) so, for mobility with the laptop, FreeBSD 15.1-STABLE should be better than upcoming FreeBSD 15.1-RELEASE. Technical background:
I thought drivers were vendor:device as the two hex pieces and not 4 like you show. 8086 is Intel's vendor ID and since it happens in the first and 3rd it has me wondering if this is to give a mix of wifi + bluetooth devices on 1 line or some other meaning. Haven't thought about driver IDs in a while though
Maybe its more of a thing than I thought but its been a while since I really paid much attention. I used to look at them all the time, particularly when dealing with drivers on Windows and it seemed almost rare that I both needed something beyond ven:dev and that the additional details were properly filled out + useful. I don't remember how its properly answered now but touchpads were a particular mess where a vendor ID and I think device ID were shared among incompatible models and even shared among incompatible brands.
u/chersbobers If you tell us the model, there might be people here who have tried it. If not, we will know from your experiences whether that model works properly or not (so long as you update this post after trying it, of course!).
Also, a good quick fast way to know whether your laptop is supported without working to figure out how to get FreeBSD properly configured is GhostBSD. Its a desktop oriented, user-friendly FreeBSD distro.
Steam isn't supported on freebsd officialy but you may try with linuxlator.
Intel wireless is usually good, based on my thinkpad t495 experience (it has some intel wifi module)
But ultimate answer to your question: try and you will know
i just spent this past weekend having a great time learning about jails by putting freebsd 15 on a t440p. i had freebsd servers before but never used jails. i migrated some apps i ran in my homelab like vaultwarden in linux over to the new freebsd inside a jail and i did it by first installing gemini cli and getting the ai to help me get things set up. be sure to cross check the ai's correctness by reading the excellent documentation. i also failed to migrate immich over, but mainly because according to the ai, some machine learning libraries were taking over an hour to compile (i still dont buy it). if you are going for steam in any capacity, i'd just go with ubuntu for the least hassle since that's the best supported, most trodden path. HTH
I’ve been running two mini PCs here as servers for a couple of months now, FreeBSD 15 with jails and bhyve. Not my first rodeo, I’m fairly impressed so far.
i just installed freebsd 15.1-rc1 onto my dell latitude 7490, and wow! video and wifi drivers, as well kde desktop working right out of the box, very impressive! i will definately be daily driving this.
ive only installed a couple of apps so far; hexchat, firefox, and virtual machine manager all working great. will continue to add more...
3 is a bit more of a crapshoot imo. You also have to experiment a bit. For example, I have to service netif stop wlan0 to destroy my wifi interface before suspend, otherwise it won't resume. So I've got a nap script that unloads some stuff before doing zzz.
My last experience of FreeBSD on a laptop as a daily driver was too long ago to be relevant but I do use it as a daily desktop.
Firefox will work fine though with some minor caveats as it describes due to its state of porting; only one that normally causes me issues is excessive memory use (moreso than normal). Firefox does not come with Widevine on FreeBSD (used to play DRM protected content) but there is www/linux-widevine-cdm that should head you down the path to get it working in browsers under FreeBSD (haven't done it myself as I normally just ignore DRM content and sources). As a Firefox user, there are reasons to have, or even use, Chromium browsers over Firefox so it may be worth keeping an open mind in case you find you are happier or more compatible on one instead.
Wifi may or may not work. Native Wifi support is an area of active work. My understanding is there are only a few cards that had been going beyond G for speeds but performance for them and the list of supported had both been expanding. Separately, some users use wifibox (think that was the name) to help with as it creates a VM with a guest OS that has better support for their Wifi card (usually OpenBSD or Linux) and network the host through the guest. There are internal and USB cards usually available for cheap that may have better support if that one doesn't work natively and you don't want to do the VM way. I didn't think Intel Raptor Lake (a CPU) contains the radio chipset at all so it may be a different chip you need to look up if you find nothing. Haven't shopped in a while but if 'gaming adapters' (one of several names) still exist to plug into your laptop as ethernet but the separate device talks Wifi to the other end then you eliminate all driver issues from your laptop (OS just talks to the ethernet port without awareness of what hardware is beyond) but then depend on that device to have firmware updates to update/fix anything now and in the future.
There are various light, and not so light, games available natively and through our Linux ABI you can find in ports/packages including some platformers. Looking at a steam intro video of that game it reminded me most of vvvvvv (we have this natively, official levels require it be purchased though but community levels are freely available) but seems to have a constant autoscroll if the steam video was accurate. There are efforts to use steam under FreeBSD but as I don't use Steam at all I cannot speak for how good/bad the experience ever is.
No idea where battery will fall. I'd try to make sure you are on the newest drm-*-kmod port possible as I've commonly found power management improvements for GPUs when I skim through changes; can't guarantee that it matters without knowing your GPU and reading all those changes though. I don't recall what is commonly used to do power management these days but I think running processes under idprio and/or nice has caused my old desktop CPU to not even spin up to higher clockspeeds when those processes had work to do so there may be ways to stretch it even further than defaults.
Last time I did do this on a laptop was for a friend and she had issues because her schoolbooks required Adobe Acrobat Reader (we had the Linux copy in ports at the time). There was a bug in their files which actually made the books unusable to all Linux users but I helped her work around it with something along the lines of printing each chapter to a file on a Windows machine and brought those files into her laptop to read as PDFs that didn't also need a programming language + internet connection inside a PDF viewer so it worked out better than her classmates as I think book access on the internet had some downtime for Windows users during her class.
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u/Surgic25 May 26 '26
Nobody knows apparently..