OS PLATFORMS

Better laptop sleep and Wi-Fi support make the beastie more portable-friendly, but getting beyond the shell remains a DIY job

After a delay when a microcode-related boot problem surfaced, FreeBSD 15.1 is now available. Laptop support is getting there, but a GUI from the installer isn't – yet. You'll have to put in some extra work if you want to have more than a command prompt.

As you might expect from its version number, it's much like a point release of other, more widely used OSes: it contains lots of bug fixes, and hardware support in multiple areas is improved. For the lowdown on what has changed, the Release Notes contain a list of fixes and new features, and the one known issue – in the NFS client – is detailed in the Errata.

Desktop use is something of an edge case for FreeBSD, but the Laptop Support and Usability Project is working on it. We gave a brief update when KDE Plasma 6.6.0 appeared back in February, but work has continued. The May status update is encouraging. Now laptop suspend and resume work, and if you wish, FreeBSD 15.1 can put laptops to sleep when their lids are closed, and wake them when the lids are opened. The team is still working on hibernation, as well as the more modern "S0ix" sleep modes.

Wireless networking support is also making significant strides. Version 15.1 has improved versions of the Intel iwlwifi and Realtek rtw88 and rtw89 drivers, which are based on Linux version 7.0. This means that FreeBSD 15.1 now supports Wi-Fi 4 and Wi-Fi 5. If, like this vulture, you're more familiar with ratified standards than marketing names, the former means 802.11n (2.4 GHz and 5 GHz, up to 600 Mbps) and the latter denotes 802.11ac (5 GHz, up to 3.5 Gbps). And if you're not sure which chipset your wireless controller uses, the FreeBSD 15.1 Hardware Notes page has full details of the names of all the supported devices.

The release was delayed a couple of weeks due to what the RC3 announcement called "a critical bug fix to the x86 boot loader," which also noted the importance of manually updating the EFI boot loader. This step is also specified in the Upgrade instructions.

The instructions are quite complex, and we recommend you study them closely. For one thing, you need to know if you installed your system using the traditional distribution sets or the more modern, and still somewhat experimental, base system packages. We upgraded the FreeBSD 15.0 VM we installed seven months ago, and we couldn't remember which method we used. Fortunately, the freebsd-update command told us, so we followed the commands given in the guide for package-based installations. By Linux standards, they're very wordy and we did miss at least one vital punctuation mark, but it worked in the end.

A year ago, the project said that it hoped to offer the KDE desktop right from the installer. That didn't make it into FreeBSD 15.0 last December, and it's not in 15.1 either.

We installed a clean copy on a test machine, a Core i5-based ThinkPad X220. The installation program is much the same as in FreeBSD 13 or 14: it still installs a resolutely text-only OS, and if you want a graphical environment or desktop, you must install and configure it yourself. The handy optional desktop-installer script is still available, but as far as we can tell, it hasn't been updated for version 15.1 yet. In our testing, it couldn't correctly install a working desktop, and whatever desktop we tried, it failed without giving any visible error.

We worked out that we needed to install the GPU drivers separately. We manually installed the drm-kmod drivers, and enabled them by editing the main init script by hand. After this, even before loading X11, the boot process picked up the native resolution of the machine's LCD and automatically changed the screen mode to fit. Once this was working, the desktop-installer ran to completion – but by that point, most of its work was done.

As well as the very basic TWM, we also tried the FreeBSD-native Lumina desktop, Xfce, and GNOME (albeit on X11 only). FreeBSD 15.1 also offers several others, including the rather dated GNOME 47 and the much more recent KDE Plasma 6.6.5.

FreeBSD is making good strides in supporting modern portable hardware. We feel that this matters for two reasons. First, any FOSS project can only thrive if it continually wins new users, and if curious newbies graduate from VMs to bare metal, most are likely to try it on laptops. Second, power management matters everywhere, although it's unfairly neglected on servers. Even there, power management is useful: the world could save substantial amounts of power if workloads were migrated off underused machines and they were allowed to go to sleep, only waking when accessed.

For tired Linux users looking for an escape from ever-more-bloated corporate-influenced distros, FreeBSD is getting more viable all the time. It doesn't have systemd, Flatpak, Snap, UKIs, or built-in AI features. It does support Wayland, if that's something you want. The main problem you will face is getting it as far as a GUI. Both NetBSD 11 and OpenBSD 7.8 are ahead in this department, but they are also smaller, simpler OSes. FreeBSD can do far more, even including running Linux binaries and Linux OCI containers. ®