2026 is off to a great start for the Laptop Support and Usability Project. We’ve seen lots of exciting updates to major areas such as graphics and Wi-Fi drivers, as well as FreeBSD installer improvements to support the KDE Plasma desktop environment out of the box.

At this stage in the project, as we hinted earlier in the Year One Project Update, we decided to start a rigorous testing program to comprehensively validate all laptop and desktop functionality together. Since January, we have been working behind the scenes to evaluate testing requirements and implement the tooling needed to maintain these test results for the long term.

After trial runs of integration testing on our committed target systems, we are pleased to open up this effort to the FreeBSD community!

How to test

This is the process for testing FreeBSD on your laptop:

1. You run our testing tool that automatically probes your laptop hardware and logs what features work (or don’t work).
2. The tool creates a new directory containing the fully anonymized results.
3. If you wish, you can also add your own commentary to a new file named comments.md inside this directory.
4. You send the results in a Pull Request, making sure to answer the User Stories questionnaire in the template.
5. We will process the report and publish it to the compatibility matrix. No Personally Identifiable Information will ever be published.
6. Success!

To get started, run the following commands as an unprivileged user on your target testing laptop and follow the prompts along the way until you have completed the process. These steps can be done on any FreeBSD installation or live environment such as mfsBSD.

pkg install python hw-probe
git clone https://github.com/FreeBSDFoundation/freebsd-laptop-testing
cd freebsd-laptop-testing
make

Need help with testing FreeBSD on laptops? You can start a Discussion in our testing repository or get in touch with us directly.

1) Test FreeBSD on laptops at a high level

The Laptop Project’s developers have put in a substantial amount of work into testing their new features and improvements. To maintain this quality across a wide range of hardware and catch bugs caused by the combination of these developments, we need to test FreeBSD on laptops from an end-user’s perspective.

The proj-laptop repository maintains “User Stories” that correspond to real-world use cases that are expected to work “out of the box”. Our goal is to validate these scenarios in addition to our usual developer-centric testing on a narrower per-feature basis.

2) Maintain a definitive public record of FreeBSD laptop compatibility

As we started getting test results for more laptops, we were able to compare FreeBSD compatibility and laptop feature-completeness across a variety of hardware devices. For many years, the resulting “matrix” of compatibility has been kept up-to-date by FreeBSD developers and enthusiasts on the Laptops Wiki page. To improve on its public discoverability, while also tracking newer work from the Laptop Support and Usability Project on an ongoing basis, we drafted a simple webpage to act as a central “ground truth” to answer the following questions:

1. Which laptop should I buy if I want to use FreeBSD on it?
2. Does the laptop I already own have the features I need on FreeBSD?
3. Do I need any extra configuration for a specific feature on my laptop?
4. What do other users say about FreeBSD on a particular laptop?

We expect to eventually publish this webpage under freebsd.org. In the meantime, you can check it out at https://freebsdfoundation.github.io/freebsd-laptop-testing. We would love your feedback!

3) Create pathways for volunteer participation from the community

With limited access to testing systems, there’s only so much we can do! We hope to work together with volunteers from the community who want FreeBSD to work well on their laptops.

While we expect device hardware and software enumeration to be a fully automated process, we feel that manually-submitted comments about personal experience with FreeBSD are equally valuable. We plan to highlight this commentary on our “matrix of compatibility” webpage for each tested laptop.

We are striving to make it as easy as possible to submit your results. You won’t have to worry about environment setup, submission formatting, or any repo-specific details!

Learn more

To learn more about the Laptop Integration Testing project, please visit https://github.com/FreeBSDFoundation/freebsd-laptop-testing and refer to the extended Contributing Guidelines.