If you’ve been waiting for the right moment to try FreeBSD on a laptop, take note – 2025 has brought transformative changes. The Foundation’s ambitious Laptop Support & Usability Project is systematically addressing the gaps that have held FreeBSD back on modern laptop hardware. 

The project started in 2024 Q4 and covers areas including Wi-Fi, graphics, audio, installer, and sleep states. 2025 has been its first full year, and with a financial commitment of over $750k to date there has been substantial progress.

Wi-Fi

In 2025 we added support for W-iFi 4 and 5 on key hardware and made a start on Wi-Fi 6. Wi-Fi 4 and 5 drivers for Intel and Realtek are available in 15.0, with support for additional Realtek and Mediatek drivers in progress. Thanks to Bjoern Zeeb and Tom Jones for their work on this.

Graphics

Graphics drivers have been upgraded to Linux 6.9, which is available in 15.0 (note: to use this driver you need to adopt the drm-latest-kmod port as it’s a non-LTS version). Linux 6.10 is in progress, and this is the minimum version required for the latest Framework laptop (16″ AMD Ryzen AI 300 series). Thanks to Jean-Sébastien Pédron for all the hard work.

Audio

Notable updates to the audio experience are also available in 15.0. Two new utilities; sndctl(8) and mididump(1), several bug fixes and improvements, wider laptop support, as well as an initial attempt to address automatic sound redirection for HDA sound cards. Our thanks go out to Christos Margiolis for his work on this.

Installer

The installer for FreeBSD has gained a couple of new features that benefit laptop users. In 15.0 the installer now supports downloading and installing firmware packages after the FreeBSD base system installation is complete. Coming in 15.1 it will be possible to install the KDE graphical desktop environment during the installation process. Grateful thanks to Bjoern Zeeb and Alfonso Siciliano respectively.

Sleep states

Important work is underway on enabling modern standby (S0i3) which should be available in 15.1, and hibernate (S4) which may be available in 15.2. Additional related areas of functionality (for example, managing the transition from modern standby to hibernate, disk encryption on hibernate, and sleep states for VMs) will be addressed as part of the S4 work. Thanks to Aymeric Wibo, Tom Jones, En-Wei Wu, Konstantin Belousov, and Olivier Certner for their work on sleep states.

2026 plans

The project continues into 2026 with a similar sized investment and scope. Key targets include completing work on sleep states (modern standby and hibernate), adding support for graphics drivers up to Linux 6.18, Wi-Fi 6 support, USB4 and Thunderbolt support, HDMI improvements, UVC webcam support, and Bluetooth improvements.

A substantial testing program will also start in January, aiming to test all the functionality together across a range of hardware. Community testers are very welcome to help out, the Foundation will release a blog post and send an invite to help to the Desktop mailing list some time in January 2026.

A Community Effort

This year reinforced to us that meaningful progress only happens when communities, contributors, and organizations share responsibility for sustaining the work that supports us all.

Thank you to all the developers, volunteers, testers, donors, and advocates who contributed to this project. Your support is helping build a more modern, usable, and inclusive FreeBSD ecosystem.

Learn more about the Foundation’s Laptop Project at https://github.com/FreeBSDFoundation/proj-laptop 

Support This Work

Continued progress on laptop support, usability, and hardware enablement is made possible through community donations.

You can support ongoing improvements here:
Donate to FreeBSD Foundation | FreeBSD Foundation

– Contributed by Alice Sowerby