Daily Archives: 2024-10-12

Article note: I tried FreeBSD 14 on a spare laptop the other day because I had a "Let's see what's going on in BSD Land" urge. Maybe refresh my perspective on the Linux stack. Two hours of fucking around later I determined that the QCA9565 wireless chip-set driver seems to be "half working" and intermittent, or their alarmingly-static-looking wireless configuration system has subtleties I couldn't figure out, as someone who is "pretty good at computers." Next I tried booting the installer on a coreboot'd ex-Chromebook just for sport, it couldn't handle the i2c input devices, so no. It runs OK in a VM but... not on any real hardware I have on hand, and not with any user-facing features that really distinguish it. I do still adore the simplicity of BSD-style rc init, and like the ifconfg extended for the modern era better than the command line soup that is the ip tool, and some other details in that vein, but the overall experiment was not wildly favorable. Also, their much-vaunted documentation is frankly not as comprehensive as the Arch wiki. The HN thread makes it sound like their power management/suspend situation is not really up to snuff for running on laptops right now anyway, though there are reports of a major effort to improve it.