My GhostBSD laptop experience

me12345

Experienced Linux user/dev impressions of FreeBSD on 10 year old Intel and 5 year old AMD laptops.
GhostBSD Mate beta 15.0-RELEASE-p2 iso provided a much smoother out of the box setup than FreeBSD R15 iso with manual X config. Below is my outline for any discussion. If needed some of the open questions can be moved to support category.
I did full upgrade with "sudo pkg update ; sudo pkg upgrade"

1. Graphics & Display:
       1A. AMD:
             Auto-detect failed with crash Xorg; GUI only with scfb (no hardware acceleration)
             After removing the crashing scfb driver then autodetected AMD video and automatically enabled hardware acceleration
             Needed updated firmware amdgpu/renior_vcn.bin (Oct 1st) to fix choppy videos - same as Linux
             24.1.7 Mesa is 3-4x slower with glmark2 than Linux 7.0-rc3 Linux / 26.0.2 Mesa

       1B. Intel:
             Auto-detect failed with crash Xorg; GUI only with scfb (no hardware acceleration)
             After removing the crashing scfb driver had to install intel driver then autodetected Intel video and automatically enabled hardware acceleration
             24.1.7 Mesa is 2-3x slower with glmark2 than Linux 7.0-rc3 Linux / 26.0.2 Mesa

1C. Validation:
Still need install igt and amdgpu_top (compile from source) to verify video hardware decoding.

2. WiFi:
rtw88 driver stuck at Wifi 3 (54Mb/s) with 20Mb/s real throughput. Improved support (WiFi 4/5) is planned for BSD 15.1.
Intel driver also suck at wifi 3. Tried iwlwifi RX at 20Mb/s but TX is 5Mb/s max ?

3. Audio:
HP AMD hardware buttons and MATE plugin work perfectly
Dell Intel hdaco0 bad command (known FreeBSD bug) causes broken audio subsytem resulting in greyed out MATE volume plugin. Firefox audio works fine ?

4. Time:
No time server by default ? Fixed via pkg install ntp and ntpdate -u 0.freebsd.pool.ntp.org.

5. BSD Kernel:
Relies on Linux KPI (BSD 15 uses old Linux 6.6 KPI or 6.17 ?) for driver compatibility. Old Linux drivers are not ideal for newer hardware

6. Power Management:
Just plain bad battery life not sure if Linux KPI ?

7. BSD pluses:
             ZFS is great.
             GhostBSD GUI is sane and functional ootb without much tinkering.
             One can actually run FreeBSD on many laptops

8. BSD minuses :
             Old Linux KPI causes poor power management? / old mesa causes poor 3D performance / slow wifi
             BSDisms like doas and different ps flag results are frustrating for a Linux user like me
             Why no date/time in dmesg ?

vimanuelt

It seems you are using one of the testing ISOs which uses xlibre. GhostBSD's xconfig tool uses Xorg. It seems xconfig does not support xlibre at the moment. You may need to wait for Eric to work out the issues.

me12345

Thanks for the replies.

vimanuelt I should have made it clear but you are right I started with libre and had to remove scfb driver to prevent X server from crashing. I have since forced xorg install with pkg. I personally prefer to use xorg until Xlibre is a bit more established. I am open to either as I like to use the best tool job and don't take sides in something like the Xorg/Xlibre drama.

Also nevillehay thanks for the tip on powerdxx. I have to do some research but it looks like native Freebsd and not using Linux KPI. I would just like to see similar battery life as Linux as I don't use hibrinate/suspend.

Anyway my test laptops are fine and now I just need to wait for Wifi 5 to arrive in FreeBSD as 20Mbs real data limit is not good in 2026. My only other issue is just OpenGL performance but hoping just some upcoming newer mesa builds can improve the performance gap with Linux.

Overall I'm pretty impressed with FreeBSD and the ease of the GhostBSD install.

It's so nice to have ZFS just work as native without hacks and kernel model builds in Linux.

nevillehay

Thanks for the imput. For power issues, you can try using powerdxx

vimanuelt

me12345
I'm glad it is working out for you.