> this happening in any mainstream OS would be unacceptable, since many simply wouldn't know how to change the setting, or wouldn't even be aware that there's a

> this happening in any mainstream OS would be unacceptable, since many simply wouldn't know how to change the setting, or wouldn't even be aware that there's a setting to change in the first place. Last year I tried to run FreeBSD on a HP DL380 G7 (old-ish enterprise server). After install, all the fans were spinning at ludicrous speeds. Funny thing about these HP servers; the fans will spin like this if you put non-HP hardware components in them. I don't have non-HP components, so I never had the fan issue prior to FreeBSD. But because the issue was so common, searching the web kept turning up crazy solutions using resistors and such. I gave up and put Alpine Linux on there instead. Alpine worked great. Months later, I went back and tried FreeBSD again. This time I had stumbled across a FreeBSD specific fix for the fan: sysctl hw.acpi.cpu.cx_lowest=C3 That was it; a C state setting. I had to learn about C states, powerd and Intel SpeedStep before I could do anything with FreeBSD on that server. No power management. But... we get a mail server? Yeah, I would say defaults do matter.