14 ms·

FreeBSD on the Framework Laptop

271 points by throw0101a 4y ago

sdfjkl 4y ago
> wifibox essentially spins up an Alpine Linux VM using FreeBSD's bhyve virtualization technology, and allows you to passthrough your machine's wireless card Jesus christ.
- NegativeLatency 4y ago
  Sounds sub-optimal, I'm thinkng back to linux wifi support on random laptops 10+ years ago and it was also quite bad.
  - felixg3 4y ago
    I think it mostly depended on the vendor, like today, where Broadcom and Realtek suck a lot, Mediatek and Qualcomm a little and Intel/Atheros work just fine. I remember using Ubuntu 6.10 or so with an Intel card out of the box.
    - filmgirlcw 4y ago
      I’m sure it is but the status I see shows that there isn’t much support for anything newer than 802.11n cards period, so if you’re using anything from the last 5 or 6 years, you may have a problem. That’s a it different from the various Broadcom or whatever issues the Linux kernel was dealing with in the early Ubuntu eras (where Ubuntu also I think accepted some blobs/drivers that weren’t in the kernel at the time). The problem here seems to be no support for certain stuff, regardless of chipset maker, rather than having to pick a certain one, unless you’re able to go really far back (which may have issues on some networks at this point). As always, the best option for less-mainstream operating systems is to use Ethernet when possible.
- easton 4y ago
  It's easier than writing a driver for FreeBSD yourself, I suppose, although I'd probably just get a USB Wi-Fi dongle instead of worry about walking into a meeting and my Wi-Fi driver VM crashing :) (or, just run Linux and run FreeBSD in a VM, but that's no way to support a niche operating system...)
  - filmgirlcw 4y ago
    I think the problem is that there aren’t many modern wireless cards with official FreeBSD support, so you’re stuck using a specialized dongle or Ethernet if you want to use FreeBSD on a laptop.
  - craftkiller 4y ago
    You don't need a dongle, just purchase a supported wifi card. I put a supported atheros card in my framework laptop and the wifi works flawlessly, natively. The framework laptop is designed to be opened and have the parts replaced, so its the perfect laptop for doing hardware changes like this.
    - Klonoar 4y ago
      Does this actually support operating on 5GHz, or is it still stuck in the 2.4GHz era? I'm not aware of any FreeBSD-compatible wifi cards that actually do this. (I would love to be proven wrong, but I'm super tired of people saying "wifi cards work fine on FreeBSD" when the reality is that the speeds are sub-optimal without a way to improve it currently)
      - prmoustache 4y ago
        On the other hands 2.4GHz is perfectly fine for a lot of people. Actually I often select 2.4GHz on purpose at home because 5GHz works really bad with thick walls and I barely get any network in my kitchen and rooftop. People will say it is easy, setup a mesh network or some powerline adapters but: 1. It is much more expensive 2. It is not practical in an old flat with very few power outlets, especially when you are not the owner. And I don't really run into use case where running 2.4GHz limits me.
- znpy 4y ago
  > Jesus christ. exactly. this is the kind of bs i like to call out when i see the usual freebsd desktop thread. it's going to work mostly okay-ish, as long as you don't mine some abominations like that running on your systems in the background. this really reminds me my linux experiences circa 2005-2006 (ndiswrapper for wifi cards, do people remember that?).
  - flatiron 4y ago
    Totally agree. Wonder the use case why they don’t run Linux and put FreeBSD in a VM where everything would work perfectly.
    - Koshkin 4y ago
      Good point, actually. These days everything pretty much runs on VMs anyway…
- ploxiln 4y ago
  That is my initial reaction, but ... a minimal linux VM in a minimal hypervisor, might not be that bad, for a network adapter. Perhaps -40MB- 128MB of memory? Double the context switching? Sounds kinda like a micro-kernel driver. Have you ever tried to install a minimal driver for a printer in windows, and then watched in horror as it automatically started downloading 600MB of HP junk?
  - doubled112 4y ago
    I just stay away from HP junk. Life is too short.
  - tailspin2019 4y ago
    > Have you ever tried to install a minimal driver for a printer in windows, and then watched in horror as it automatically started downloading 600MB of HP junk? Never have I changed my opinion on something (a VM for a fricking driver) so quickly. Good job.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
    Yeah, obviously it's not ideal but I don't really see any problem with passing the card to what is, indeed, effectively a userspace driver (that happens to internally contain a virtual machine and Linux). Some upfront setup effort and lower performance beats not having a way to use the card at all!
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- cesarb 4y ago
  Not that different from a Linux user using NDISwrapper to run a Windows wireless driver on Linux.
  - sheenobu 4y ago
    NDISwrapper was more like wine, it implements APIs but doesn't run any sort of virtual CPU.
    - mbreese 4y ago
      Spiritually it was the same concept though... if you can't get a driver for your Linux OS, use the driver from another OS. This just seems to take that to be extreme -- don't just use the driver from another OS, actually use the driver FROM the other OS!
- dark-star 4y ago
  It's basically a microkernel ;-) (although with a very "fat" WiFi driver)
imwillofficial 4y ago
If this is something they get dialed in, I’ll buy several for sure. Love the framework idea and want to support, but have very little use case right now.
dark-star 4y ago
Man, FreeBSD really needs some driver love... * No Suspend/Resume? Linux has solved this for years, I have not come across a laptop in the last 10 years that had trouble with s2r or s2d (but I guess that there might be a few that don't fully support it, I mainly tested Dell laptops) * WiFi driver and Ethernet over USB-C both highly unstable? That's an Intel chipset, those are usually the more stable ones (at least on Linux/Windows), and the wire ethernet is not a cheapo chipset either (Realtek) * Bluetooth not supported??? * microSD slot on USB-C docking station doesn't work? This is just SPI, how hard can that be... I wonder if there is any laptop from the last 5 years where FreeBSD fully works. I keep trying FreeBSD on and off on my two Laptops but I had similar experiences (plus I'm not used to the FreeBSD way of doing things). I'm ready to jump through some hoops but in my case, FreeBSD was always removed after a weekend or so, and replaced with Linux where everything just works. I used to tinker a lot to get Linux and BSD running on hardware, but these days I kinda expect most things to just work out of the box ... I really wish FreeBSD would get some more developer backing
- cowtools 4y ago
  if FreeBSD had a copyleft license, maybe companies would have a reason to publish their drivers, or you could port drivers from Linux.
  - keewee7 4y ago
    Aren't most Linux drivers closed source binary blobs?
    - cowtools 4y ago
      The nvidia drivers sure are. I don't know about most drivers though. As for wifi, I own this ath9k card which I'm told is completely free, but I also own this intel 3160 chip that apparently requires some firmware to be loaded. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open-source_wireless_drivers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open-source_wire...
      - 4y ago
nortonham 4y ago
Nice update. Hopefully the work being done to update wifi support on FreeBSD will come to something and something like wifibox won't be necessary.
throw7 4y ago
FreeBSD on laptops sounds like Linux on smartphones. ;)
- ruslan 4y ago
  Me and many others would be happy to have it. :)
- alberth 4y ago
  So you mean like Android then.
  - Koshkin 4y ago
    Which is not just Linux, it is also a Java thing on top of it.
auraham 4y ago
I suggest to share your experience in [1], so others can benefit of your testing. [1] http://linux-hardware.org/ http://linux-hardware.org/
ruslan 4y ago
This is nice. Couple of days ago I published 80 pages work describing my experience installing FreeBSD on Lenovo Ideapad 3 Gaming laptop and making it to work. The article is in Russian, but I think it can be easily read through Google Translate, here's the link: https://habr-com.translate.goog/en/post/683702/?_x_tr_sl=ru&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://habr-com.translate.goog/en/post/683702/?_x_tr_sl=ru&... My experience was pretty similar to that of the owner of Framework laptop, except some extra topics: headless NVIDIA GPU, Touchpad issues, bootloader hangs.
- phist_mcgee 4y ago
  Did you really write all of those pages by hand?? It appears incredibly comprehensive. Did you write it just for fun?
  - ruslan 4y ago
    Yes, I wrote it just for fun. It was a kind of challenge for me, both resolving issues and describing them in detail to let new people in town learn how issues can be resolved. Last time I wrote anything that long was my diploma thesis 20+ years go. :-) This work took me nearly four months to accomplish.
    - jayp1418 4y ago
      Cool. Let us know if you write one about NetBSD :)
      - ruslan 4y ago
        Sure. ;)
    - phist_mcgee 4y ago
      It was a really interesting read, we need more long form guides like this - it takes a lot of work but this is the kind of resource I would love to read getting setup.
AdmiralAsshat 4y ago
The music player at the bottom right is...Audacious with Winamp skin, I presume?
- qbrass 4y ago
  It's XMMS. Audacious is a fork of a fork of it.
- fulvioterzapi 4y ago
  Looks like XMMS to me. https://www.xmms.org https://www.xmms.org
xupybd 4y ago
I want to try BSD one day but these sorts of articles put me off. I used to enjoy trying to get things working but I just don't have that sort of time anymore. I understand that the community only has so many resources to support the various hardware around. I suspect one BSDs strengths is that the smaller community is able to follow a more cohesive vision. But for me this means I'm probably not going learn it until I can just run it out of the box.
- ndiddy 4y ago
  In every image I've seen of a FreeBSD developer conference, the vast majority of the developers are running FreeBSD in a virtual machine on a Macbook. I guess they aren't considering real hardware support as a priority.
  - trasz 4y ago
    This seems to have changed over the last decade though.
  - binkHN 4y ago
    You aren't wrong. This is part of the reason I tend to buy ThinkPads; a large portion of the OpenBSD developers use ThinkPads and dogfood OpenBSD on them!
    - adam_ung 4y ago
      Same for FreeBSD folks. Most of the FreeBSD developers I know develop on ThinkPads.
  - GekkePrutser 4y ago
    I run FreeBSD bare metal on my main desktop (Intel NUC). But I don't need WiFi nor Bluetooth so that helps a lot. Don't have these on my windows (big gaming box) desktop either. I'm just not a laptop person really. Only for work. That makes the situation a lot easier.
  - adam_ung 4y ago
MontyCarloHall 4y ago
Serious question: what is so compelling about the FreeBSD desktop experience compared to Linux that makes it worth jumping through all these hoops?
- IgorPartola 4y ago
  For me personally it would be the ability to run jails and ZFS on a desktop. That would in turn enable me to run the same in production because local/dev/prod parity would be a good thing.
  - MontyCarloHall 4y ago
    Don’t Linux and FreeBSD both use OpenZFS these days? Jails are a fair point, but if they’re essential to your production environment, why not just run your FreeBSD dev environment in a VM on your Linux laptop, or SSH into a dedicated FreeBSD dev box? After all, OP is already running Linux in a VM in order to run working WiFi drivers.
    - throw0101a 4y ago
      > Don’t Linux and FreeBSD both use OpenZFS these days? Certain integrations between ZFS and the OS are more 'elegant' in FreeBSD: * https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=beadm https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=beadm * https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?bectl https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?bectl
      - fomine3 4y ago
        Also ARC and page cache (kernel mm) integration isn't very good on Linux. It's fine for NAS but possibly not good for desktop usage. Perhaps good on FreeBSD?
  - ladyanita22 4y ago
    I mean, Ubuntu does support ZFS, and there's LXC...
- 4y ago
martin1975 4y ago
Is it possible to port Linux driver code to FreeBSD, given licensing issues and all that? Seems like an 'easy' fix, given that Linux has most of the non-working FreeBSD issues solved..if not all. I'm all for code re-use.
- bpye 4y ago
  Some Linux code is dual licensed, a lot of the DRM subsystem for example, I’m pretty sure GPU support on the BSDs are based on ports of it.
  - adam_ung 4y ago
    This is exactly what is happening right now: https://github.com/freebsd/drm-kmod https://github.com/freebsd/drm-kmod
IntelMiner 4y ago
I really, really like my Framework laptop. But I've found I can only really run Windows on it without having to shift my entire Linux workflow Not because Linux doesn't work at a *hardware* level. All the drivers are long since mainlined and the documentation on places like Gentoo and Arch's wikis are superb The only blocker for me now is fractional scaling in XFCE is just not there (yet). It's something the developers are slowly working on and hoping to get out in the next release, but it's just not available yet. I could use GNOME or KDE and gain it (and probably even run Wayland since it's an Intel iGPU) but I've been wedded to XFCE since GNOME 2 went out the door and GNOME 3 showed up. I'd rather not make the uphill climb to relearn an entire desktop environment for just a laptop I use infrequently

271 points by throw0101a 4y ago

> wifibox essentially spins up an Alpine Linux VM using FreeBSD's bhyve virtualization technology, and allows you to passthrough your machine's wireless card Jesus christ.

NegativeLatency 4y ago
Sounds sub-optimal, I'm thinkng back to linux wifi support on random laptops 10+ years ago and it was also quite bad.
- felixg3 4y ago
  I think it mostly depended on the vendor, like today, where Broadcom and Realtek suck a lot, Mediatek and Qualcomm a little and Intel/Atheros work just fine. I remember using Ubuntu 6.10 or so with an Intel card out of the box.
  - filmgirlcw 4y ago
    I’m sure it is but the status I see shows that there isn’t much support for anything newer than 802.11n cards period, so if you’re using anything from the last 5 or 6 years, you may have a problem. That’s a it different from the various Broadcom or whatever issues the Linux kernel was dealing with in the early Ubuntu eras (where Ubuntu also I think accepted some blobs/drivers that weren’t in the kernel at the time). The problem here seems to be no support for certain stuff, regardless of chipset maker, rather than having to pick a certain one, unless you’re able to go really far back (which may have issues on some networks at this point). As always, the best option for less-mainstream operating systems is to use Ethernet when possible.
easton 4y ago
It's easier than writing a driver for FreeBSD yourself, I suppose, although I'd probably just get a USB Wi-Fi dongle instead of worry about walking into a meeting and my Wi-Fi driver VM crashing :) (or, just run Linux and run FreeBSD in a VM, but that's no way to support a niche operating system...)
- filmgirlcw 4y ago
  I think the problem is that there aren’t many modern wireless cards with official FreeBSD support, so you’re stuck using a specialized dongle or Ethernet if you want to use FreeBSD on a laptop.
- craftkiller 4y ago
  You don't need a dongle, just purchase a supported wifi card. I put a supported atheros card in my framework laptop and the wifi works flawlessly, natively. The framework laptop is designed to be opened and have the parts replaced, so its the perfect laptop for doing hardware changes like this.
  - Klonoar 4y ago
    Does this actually support operating on 5GHz, or is it still stuck in the 2.4GHz era? I'm not aware of any FreeBSD-compatible wifi cards that actually do this. (I would love to be proven wrong, but I'm super tired of people saying "wifi cards work fine on FreeBSD" when the reality is that the speeds are sub-optimal without a way to improve it currently)
    - prmoustache 4y ago
      On the other hands 2.4GHz is perfectly fine for a lot of people. Actually I often select 2.4GHz on purpose at home because 5GHz works really bad with thick walls and I barely get any network in my kitchen and rooftop. People will say it is easy, setup a mesh network or some powerline adapters but: 1. It is much more expensive 2. It is not practical in an old flat with very few power outlets, especially when you are not the owner. And I don't really run into use case where running 2.4GHz limits me.
znpy 4y ago
> Jesus christ. exactly. this is the kind of bs i like to call out when i see the usual freebsd desktop thread. it's going to work mostly okay-ish, as long as you don't mine some abominations like that running on your systems in the background. this really reminds me my linux experiences circa 2005-2006 (ndiswrapper for wifi cards, do people remember that?).
- flatiron 4y ago
  Totally agree. Wonder the use case why they don’t run Linux and put FreeBSD in a VM where everything would work perfectly.
  - Koshkin 4y ago
    Good point, actually. These days everything pretty much runs on VMs anyway…
ploxiln 4y ago
That is my initial reaction, but ... a minimal linux VM in a minimal hypervisor, might not be that bad, for a network adapter. Perhaps -40MB- 128MB of memory? Double the context switching? Sounds kinda like a micro-kernel driver. Have you ever tried to install a minimal driver for a printer in windows, and then watched in horror as it automatically started downloading 600MB of HP junk?
- doubled112 4y ago
  I just stay away from HP junk. Life is too short.
- tailspin2019 4y ago
  > Have you ever tried to install a minimal driver for a printer in windows, and then watched in horror as it automatically started downloading 600MB of HP junk? Never have I changed my opinion on something (a VM for a fricking driver) so quickly. Good job.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  Yeah, obviously it's not ideal but I don't really see any problem with passing the card to what is, indeed, effectively a userspace driver (that happens to internally contain a virtual machine and Linux). Some upfront setup effort and lower performance beats not having a way to use the card at all!
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
cesarb 4y ago
Not that different from a Linux user using NDISwrapper to run a Windows wireless driver on Linux.
- sheenobu 4y ago
  NDISwrapper was more like wine, it implements APIs but doesn't run any sort of virtual CPU.
  - mbreese 4y ago
    Spiritually it was the same concept though... if you can't get a driver for your Linux OS, use the driver from another OS. This just seems to take that to be extreme -- don't just use the driver from another OS, actually use the driver FROM the other OS!
dark-star 4y ago
It's basically a microkernel ;-) (although with a very "fat" WiFi driver)

imwillofficial 4y ago

If this is something they get dialed in, I’ll buy several for sure. Love the framework idea and want to support, but have very little use case right now.

dark-star 4y ago

Man, FreeBSD really needs some driver love... * No Suspend/Resume? Linux has solved this for years, I have not come across a laptop in the last 10 years that had trouble with s2r or s2d (but I guess that there might be a few that don't fully support it, I mainly tested Dell laptops) * WiFi driver and Ethernet over USB-C both highly unstable? That's an Intel chipset, those are usually the more stable ones (at least on Linux/Windows), and the wire ethernet is not a cheapo chipset either (Realtek) * Bluetooth not supported??? * microSD slot on USB-C docking station doesn't work? This is just SPI, how hard can that be... I wonder if there is any laptop from the last 5 years where FreeBSD fully works. I keep trying FreeBSD on and off on my two Laptops but I had similar experiences (plus I'm not used to the FreeBSD way of doing things). I'm ready to jump through some hoops but in my case, FreeBSD was always removed after a weekend or so, and replaced with Linux where everything just works. I used to tinker a lot to get Linux and BSD running on hardware, but these days I kinda expect most things to just work out of the box ... I really wish FreeBSD would get some more developer backing

cowtools 4y ago
if FreeBSD had a copyleft license, maybe companies would have a reason to publish their drivers, or you could port drivers from Linux.
- keewee7 4y ago
  Aren't most Linux drivers closed source binary blobs?
  - cowtools 4y ago
    The nvidia drivers sure are. I don't know about most drivers though. As for wifi, I own this ath9k card which I'm told is completely free, but I also own this intel 3160 chip that apparently requires some firmware to be loaded. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open-source_wireless_drivers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open-source_wire...
    - 4y ago

nortonham 4y ago

Nice update. Hopefully the work being done to update wifi support on FreeBSD will come to something and something like wifibox won't be necessary.

throw7 4y ago

FreeBSD on laptops sounds like Linux on smartphones. ;)

ruslan 4y ago
Me and many others would be happy to have it. :)
alberth 4y ago
So you mean like Android then.
- Koshkin 4y ago
  Which is not just Linux, it is also a Java thing on top of it.

auraham 4y ago

I suggest to share your experience in [1], so others can benefit of your testing. [1] http://linux-hardware.org/ http://linux-hardware.org/

ruslan 4y ago

This is nice. Couple of days ago I published 80 pages work describing my experience installing FreeBSD on Lenovo Ideapad 3 Gaming laptop and making it to work. The article is in Russian, but I think it can be easily read through Google Translate, here's the link: https://habr-com.translate.goog/en/post/683702/?_x_tr_sl=ru&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://habr-com.translate.goog/en/post/683702/?_x_tr_sl=ru&... My experience was pretty similar to that of the owner of Framework laptop, except some extra topics: headless NVIDIA GPU, Touchpad issues, bootloader hangs.

phist_mcgee 4y ago
Did you really write all of those pages by hand?? It appears incredibly comprehensive. Did you write it just for fun?
- ruslan 4y ago
  Yes, I wrote it just for fun. It was a kind of challenge for me, both resolving issues and describing them in detail to let new people in town learn how issues can be resolved. Last time I wrote anything that long was my diploma thesis 20+ years go. :-) This work took me nearly four months to accomplish.
  - jayp1418 4y ago
    Cool. Let us know if you write one about NetBSD :)
    - ruslan 4y ago
      Sure. ;)
  - phist_mcgee 4y ago
    It was a really interesting read, we need more long form guides like this - it takes a lot of work but this is the kind of resource I would love to read getting setup.

AdmiralAsshat 4y ago

The music player at the bottom right is...Audacious with Winamp skin, I presume?

qbrass 4y ago
It's XMMS. Audacious is a fork of a fork of it.
fulvioterzapi 4y ago
Looks like XMMS to me. https://www.xmms.org https://www.xmms.org

xupybd 4y ago

I want to try BSD one day but these sorts of articles put me off. I used to enjoy trying to get things working but I just don't have that sort of time anymore. I understand that the community only has so many resources to support the various hardware around. I suspect one BSDs strengths is that the smaller community is able to follow a more cohesive vision. But for me this means I'm probably not going learn it until I can just run it out of the box.

ndiddy 4y ago
In every image I've seen of a FreeBSD developer conference, the vast majority of the developers are running FreeBSD in a virtual machine on a Macbook. I guess they aren't considering real hardware support as a priority.
- trasz 4y ago
  This seems to have changed over the last decade though.
- binkHN 4y ago
  You aren't wrong. This is part of the reason I tend to buy ThinkPads; a large portion of the OpenBSD developers use ThinkPads and dogfood OpenBSD on them!
  - adam_ung 4y ago
    Same for FreeBSD folks. Most of the FreeBSD developers I know develop on ThinkPads.
- GekkePrutser 4y ago
  I run FreeBSD bare metal on my main desktop (Intel NUC). But I don't need WiFi nor Bluetooth so that helps a lot. Don't have these on my windows (big gaming box) desktop either. I'm just not a laptop person really. Only for work. That makes the situation a lot easier.
- adam_ung 4y ago

MontyCarloHall 4y ago

Serious question: what is so compelling about the FreeBSD desktop experience compared to Linux that makes it worth jumping through all these hoops?

IgorPartola 4y ago
For me personally it would be the ability to run jails and ZFS on a desktop. That would in turn enable me to run the same in production because local/dev/prod parity would be a good thing.
- MontyCarloHall 4y ago
  Don’t Linux and FreeBSD both use OpenZFS these days? Jails are a fair point, but if they’re essential to your production environment, why not just run your FreeBSD dev environment in a VM on your Linux laptop, or SSH into a dedicated FreeBSD dev box? After all, OP is already running Linux in a VM in order to run working WiFi drivers.
  - throw0101a 4y ago
    > Don’t Linux and FreeBSD both use OpenZFS these days? Certain integrations between ZFS and the OS are more 'elegant' in FreeBSD: * https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=beadm https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=beadm * https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?bectl https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?bectl
    - fomine3 4y ago
      Also ARC and page cache (kernel mm) integration isn't very good on Linux. It's fine for NAS but possibly not good for desktop usage. Perhaps good on FreeBSD?
- ladyanita22 4y ago
  I mean, Ubuntu does support ZFS, and there's LXC...
4y ago

martin1975 4y ago

Is it possible to port Linux driver code to FreeBSD, given licensing issues and all that? Seems like an 'easy' fix, given that Linux has most of the non-working FreeBSD issues solved..if not all. I'm all for code re-use.

bpye 4y ago
Some Linux code is dual licensed, a lot of the DRM subsystem for example, I’m pretty sure GPU support on the BSDs are based on ports of it.
- adam_ung 4y ago
  This is exactly what is happening right now: https://github.com/freebsd/drm-kmod https://github.com/freebsd/drm-kmod

IntelMiner 4y ago

I really, really like my Framework laptop. But I've found I can only really run Windows on it without having to shift my entire Linux workflow Not because Linux doesn't work at a *hardware* level. All the drivers are long since mainlined and the documentation on places like Gentoo and Arch's wikis are superb The only blocker for me now is fractional scaling in XFCE is just not there (yet). It's something the developers are slowly working on and hoping to get out in the next release, but it's just not available yet. I could use GNOME or KDE and gain it (and probably even run Wayland since it's an Intel iGPU) but I've been wedded to XFCE since GNOME 2 went out the door and GNOME 3 showed up. I'd rather not make the uphill climb to relearn an entire desktop environment for just a laptop I use infrequently