I first installed FreeBSD this week on my laptop and I'm focusing on desktop usage (Mate). This are my findings so far and the workaround I used when applicable, maybe someone else can find them useful. My laptop is described here .
(***)
- GPU not responding after a suspend/resume cycle (***). Symptoms: videos are played without hardware acceleration, vainfo crashes,
ungoogled-chromium processes hang on logout and use 100% of CPU power (fans spin like crazy). Unfortunately there's no workaround for this problem, I even tried drm-61-kmod compiled from the ports (a good excuse to learn how to use them ) to no avail but the ungoogled-chromium problem is solved in post 17; - unable to delete snapshots ("dataset is busy") and thus zrepl couldn't work. I tracked down this to gvfs-trash that was accessing these snapshots. Solution: replace caja with pcmanfm - this got rid of gvfs and gvfs-trash along the way;
- keyboard layout gets reset to the default (US) after every suspend/resume cycle.
Workaround: I mapped F3 to execute "xterm -e 'setxkeymap it' " so just pressing that button gets back to my usual layout.The solution is in post #16 in this thread; video recording from the webcam does not work. No solution yet for this, I tried also with webcamoid with every possible combination but it didn't work. Funnily enough, the picture quality I get in FreeBSD is much better than on Linux;Solution: OBS Studio works;- the brightness applet included with Mate doesn't do anything, probably because it tries to use the Linux interface. Workaround: I mapped F11/F12 to use the FreeBSD backlight utility;
- multimedia keys on a Dell keyboard don't work, despite loading the hsbhid module, and also the Mate applet always wants to use the internal card and not the HDMI output of my monitor. Workaround: I mapped F9/F10 to use pamixer to increase and decrease the volume.
(***)
Code:
[19:25][fmc000@tu45b-freebsd][~]
⤷ $ vainfo |head -4
libva info: VA-API version 1.22.0
libva info: Trying to open /usr/local/lib/dri/iHD_drv_video.so
libva info: Found init function __vaDriverInit_1_22
libva info: va_openDriver() returns 0
Trying display: wayland
Trying display: x11
vainfo: VA-API version: 1.22 (libva 2.22.0)
vainfo: Driver version: Intel iHD driver for Intel(R) Gen Graphics - 23.4.3 (intel-media-23.4.3)
[19:25][fmc000@tu45b-freebsd][~]
<suspend-resume cycle>
[19:25][fmc000@tu45b-freebsd][~]
⤷ $ vainfo |head -4
libva info: VA-API version 1.22.0
libva error: vaGetDriverNames() failed with unknown libva error
vaInitialize failed with error code -1 (unknown libva error),exit
Trying display: wayland
Trying display: x11
[19:25][fmc000@tu45b-freebsd][~]
⤷ $