FreeBSD as the only operating system for you

I apologize for raising my own old topic. But the question is really relevant.

All these years I have used only FreeBSD on my computers and servers, without any exceptions. However, it so happened that I have a Thinkpad P15 laptop. This is a great workstation that supports 3 NVME m.2 2280, and this strongly associates me with using FreeBSD and ZFS in the form of 2- or 3-way mirror.

Unfortunately, I encountered the fact that this laptop literally rejects FreeBSD 13.5 or 14.3. I tried a number of methods that are suggested on this forum to mitigate the following problems, so my question is NOT even technical anymore. So:

- The processor temperature is 50 degrees Celsius in idle mode. It does not go down with any games with powerd, CMax, acpi_ibm and other tips that I could find on this forum. In Debian 13, the temperatures are about 28-33 degrees.

- Fan speed is always 1800 when idle. The worst thing is that once it heats up, it never stops. In Debian 13, the fan does not start at all without need, stops spinning at any opportunity, and in general, the laptop exhibits sleepy properties when idle and just quietly falls asleep.

- The discrete Nvidia video card always has a temperature of about 49 degrees. I wanted to run in hybrid mode only, using just the video CPU.

- I simply ignore the issue of Bluetooth and Wifi performance for now, because I would be ready to sacrifice this and work simply from an Ethernet cable and use wired headphones, not TWS.

- When rebooting, the system complains about the keyboard keys sticking (this only happens in FreeBSD and only when rebooting, not when simply connected).

The above temperatures are not the most critical. The fans (there are 2 of them) can work at such speeds for some time before they fail. I must say that for the sake of interest I have tried many distributions over the last 24 hours (several versions of Ubuntu 24.04, OpenSUSE Leap 15.6, Debian 13.0, RHEL 9.6). And I did not like all of them, because the heating was also high, the fans were spinning, except for Debian. I also tested Windows, and the fans worked even harder, but then stopped after some time.

In short, you'd have to be completely blind not to see how the laptop resists running FreeBSD on it.

But the question is not technical, but rather moral.

1. What do you think should be done in this situation?

2. Continue to torture my laptop? How long will it last in this mode? Will it last 3 years?

3. Is it worth giving up your favorite and only operating system because of incompatibility with a laptop that was bought specifically for FreeBSD?

4. Maybe I should reassure myself in the style: well, so what, I'll install Debian on my laptop. I have really serious stuff on FreeBSD. So what, it doesn't even have ECC memory, what could ZFS possibly have?

I sincerely await your answers while listening to two fans.
 
dnb said:
3. Is it worth giving up your favorite and only operating system because of incompatibility with a laptop that was bought specifically for FreeBSD?
Click to expand...
Hell no. In a few years you won't even remember that machine. Buy the correct hardware for the OS you want to run.

Either store that machine for a few years, until its hardware does work with FreeBSD, or sell it and put the money towards a machine that is known to work with FreeBSD.

Yes, it is irritating if you do accidentally buy a lemon but hardware is dead cheap these days (in almost all countries). More devices support FreeBSD today than ever before.
 
I'm pretty sure your laptop will not really suffer - but you.
Listening to two fans at full speed all the time ain't no fun, and for sure are no way to do any work concentrated. I recently switched to water cooling to reduce noise even more, but that's another story not to be told here [it's not really worth the effort.]
So, we are crystal on that: This situation cannot stay, but must be changed.

Let's analyze:
What is the core question?
Do you need to run a certain hardware, or do you need to get jobs efficiently done, which depends on software (Apps, compilers, operating system,...)?
That's a rethorical question, of course.

Switching to another system always means effort, anyway. Even if you are versed in debian, as you seem you pretty are.

So, at the moment I see three choices for you:
1. change the OS - But you say yourself, FreeBSD is your favorite OS. That means work efficiently. Changing the system means losing efficiency. You don't really want to leave it. Otherwise you didn't place the question here. So, last choice.
2. try another version of FreeBSD - we just see it in other threads: FreeBSD may have some powermanagement issues, especially with laptops. Maybe not anymore in future versions; So you may consider fmc000's suggestion. Least effort, least cost, so, first choice.
3. change the hardware - As kpedersen already said: Hardware is cheap these days.
Compromise. A bit effort, some cost, but to stay with your favorite OS. Second choice.

Of course, absolutely the decision is 100% on you.
But you asked, so consider this:
Very first thing I would try was what fmc000 said: Try another version of FreeBSD, and see if the problem was solved.
FreeBSD is known not to be really that laptop friendly (yet).
But You already sacrificed your mobility to stay at FreeBSD! (👆🧐)
Personally to me this ain't no prob, since to me a laptop always was and always will be a secondary machine I only use when I travel. My main machine is a big tower with 4 monitors and a real keyboard (pic of my setup is in post-707877 if you must know) - besides something like that to me was a real machine you simply have more flexibility/choices with hardware than with a laptop, like change the coolers.
Example by experience: Those are really pretty quiet: be quiet! silent wing 4 - but there are others, of course.

So, bottom line:
So, if you already are wire-bound, why not follow kpedersen's advice, and consider to simply change the hardware?
If you don't need to play modern 3D games, you don't need really that much power. You may get some used tower powerful enough for serious work at a garage or rummage sale, local classified ads, or a second hand shop for app. 100...250 bucks. Maybe place some hardware for 50...100 bucks into it, maybe have some spare parts in the attic, and you get a real machine. :cool:
 
dnb said:
Unfortunately, I encountered the fact that this laptop literally rejects FreeBSD 13.5 or 14.3. I tried a number of methods that are suggested on this forum to mitigate the following problems, so my question is NOT even technical anymore. So:
Click to expand...
I'll check vermaden blog first, a ton of useful info there, in this case especially The Power to Serve – FreeBSD Power Management and Sensors Information on FreeBSD
Please, do browse through archive there, you'll find a lot of other good tips on the 'FreeBSD on laptops' subject and other very interesting articles.
 
dnb said:
Is FreeBSD the only operating system you use? Tell me, what system do you use in dual boot with FreeBSD and why? Are you forced to use Linux distributions to make money? Could you be uncompromising and abandon systems other than FreeBSD?
Click to expand...
To answer OP, FreeBSD is my primary OS and it's one I love the most, but I also use Windows 10&11 for work & gaming, OS X for work, Alt Sisyphus Linux (and few other distros in QEMU: Gentoo, OpenMandriva, Fedora, Debian) for educating myself about Linux. In various emulators I have IBM MVS, DEC VMS, CP/M, FreeMiNT. On my personal desktop I triple boot FreeBSD, Alt and Win10 (each OS on its own drive).
 
dnb said:
1. What do you think should be done in this situation?
Click to expand...
If you want to use the computer productively, find an OS you like that runs on it. The OS isn't supposed to be noticeable on a PC unless you're doing dev for the OS (unless you like a challenge or showing it off to others maybe :p)

dnb said:
3. Is it worth giving up your favorite and only operating system because of incompatibility with a laptop that was bought specifically for FreeBSD?
Click to expand...
For general desktop, I've found Windows able to do anything. Windows is my main OS and fallback; I've used it the longest (every version and most betas 95-11), vs Linux (Ubuntu 6.06) and FreeBSD (14.1).

I switch OSs on a whim and can find reasons to use anything, but I'm also into finding a new favorite OS any time! I just try things out every OS and keep trying stuff until I get bored or can't reasonably figure something new out, switch, and repeat.

If I had a high-end gaming PC and/or did PCVR still, it'd be Windows 10 as that's the only OS I can reasonably use all that kind of hardware with. I would change the OS before hardware (former's quicker and cheaper :p) However I'd be into doing FreeBSD host and GPU passthrough to a Windows VM!

dnb said:
- The processor temperature is 50 degrees Celsius in idle mode. It does not go down with any games with powerd, CMax, acpi_ibm and other tips that I could find on this forum. In Debian 13, the temperatures are about 28-33 degrees.
Click to expand...
I'm thinking Debian has tuned or some other CPU management daemon. Every Linux distro I've removed that and forced max-perf/turbo with x86_energy_perf_policy while on AC because I've heard too many stories about TLP doing odd unexpected stuff with PCI :p (I don't trust any power management software OS-side except x86_energy_perf_policy and directly writing the MSR to tell the CPU what to do). On FreeBSD I do dev.hwpstate_intel.0.epp=0 for the same effect.

I haven't noticed my fan speeds doing anything unexpected on FreeBSD and have thermal management all firmware-side every OS. But if I couldn't have consistent firmware-side thermal management and had to have it OS-side, it has to work with dynamic fan speed on a laptop (max speed wears bearings, but I mainly don't care to hear my laptop while typing something like this :p); I'd consider any OS that couldn't do it incompatible (Hackintosh is the closest I've seen).

dnb said:
- I simply ignore the issue of Bluetooth and Wifi performance for now, because I would be ready to sacrifice this and work simply from an Ethernet cable and use wired headphones, not TWS.
Click to expand...
Wifi speed and management had me switch OSs from FreeBSD a couple times. In-house I was able to run a long Ethernet and not worry about it, but I moved recently and can't do that. 2MB/s limit on 5GHz AC is far below my WAN speeds and not enough to comfortably buffer a 4K@60Hz video.

I bought an AX210 card to attempt to fix that (waiting for delivery), but if I didn't have like $10 + gift card lying around to buy a solution I likely wouldn't deal with that past a week :p It's an upgrade over my current wifi card and wifi 6 to maybe make some kind of difference with the AX router I have, but if it wasn't for FreeBSD's support state today I likely wouldn't have bought it (I haven't bought a wifi card in years and had a bag of em from scrapped laptops :p)


Another option is to report the issues upstream and work with devs to find solutions! When found, they'd benefit your computer and anyone else, and you'll gain a deeper connection to FreeBSD by contributing :D
 
I'm new to FreeBSD and I'm loving it. I've got 3 desktop computers and a ThinkPad. One computer has FreeBSD and the others all have Debian. I permanently ditched Windows a couple years ago. The majority of my computer time now is spent on my FreeBSD computer. I hope to get good enough with FreeBSD to phase out Debian - but Ive got a long way to go.
 
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