FreeBSD is great, and it has the potential to be unrivaled. In reality, FreeBSD being unrivaled will be at increments at 5 years at a time. FreeBSD isn't perfect, but neither is anything else. The closet to that would be a Mac, and yet that lacks applications that opensource operating systems have to offer. Where Ubuntu has nearly everything, it's bulky and that makes it slower. Maybe Windows and Mac are better for all users than everything else. Right now, everything lacks in some way or other.
It took a long time for multimedia keys to become standardized so it works with more keyboards, and it's another release, before that becomes the default setting. That may be the first step for backlighting on keyboards. It took a over a decade for XMPP to get up to speed in itself, and on FreeBSD: this still has setbacks in getting ports up to speed for needed features. It took a while for graphic cards to get up to speed, and now it's there except for the newest for common manufacturers (AMD, Intel) on common architectures, which the most well known are improved upon consistently now. Many of us have assumed that all relevant graphics cards work, however, when it comes to microboards, FreeBSD lacks basic graphics acceleration for them, namely, VC (Video Core) graphics cards. NetBSD has support for Broadcom VC IV graphic cards for microboards through a driver ported from Linux: Thread share-your-netbsd-experience-for-freebsd-users.89800, (NetBSD Blog: Raspberry Pi GPU acceleration in NetBSD 7).
When it comes to backlighting on keyboards, or any hardware ability, even when it doesn't work in the current FreeBSD state, seeing what it takes and documenting and sharing that with others, is another step to getting that to work. I believe this is closer with the newer USBHID driver architecture.
BSD's need to work more closely together, to implement software technology, which one may have, that replaces Linux versions. The load of software development needs to be shared, which will benefit all BSD's and other opensource operating systems which aren't Linux (on mailing list). Some BSD licensed software needs to be forked on a BSD themed location, for instance x11/sxhkd, because it's BSD like, yet uses GNU dependencies for building. Small applications like this should be exclusively built with BSD native tools. BSD relevant upstreams for smaller programs would require less or no patches, and less non native dependencies.
To get nearly all hardware to run, I believe FreeBSD needs to have an API for GPL hardware driver libraries, only for which FreeBSD lacks those drivers. Or basically use the existing ports system, as already is being done.
As for my FreeBSD system, I'm good with it. It suits me better than any other operating system.
It took a long time for multimedia keys to become standardized so it works with more keyboards, and it's another release, before that becomes the default setting. That may be the first step for backlighting on keyboards. It took a over a decade for XMPP to get up to speed in itself, and on FreeBSD: this still has setbacks in getting ports up to speed for needed features. It took a while for graphic cards to get up to speed, and now it's there except for the newest for common manufacturers (AMD, Intel) on common architectures, which the most well known are improved upon consistently now. Many of us have assumed that all relevant graphics cards work, however, when it comes to microboards, FreeBSD lacks basic graphics acceleration for them, namely, VC (Video Core) graphics cards. NetBSD has support for Broadcom VC IV graphic cards for microboards through a driver ported from Linux: Thread share-your-netbsd-experience-for-freebsd-users.89800, (NetBSD Blog: Raspberry Pi GPU acceleration in NetBSD 7).
When it comes to backlighting on keyboards, or any hardware ability, even when it doesn't work in the current FreeBSD state, seeing what it takes and documenting and sharing that with others, is another step to getting that to work. I believe this is closer with the newer USBHID driver architecture.
BSD's need to work more closely together, to implement software technology, which one may have, that replaces Linux versions. The load of software development needs to be shared, which will benefit all BSD's and other opensource operating systems which aren't Linux (on mailing list). Some BSD licensed software needs to be forked on a BSD themed location, for instance x11/sxhkd, because it's BSD like, yet uses GNU dependencies for building. Small applications like this should be exclusively built with BSD native tools. BSD relevant upstreams for smaller programs would require less or no patches, and less non native dependencies.
To get nearly all hardware to run, I believe FreeBSD needs to have an API for GPL hardware driver libraries, only for which FreeBSD lacks those drivers. Or basically use the existing ports system, as already is being done.
As for my FreeBSD system, I'm good with it. It suits me better than any other operating system.
