I'm fairly new to FreeBSD and absolutely new to this particular forum so apologies if this is something that comes up all the time.
The short story: I think FreeBSD needs some way of making mobile networking easier.
The long story: I've worked in computing in Universities for about 30 years. I started with BSD running on a PDP/11, then SunOS, then Solaris. I'm probably unusual in never having owned and used either a Windows PC or a Mac. For many years I had various Sun machines at home. When I got my first laptop I ran Linux on it for a while and then switched to Solaris and eventually OpenSolaris. My first laptop was used to enable me to work on long train journeys: it had no mobile network connectivity and I would move stuff to and from it via wired networks at home and at work. Then mobile broadband came along: I was not an early user because it was expensive but I did eventually sign up and, with a bit of struggle, got OpenSolaris to work with it.
Since then, of course, Solaris has pretty much died for users like me, and OpenSolaris/Indiana really isn't an option, so a few years ago I decided that I was going to have to give up Solaris and find something else. My first alternative was Debian, but I found the whole experience frustrating in many ways, and about 2 years ago I switched to FreeBSD. There is a lot to like about FreeBSD for a traditional Unix user and I am surprised in many ways that it is not more popular than it is, though I suppose it passed under my radar for a long while too.
The reason for this rather long introduction is to make the point that, though I'm not a developer and have never been a professional sysadmin, I am a much more than averagely-competent user. I've set up and run a small Solaris cluster and was getting Linux and Solaris running on laptop machines at a time when that was really unusual.
What everyone wants now, myself included, is internet connectivity "on the go" and in this area, I think Linux wins over FreeBSD by a mile. I have mobile broadband running on my laptop (under FreeBSD) but it was a bit of a struggle, I needed help from these forums and spent a fair bit of time tinkering with the PPP configuration file. Similarly, I have WiFi working, again after tinkering with wpa_supplicant. I have used wifimgr and it is ok, but I'm often driven to editing wpa_supplicant.conf by hand and running ifconfig.
Linux has a tool called, I think, NetworkManager and a little control icon called nm-applet and it is incredibly easy to use. You can set up a new connection in seconds for wired, wireless or mobile, and it manages them all seamlessly. I've found a couple of threads on these forums mentioning nm-applet, but neither it nor an equivalent seems to be available in FreeBSD.
As I said at the outset, I am new here, I don't mean to cause any offence, and these are just "thoughts" for which the Off-Topic forum seems the right place. I am still learning FreeBSD and I want to continue to do so and to use it for the foreseeable future, but it seems to me that its future must include reasonable compatibility with laptops (I'm not suggesting tablets or phones), and that in turn means reasonably straightforward mobile internet.
The short story: I think FreeBSD needs some way of making mobile networking easier.
The long story: I've worked in computing in Universities for about 30 years. I started with BSD running on a PDP/11, then SunOS, then Solaris. I'm probably unusual in never having owned and used either a Windows PC or a Mac. For many years I had various Sun machines at home. When I got my first laptop I ran Linux on it for a while and then switched to Solaris and eventually OpenSolaris. My first laptop was used to enable me to work on long train journeys: it had no mobile network connectivity and I would move stuff to and from it via wired networks at home and at work. Then mobile broadband came along: I was not an early user because it was expensive but I did eventually sign up and, with a bit of struggle, got OpenSolaris to work with it.
Since then, of course, Solaris has pretty much died for users like me, and OpenSolaris/Indiana really isn't an option, so a few years ago I decided that I was going to have to give up Solaris and find something else. My first alternative was Debian, but I found the whole experience frustrating in many ways, and about 2 years ago I switched to FreeBSD. There is a lot to like about FreeBSD for a traditional Unix user and I am surprised in many ways that it is not more popular than it is, though I suppose it passed under my radar for a long while too.
The reason for this rather long introduction is to make the point that, though I'm not a developer and have never been a professional sysadmin, I am a much more than averagely-competent user. I've set up and run a small Solaris cluster and was getting Linux and Solaris running on laptop machines at a time when that was really unusual.
What everyone wants now, myself included, is internet connectivity "on the go" and in this area, I think Linux wins over FreeBSD by a mile. I have mobile broadband running on my laptop (under FreeBSD) but it was a bit of a struggle, I needed help from these forums and spent a fair bit of time tinkering with the PPP configuration file. Similarly, I have WiFi working, again after tinkering with wpa_supplicant. I have used wifimgr and it is ok, but I'm often driven to editing wpa_supplicant.conf by hand and running ifconfig.
Linux has a tool called, I think, NetworkManager and a little control icon called nm-applet and it is incredibly easy to use. You can set up a new connection in seconds for wired, wireless or mobile, and it manages them all seamlessly. I've found a couple of threads on these forums mentioning nm-applet, but neither it nor an equivalent seems to be available in FreeBSD.
As I said at the outset, I am new here, I don't mean to cause any offence, and these are just "thoughts" for which the Off-Topic forum seems the right place. I am still learning FreeBSD and I want to continue to do so and to use it for the foreseeable future, but it seems to me that its future must include reasonable compatibility with laptops (I'm not suggesting tablets or phones), and that in turn means reasonably straightforward mobile internet.