Recently I got into FreeBSD (version 15) and tried to set it up as my desktop. As of now I think FreeBSD needs some more polishing to be used as a daily desktop.

WiFi#

My card is not supported currently but I heard drivers are on the way. So I had to use a package called wifibox which spins up a headless Alpine Linux using the built-in bhyve virtualisation tool. It exposes sockets to control the wpa_supplicant on the guest machine to the host machine using socat. It worked really well but you have to give up some memory (around 150MB).

Graphics#

I have an all AMD machine meaning my CPU, iGPU, dGPU all of them are AMD. So drivers should never be an issue. I set up amdgpu and xorg. For some reason my primary GPU was always the dGPU. When I forced xorg to change primary to iGPU it would boot to a black screen. Not sure why this happens but if I were to guess it would be that the kernel finds the dGPU first since its at PCI:3:0:0 (iGPU is at 7:0:0) and flips the mux that way since my laptop is set to hybrid mode.

This next issue is weird. Some packages which supports nvidia-drivers install it as dependency. But apart from taking up some unwanted storage it is not a big deal. But when these drivers are installed it runs some script which replaces the mesa libglx.so.0 library in the modules directory of xorg with nvidia versions of it breaking my graphics pipeline. So now my glxinfo gives me "cannot load glx module" errors. xorg always loads the nvidia version even if I force amdgpu. Only fix was to manually remove those files. There is no blocklist for pkg through which I can ban all things related to nvidia. Maybe a solution is to run a script after every pkg operation to check for these file changes and revert them back to the original version.