FreeBSD on a MacBook Pro

[wwweston]

> Six years later, it less and less "Just Works", started turning into spyware and nagware, and doesn't need much less maintenance than Linux desktop — at least for my work, which is system administration and software development, probably it is better for the mythical End User person. Work needed to get software I need running is not less obscure than work I'd need to do on Linux or othe Unix-like system.... GUI that used to be nice and unintrusive, got annoying. Either I came full circle in the last 15 years of my computer usage, or the OSX experience degraded in last 5 years.

So... it's not just me. Somewhere between Snow Leopard and Mavericks I started finding building various things from source that never were a problem became an exercise in figuring out what library had been removed or moved or what Apple had done with lib/header paths or something else.

If people aren't going over to another unix, what are they doing? Homebrew? Container-ing or virtualizing another unix? Or just suffering?

[BoorishBears]

The problem for me is OSX still takes less maintenance than Linux and provides a higher quality experience than Linux.

I have complaints about the UI changes in OS X sometimes but it's still not as bad as half the Linux applications I'd use in place of OS X ones like Tower

And every time I try Linux i still have issues like the "sleep of death" and NVIDIA Optimus support being in poorly documented limbo (your dedicated GPU is both in use and out of use until you run a graphical benchmark and measure the current draw of your laptop)

And I prefer Homebrew to apt. I've never had Homebrew fail to install other packages because I had a package install break previously, which is always something that drove me nuts about apt.

[meekins]

Homebrew and a Vagrant managed Linux VM depending on the situation. I'm seriously considering moving to Linux next time I'm switching my work laptop.

[boterock]

Some months ago I got FreeBSD running in a Macbook Air, and surprisingly the UEFI boot worked out of the box. I say surprisingly because when I tried, the Linux efiboot didn't work, the only way to boot linux was through GRUB.

I had almost everything working (Audio, suspend on close, i3 or gnome) but never got the wifi to work, I even tethered from my android phone to the Macbook and it worked very good. But in the end it was to annoying to do often. If only FreeBSD supported that wireless chip, I'd be writing this on FreeBSD. When the wayland and updated intel drivers come to FreeBSD maybe i'll try it again, but wifi is a deal breaker.

I always wondered why there isn't wifi drivers for this macbook in FreeBSD if Fedora had them (and AFAIK Fedora only ships open drivers)

[floatboth]

No one ported the broadcom wifi drivers. New Intel cards (7260, 8260) are supported.

Also, you can build the updated graphics drivers from https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop/freebsd-base-graphics

[0xcde4c3db]

Which FreeBSD version did you try? I'm just skimming things, but it looks like Adrian Chadd might have updated the relevant driver back in May/June, in time for FreeBSD 11.

[BorisMelnik]

ever considered using a supported wifi usb?

[duaneb]

I believe audio over hdmi is also unfinished for recent MacBook pros, which is a deal breaker for me.

[rangibaby]

at least for Ubuntu on a 2013 MBP I had to install non-free wifi, everything else Just Worked (tm)

[mpasternacki]

I’m author of that gist (just noticed I have some comments there I need to reply to), still running the setup, now with FreeBSD 12-CURRENT. Tl;dr it generally works, still no wi-fi support. X works fine (running with drm-next-4.7 patches to get external thunderbolt display to work; vanilla kernel works fine with built-in and DVI display, gets confused by Thunderbolt display only). Gave up on pkg because I want to control my build flags, I’m using portmaster now and thinking about setting up poudriere on a bigger server. Feel free to ask if you have any particular questions.

[synthmeat]

Give https://github.com/jrmarino/synth a whirl.

[gkop]

So to be clear, no Thunderbolt display working yet?

[mkup]

This tutorial is about FreeBSD 11-CURRENT snapshot 20150111 (pre-release version), so it deals in act II with hybrid UFS/ZFS setup, but FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE supports root-on-ZFS-in-UEFI-mode via standard installer. Release version of boot1.efi loader fully supports ZFS, so small UFS boot partition is no longer needed, and things are much simpler now.

[mpasternacki]

It doesn't work yet with GELI as far as I know, so for encrypted root /boot still needs to be on a separate partition. There was some work to support encrypted /boot, I'm not sure where it stands now, but I'd be very surprised if it supported encrypted ZFS.

[JeremyMorgan]

I really want to try this out. I was a heavy FreeBSD user for many years in the 2000s, and I drifted back into Linux. One thing I will say for FreeBSD, it's harder to get dialed in but once it is, it's very solid. I think with enough tinkering FreeBSD would run really well on a MBP, I just wonder if it would provide a lot of advantages over OSX to make it worth the time.

[noobermin]

Random question for you, how does the shell experience on FreeBSD compare to MacOS? Linux?

[lorenzfx]

I'm using FreeBSD on Lenovo X220, and while it's obviously no MacBook, everything important to me (wifi, suspend-to-ram, graphic support, long battery usage, HDMI out) just worked out of the box (apart from the initial install, which wasn't FreeBSD's but Lenovo's fault and is since being worked around in recent FreeBSD installers). I can really recommend it if you want to give FreeBSD a try on a Laptop.

[lorenzfx]

ps: make sure you get a wifi card that is supported by FreeBSD. While you can put in a supported one, the X220 won't boot because Lenovo put a Wifi card whitelist into the BIOS and you need to install a patched BIOS from a dubious source.

[95014_refugee]

"using a custom [FreeBSD] kernel seems tricky in a VMWare/VirtualBox VM"

This flipped a set-once bit, making the rest of the article essentially unreadable due to zero confidence in the writer's technical skill. Also, the lack of "late 2011" in the title makes it pretty misleading.

[jsjohnst]

I thought the exact same thing. It's trivially simple to run custom kernels. Further, with currentish versions of OSX, you don't even need VMware/VB. The built-in hypervisor works good enough without crash prone kexts like in the alternative in my experience.

Not sure if you read the rest of the article, but it didn't do much to instill technical competence after that point either.

[cgvgffyv]

Couldn't you just have said, "this guy doesn't know what he's talking about", like a normal person?

That was hard to parse.

[rhubarbquid]

and 2 sentences after describing themselves as someone "whose definition of "fun" includes spending 6 hours in the middle of the night figuring how to get dual boot working with UEFI."

So the author really enjoys debugging boot problems, but a custom kernel in a VM is just too tricky? Is there something I'm missing that makes that way harder than debugging dual boot?

[enzolovesbacon]

I'm periodically installing FreeBSD on my ThinkPad T400 to see how it's performing with Chromium. It's the only application I use extensively, and the only one that performs really bad with FreeBSD (and OpenBSD also), which prevents me from switching from Fedora.

Is there any magic I'm missing, aside from the shared memory support?

[floatboth]

It performs fine on my X240 without doing anything.

[kevans91]

FWIW- Chromium was realllly unstable until the recent 52 -> 54 update that took place on the 22nd. Since then, it seems to be a lot more stable and performs better (on my crap hardware). I would definitely give it another shot.

[eth0up]

My experience with FreeBSD is limited to a fugacious week with apparent quixotism and my noble Raspberry-Pi2, which ended inimically. All seemed rigorously dandy until presumably, Chuck Norris imposed thereafter some wicked temporal augmentation between all moments between any character typed or program otherwise compiled, offering only a typographic respite or scintillating scroll of never-ending techno-glossolalia in his wake whilst I sat there hour after hour (or character after character) awaiting something that made sense. Having no visible recourse, I capitulated and returned to Rasbpian.

With my compulsive - but hitherto compromised - aversion to running Linux within the virtual-machine of Systemd, I have ever-since intended to try again, maybe with a Pi3 and/or laptop, or even Mac. I've wangled Debian on a Macbook, but would, considering circumstances, prefer FreeBSD. I hope there is promise here. I praise all efforts.

[floatboth]

That's odd. Are you using HDMI or the serial console?

My Raspberry Pi 2 runs FreeBSD very well. Currently running OpenNTPD + Monit + Postgres + Node-RED + go-carbon + graphite-api + Grafana + Syncthing + Transmission — all of this with only 249 MB of RAM used. FreeBSD's memory management is excellent.

RPi 3 (native AArch64 mode) support is in progress https://wiki.freebsd.org/arm64/rpi3 for now it runs only on one CPU core, SMP is "actively being worked on".

[ekianjo]

> back then I grew tired of Linux desktop (which is going to be MASSIVE NEXT YEAR, at least since 2001)

The snark was really unnecessary.

[Ar-Curunir]

I agree, I've been running Arch Linux on my MBP Retina for 2+ years now almost without problems. I bet if the OP tried Linux, they'd be absolutely fine.

[bertiewhykovich]

it was good

[bootload]

plz keep posting and upvoting these kinds of stories (foss on hardware), great read.

[dataharry]

That was anticlimactic

[unexistance]

so far so good, pretty detailed too

some might care images / screenshot, not me tho :D

[wavefunction]

stunts for stunts' sake

[webaholic]

That's how a lot of great projects got started.