Hi, after 45 years in the UNIX / HW support business the trend I see that the lifecycle
of a specific computer model gets shorter an shorter. We are now down to lifecycles of less than a Year
due to INTEL / AMD competition. In fact FRAMEWORK releases new models in 2 weeks.
So the development of support for one single model computer will not be finished during its salescycle on the market.
Its the Laptop Peripherals : WIFI, touchpads, cameras , microphones , batteries , sleepstates,
biometric devices used for identification, that needs drivers.
Using an available Platform for doing this is of course necessary , but remember that 9 months after you started development
the unit will disappear from the shelves. Lars Tunkrans. Fujitsu SPARC M12 product specialist. On 2/11/25 15:44, Ed Maste wrote:
The FreeBSD Foundation's Laptop Support and Usability Improvements project is choosing a small list of laptops and of desktop environments that will be used as targets for our development effort. This means that contracted developers will be using the laptops and environments on these lists during their work, and that our testing will be done against these. Inclusion in the target laptop list implies that at least two of these laptop models are in use by developers working on this project for the FreeBSD Foundation, and that we have vendor contacts for development support. We are starting the list with the 13" AMD Framework laptop: https://github.com/FreeBSDFoundation/proj-laptop/blob/main/supported/laptops.md We've chosen this laptop as the initial target for a few reasons. The Foundation has a good relationship with folks at Framework, and they have been contributing bug fixes and improvements to improve FreeBSD. See https://github.com/FrameworkComputer/freebsd-on-framework for details. The Foundation also has a good working relationship with AMD, in case we need support during development. Additional laptop models will be added over time, taking into account vendor support and community feedback. For the desktop environment we'll start with KDE, as it is popular and has an active development team. https://github.com/FreeBSDFoundation/proj-laptop/blob/main/supported/desktop-environment.md. We're targeting Wayland as it's important for long-term viability, although in the short term KDE on X11 is the usable approach. Please let me know if you have any feedback on these two topics.
