A Foray into FreeBSD
Sun, 30 Nov 2025 07:22:15 +0100
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Over the past few days I've been playing with FreeBSD on a Thinkpad
X270. FreeBSD is  rock solid. It doesn't have  the fragmentation of
Linux, and while it's possible  to install Wayland it hasn't caught
the systemd cancer.

I'm  glad  to  say  I  got  it up  and  running  without  too  much
difficulty, except for the laptop's multimedia keys.

The first hurdle was my brain. F1-F10 weren't working with midnight
commander until I realised that the multimedia/function keys worked
in the opposite way to my X220. Duh. I fixed this in the bios.

I then  spent a  while learning the  differences between  Linux and
FreeBSD. While  they are both in  the Unix family, Linux  is a unix
clone, while FreeBSD has royal  unix blood. That said the influence
of Linux on FreeBSD can be largely felt, and I suppose the opposite
is true too.  I believe the network stack in  Linux and Windows was
borrowed from BSD for example.

So I  eventually had  FreeBSD running  with xorg,  dwm, and  I even
compiled my  favorite Gopher browser  Chawan. There was  however an
annoying problem: the multimedia keys.  FreeBSD has a module called
acpi_ibm which  dates back to the  Thinkad 61 series, so  it wasn't
capable of delivering events for  most of the X270 multimedia keys.
The Linux module thinkpad_acpi is much more recent, and covers just
about every multimedia  key you could imagine. I got  the audio and
brightness keys  working with acpi, but  F4 mic mute and  F7 to F12
stayed dead.

In the end I made an  executive decision:  I'll install Artix Linux
(dinit) on my X270,  and then proceed to install FreeBSD on my X220
Basically I don't  think FreeBSD will be my daily  driver yet.  I'm
hearing some good things about the upcoming version,  so we'll see.

I'm writing  this article  on my  X270 so I've almost  finished the
swap, once finshed  I'll go back to FreeBSD on  the X220. Maybe one
day I'll be able to replace  Artix Linux with FreeBSD,  but I don't
feel it yet. It comes down to practicality.

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