As we have been covering over the past year, major investments have been made to better the outlook for running FreeBSD on laptop hardware. From WiFi driver improvements to enhancing suspend/resume, power management, graphics drivers, and other features, it's been a big undertaking to make FreeBSD work better on laptops. The FreeBSD Foundation calls 2025 as having brought "transformative changes" for the FreeBSD laptop experience.

The FreeBSD Foundation put out a blog post to highlight the transformative improvements made this year for FreeBSD on laptops. This year brought [1]a lot of FreeBSD hardware improvements with [2]WiFi and GPU drivers being a big focus , [3]partnering with vendors like Framework Computer for better hardware testing, and more. This initiative took off last year with [4]financial support from AMD, Dell, and Framework among other FreeBSD stakeholders.

FreeBSD has seen more than $750k in financial commitments for helping their laptop story play out. The FreeBSD Foundation highlights WiFi 4 and WiFi 5 achievements this year, upgrading to the Linux 6.9 open-source kernel graphics driver code, better audio support, FreeBSD 15.0 installer improvements, continued sleep state work, and other engineering achievements in 2025.

For 2026 they plan to continue working on power management / sleep states, WiFi 6 support, porting over newer open-source Linux graphics driver code, USB4 and Thunderbolt enablement, HDMI improvements, UVC web camera support, and better Bluetooth.

Those wishing to learn more about these ongoing FreeBSD laptop improvements can find out more information via the [5]FreeBSD Foundation Blog .



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeBSD-Laptops-July-2025

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeBSD-Laptops-April-Report

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeBSD-Q1-2025

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeBSD-Better-Laptops

[5] https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/freebsd-closes-the-laptop-gap-year-one-project-update/