Guys if you've got some spare cash I recommend putting a bit towards having FreeBSD working flawlessly on a single well-defined desktop platform (e.g. thinkpad). It doesn't need to be fancy, but the little things like suspend-and-resume need to work correctly without tinkering. That way if someone wants to run FreeBSD, you give them a straightforward starting point. At the moment some FreeBSD fans reluctantly turn to linux for these reasons.
As a long time BSD user (laptop and server) who is always on the cusp of throwing in the towel, I have wanted this, chased for this and even posted on HN before.
The big issue for this is knowing that the chipsets will remain stable over time. My best guess is to piggy back on a big Fortune 500 purchasing department - that is the CTO for say Exxon wants the same damn chips in all his windows PCs for the next three years because it makes support a 1000 times easier. So he basically tells HP set aside enough chips and capacity for me and I will keep buying.
If we can piggy back on that - we can target a fixed platform.
So if there are any Fortune 500 CIOs here with a nice deal from HP, and anyone willing to pay in the range of 500 pa to keep a BSD developer in beer and roofing tiles please shout - I will do the admin if others show willing
This is a great idea! I think it would be a waste of time for FreeBSD to take the entire desktop market on -- Linux has been fighting that battle for years -- but it would be awesome if Dell/HP/Lenovo came out with a PC-BSD-based laptop with official support. (For those not familiar with FreeBSD, PC-BSD is the "Desktop" edition of FreeBSD.)
Another feature I'd really like to see the FreeBSD Foundation focus on this year is full support for Xen/KVM, with the specific goal of getting FreeBSD to be a "first-class" citizen on EC2. Interestingly, some folks from Microsoft are working on Hyper-V drivers so perhaps we'll see FreeBSD on Azure in the future.
Dell/HP/Lenovo won't do that - the most they're likely to do is half-assed support for Linux. That's why it would be neat if FreeBSD to get themselves working solidly on a single platform, because fans would have a reliable option.
On that note, what are the best laptops/netbooks out there for *BSD in terms of hardware support? I was thinking of doing what the grandparent comment was suggesting, but had trouble finding a list of (near) 100% supported machines.
When I looked at this six months ago the answer was thinkpads. But there is still oddness. I got a X1 Carbon which is a fantastic system once you get rid of the awful Windows setup it ships with but I ran out of time to mess around getting FreeBSD right and moved to ubuntu which is adequate.
