heads up THIS IS NOT A GUIDE LMAO don't try and follow along
shoutout this thing it actually has useful information and i probably should read it more as i go into this because it is that good i think
day 1 or something
yippee lenovo t14 gen1 came in the mail!! the intel one. with the vpro shit. because 1) AMT and 2) actually-good ethernet
ive already been up for like 20 hours at this point
wrote 15.1 image to usb
booted laptop on usb
goodbye windows 11 that came preinstalled from the seller
going through installer, pick wifi because ethernet is a hassle for me
oops it dont work, no firmware!!
okay fine i go use ethernet because like i need this to work
i use the pkgbase even though it says tech preview because i gather thats how 16 will be
going great
installed dev set because like i want my compiler thanx
zfs on the one drive ez
like installing this to start is no problem
making sure i put my user in video, wheel, and operator. first two are kind of normal and then operator lets you do like reboots as your normal user
time to reboot into the shiny system!
takes a sec. i have no reference though so it could just be the hardware.
logging in as root because you dont get sudo to start
i think my 5ghz wifi is like ax-only or something so like that didnt work. could be stupid but i think the card in this thing is an ax201. if that means anything.
normal wpa_supplicant dance though plus an "ASSOCIATE, DAMN IT!" via ifconfig
ok now i go and install the plasma6-plasma, konsole, sddm. enabled sddm. but not actually because first i need gpu drivers which is drm-kmod for my intel gpu. i915kms needs to be on that kld_list.
cool fine installed that. now i do plasma junk aaaand crap yeah i need to reboot
we up again
straight into the sddm! nice!
punch in my password and beautiful [hacker voice] i'm in
of course the first thing i do is take a screenshot of the about, because like, wayland on not-linux???? crazy.
anyways.
installed firefox-esr because it's stable™ and i needed to log into discord to flex
oh apparently it doesn't do cjk fonts out the box i need to figure that out
well time to drag out the vibe machine. wasn't expecting it to go so fast about that, figured i would last longer. i mean im still going to do most of this but i'd rather not touch this codebase manually because yes it was all "clod pls fix"
so, claude code, give it a shot. "unsupported operating system"
expected, but a little sad.
i say screw it lets jump to pi. no worky because it doesnt know how to install node. okay. bun time i guess.
apparently bun has freebsd support. at least they say they do. it did not work for me, but it did dump shit into ~/.bun anyways. at least afaik its a clean delete of that
ok screw it im going to figure out this linuxulator
its literally just
sysrc linux_enable="YES"pkg install linux_base-rl9service linux start
and then it just works. kinda sorta. i also encountered this claude-code package that uses said linuxulator.
okay logging in fine and all... going! "hi :3" "yo whats up" "!uname -a" "oh." app freezes
so that's not happening. onto the next slop generator! because i want my pretty theme! codex, you're up!
i have a yubikey because you need that in order to have access to the daybreak/trusted access program. ship a picture of yourself off to san francisco (i had to try writing francisco multiple times and im not sure what was wrong) and you get access to the version of the Evil AI that can hack anything. not literally, you can't go "give me nuclear codes" it doesnt work that way (i did not try @fbi i swear)
oh right i need to write this post. wow meta. im here now this is live posting and not from recall.
ok well a little more recall because turns out the security key doesnt read in to firefox because i lack the services™ needed.
aka u2f-devd and adding my user to u2f group. and restarting. i need to do that now.
oh apparently it went to sleep and i had to push the power button. good to know sleep works! lol
ok restart clicked in the kde menu
we back on lets try again. codex, sign in, oh! "Please enter the PIN for your device." that sounds right. touched the thingy and it works!!!! woo
oh cool the chatbox has like twinkling stars. is that because it's astra?
/model gpt-6-sol
oh i just straight up insulted the astra didnt i whoops
the answer is yes!
anyways, im going to go ask it to beat this codebase into submission
ok im back and it works but im doubting the practicality of freebsd as a workstation now
like its a great operating system and i would love to use it but i got bad vibes bro. what does that even mean.
probably the gpu bugging out (wayland issue? idk but still)
day 2!
nevermind im sticking to my guns
made xplasma work so now the machine is sexy. nice crunchy letters in tahoma :D
and yeah as you can see i got myself logged in to here to write on the laptop.
using firefox esr (did i mention that) and just decided screw it lets use this, so now there's bitwarden
that's basically all i need to make a browser usable. i can try and delude myself into thinking that i need my bookmarks/history/whatever to sync, but i really don't.
the current goal right now is to try and get wayland to not have weird artifacts. the x session is butter aside from the occasional freeze-up where i have to go and restart my entire session. though, i did have a lot of tabs open, some youtube, and there may have just been competition for vram. not sure.
it also has better input device handling in general since it's no longer going down the whole x11 pipe. used to be anti-wayland, but it has been generally better after software actually moved to it.
uhhhhhh anyways! enough lifeblogging! (this will happen again)
i brought up the visual issue plus a bunch of log spam from hdac (intel audio driver) with the chatgpt and it found this bug
https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=281311
and this forum post
fixed and outdated, as usual with its results, but it still gives me a direction to look.
adding hw.i915kms.disable_power_well="0" (forces power shenanigans to stay turned on) to /boot/loader.conf, and will see how that goes over after a reboot...
wow i am putting this off a lot. the good news is there'll be a "Turn off computer" menu for XPlasma now!
oh what the shit i finally rebooted and the computer is noticeably faster?
ok so i went to install networkmgr so i can have my gui network stuff and oh this is gross. it forces sudo in and
/home/sock>cat /usr/local/etc/sudoers.d/networkmgr
%wheel ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /usr/local/bin/networkmgrlike can we not do that thaaanks
oh and its ugly btw
ah! i caught a picture of the weird graphical thing! (the line in the loader.conf did not work)
going to try software gfx for firefox (gfx.webrender.software)
yeahhhh that seems to have fixed it. hmm okay time to figure out why that's happening.
ok so these freezes are bad. i have a vague suspicion that it's linux's fault? installed node24, npm-node24, and pi with that.
gonna sync over my shit real quick so syncthing, syncthingtray
hmmmmmm i have not had any issues since closing discord after my system froze immediately after trying to navigate to it. L pisscord get off my computer
oh yeah this looks like it works!! just need to
$ echo '{"SKIP_HOST_UPDATE":true}' > ~/.config/discord/settings.json
$ chmod -w ~/.config/discord/settings.jsonbecause discord insists on an unneeded update to the system package that will be perpetually outdated because discord won't stop pushing updates. it is not my "lucky day"!!!
oh i also installed konversation to talk with the e-goober through there
and steam. because gaymes. this was funny:
/home/sock>/usr/local/steam-utils/bin/lsu-bootstrap
Please, consider setting up a dedicated OS user account for Steam.
Otherwise each and every Steam game will have unrestricted access to your files.
If you really couldn't care less, you can supress this message with
--allow-stealing-my-passwords,-browser-history-and-ssh-keys flag.(i could not get steam to work)
day 3 :D
i wake up => i open computer => repeat
this is going smooth, aside from networking being odd!
apparently, at least with how i have this set up using wpa_supplicant, going between access points and all is a rough time. so moving around the house can break my connection until i beat it with an ifconfig shaped wrench
this seems fixable. google save me pls
okay so that part seems inescapable, but! iwx is promising!
also the power_well thing seems to just be wrong so screw it im commenting out that line
so yeah devmatch_blocklist+="if_iwlwifi", wlans_iwx0="wlan0", and kld_list+="if_iwx"
...NOPE!
honestly i dont know wtf im doing
ok i did notice some funkiness with suspend so i went and did an rc.d thing with service netif {start,stop} wlan0 which hopefully makes that sane-er
despite the horrors i think i'm going to swap proxmox for freebsd! bhyve and jails sound like a fantastic deal.
day <???>
proxmox is kill and now i have three vms and an invasive species
if you want the thinky computer this is the way to do it:
BUN_JSC_useConcurrentGC=0 claude rcfollow up on the wifi: went back to iwlwifi because i got confused with iwx. its like yeah cool native whatever but idk i like it when the card can be used for what it can do.
also my router was misconfigured and thats like all that was wrong with my wifi. it was wpa3-only which is like not going to work.
in conclusion: freebsd is lovely, i will be sticking with it, and would recommend it if you can bear to read a little, and don't plan to play video games on it!
will probably condense bits of this into Real Articles eventually™