I stick with a single 43" 4K@60 but it was a bit of a challenge to get on the happy path:
https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/intermittent-scanline-fli...
All systems can have issues. But the more widely used systems are at an advantage.
Although the 2x4k monitors are daisy chained. I was surprised when it worked first time.
My wife and I have identical HP laptops. Her's runs Arch (as you do), with KDE and mine runs Kubuntu 25.10 at the mo. Both use NetworkManager.
I look after both.
Randomly after wake up from suspend, wifi may or may not still be working. When I say random, I mean after a kernel update or the wind changes direction. I think wifies lappy is OK now because I seem to get a lot less "support" calls for the last few weeks.
To be fair, there are a lot of moving parts from a lot of bits of Linux involved in a modern distro these days.
When I say hard to decide what solved looks like: if Samba or SSSD crap out, is that wifi's fault or the kernel/driver? This is exactly what Windows has had to solve over the years and I do note things like credential managers and mounts that manage to survive disconnects being bolted on to Linux.
All that scrappy stuff needs to be passed on to the BSDs too. Getting a laptop with file systems that come and go, with a dickey clock tick and networking that comes and goes and VPNs and all the rest.
Getting all of that to work is quite a job.
The reason all this is hard is likely a remnant of what Microsoft did in the 1990s to the point where Non Windows OSes are given the shaft
Nvidia, Broadcom, Wifi generally, whatever
I think they assume people know what they're doing but a little x session never hurt anyone?
Meanwhile in the *BSD, you have the devices or some other OS concepts/subsystems, then a control layer with the associated management tools. Any other tool is either an alternate version, or a UI paint job.
Fast still means beyond 802.11g? (11n support is incomplete, last time I checked)
Because there is no corporate sponsor that needs good Wi-Fi drivers on FreeBSD, I doubt it will ever be better. I guess Sony, but it's all custom for them. I doubt there is anything to contribute back, even if Sony was open to that idea.
The killer features for me:
- The pf firewall. Rules you actually understand!
- Jails! When you cannot have Zones this will do.
- Native ZFS. Stable, mature, safe and with all the features you can dream of.
- Linuxulator. Binary compatibility with Linux if need be. Can be put in jail as well.
- pkg/ports. I really like it but I might have been indoctrinated.
- Networking stack. Good. Stable. Makes sense to me.
For a nice graphical UI Linux is more smooth but if you are willing to tinker it can work. As Linux gets all the attention you will see stuff such as Chromium lag behind.
I can understand that can scare people off. But FreeBSD feels like a comfortable old glove for me. I will suffer the minor holes. My beard has grayed and my hair line is non-existant.
If waiting for a laptop I would perhaps wait for FreeBSD 15 for much needed improvements in WIFI. If you want fast WIFI today you need weird hacks routing through a Linux VM[1]. It works rather well but it is honestly a bit clunky.
[1] https://github.com/pgj/freebsd-wifibox