Comment by tombert

I haven't tried FreeBSD on a laptop in about a decade (~2016-2017), and I had similar issues. I couldn't get WiFi working even though I thought it should be supported, I couldn't get the laptop brightness controls working, the sound would just randomly cut out, and after a certain point I have to ask myself how much time I am realistically willing to spend on getting this working. I was trying to run it because of Jails and ZFS, but by 2016 Linux containers were generally "ok enough" nowadays, and ZFS On Linux seemed to work ok on Arch after a bit of finagling, and Linux stuff seemed work more consistently.

FreeBSD is pretty neat, don't get me wrong, I have played with it on servers and I ran an OPNsense router for years, so this isn't a dig on the OS as a whole, just that I don't think it's a good fit for laptops, at least the ones I've tried.