FreeBSD Foundation Laptop Support target hardware and desktop environments

From: Ed Maste <emaste_at_freebsdfoundation.org>
Date: Tue, 11 Feb 2025 14:44:54 UTC
The FreeBSD Foundation's Laptop Support and Usability Improvements
project is choosing a small list of laptops and of desktop
environments that will be used as targets for our development effort.
This means that contracted developers will be using the laptops and
environments on these lists during their work, and that our testing
will be done against these.

Inclusion in the target laptop list implies that at least two of these
laptop models are in use by developers working on this project for the
FreeBSD Foundation, and that we have vendor contacts for development
support.

We are starting the list with the 13" AMD Framework laptop:
https://github.com/FreeBSDFoundation/proj-laptop/blob/main/supported/laptops.md

We've chosen this laptop as the initial target for a few reasons. The
Foundation has a good relationship with folks at Framework, and they
have been contributing bug fixes and improvements to improve FreeBSD.
See https://github.com/FrameworkComputer/freebsd-on-framework for
details.

The Foundation also has a good working relationship with AMD, in case
we need support during development. Additional laptop models will be
added over time, taking into account vendor support and community
feedback.

For the desktop environment we'll start with KDE, as it is popular and
has an active development team.
https://github.com/FreeBSDFoundation/proj-laptop/blob/main/supported/desktop-environment.md.

We're targeting Wayland as it's important for long-term viability,
although in the short term KDE on X11 is the usable approach.

Please let me know if you have any feedback on these two topics.