Re: FreeBSD Foundation Laptop Support target hardware and desktop environments

Hi,  after 45 years  in  the UNIX  /  HW    support  business the  trend 
I see that  the lifecycle

of a specific computer model gets shorter an shorter.  We are now  down 
to  lifecycles of less than a Year

due  to  INTEL / AMD   competition.   In  fact  FRAMEWORK releases  new 
models  in 2 weeks.

So the  development of  support  for  one  single model computer will 
not  be finished during  its  salescycle on  the  market.

Its the  Laptop Peripherals :   WIFI,  touchpads, cameras , microphones 
, batteries , sleepstates,

                                                        biometric 
devices used for identification,   that needs drivers.

   Using  an available  Platform for doing  this is of course necessary 
, but remember  that  9 months after you  started development

  the  unit  will  disappear from  the  shelves.


       Lars Tunkrans.

        Fujitsu SPARC M12  product  specialist.


On 2/11/25 15:44, Ed Maste wrote:
> 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.
>