My requirements are: suspend/resume, being able to drive a 5K monitor over USB-C, wifi.

I found https://wiki.freebsd.org/Laptops but I don't know how up-to-date it is.

Think it's been 15+ years since I first tried and hardware only got more complicated and closed than back then

I’ve bought a few of this vintage (7490’s specifically) and they are plentiful, cheap, and perfectly useable. I put Ubuntu on them, works great.

I would love to see a FreeBSD Workstation edition akin to like Fedora or Ubuntu where things just work (mostly).

Wayland took too long. We’re still stuck on Gtk. KDE Plasma team is making moves. I just want a nice, BSD, desktop experience without all the enshitification of copilot or Apple knowing what’s best for me.

I have decided to get back to FreeBSD, I used it as desktop 2002-2009 or so.

Downloaded 15.0, start install, wifi driver works perfectly, out of the box. Promising start, never seen before with FreeBSD.

Installed. Next, lets go to setup, graphics and Wayland. And here we started again, same story, hundred magic params to add, nvidia drivers doesn't work properly, install older version, is incompatible with Wayland etc. Need to go back to Xorg, another set of problems.

Ok, if I spent another 8 hours and asked for help in forums as it was 20+ years ago, I could have probably made it work. Until the next issue showed up.

So I decide to drop it, download CachyOS. Start installer. It detects K1000M, installs old version of Nvidia drivers, KDE, sorts out all compatibility issues, everything just flies, flawlessly. As never before, not even Ubuntu or Fedora.

CachyOS guys, thank you, you made an incredible work on getting it all to this state. Absolutely great.

Now don't get me wrong, I love FreeBSD, used it as my main driver for years in early 2000s, started my career with it and it has sweet spot in my heart, forever. It's just that laptop support is not there, still terrible, as it was 20 years ago. PS last laptop I used it successfully on, was Sony Vaio VGN-FS550 from 2005!