Installing FreeBSD 15 on my desktop

This week I've been working on a script and slides for a YouTube video about Inko. After a week of doing that I needed a bit of a break. Last week I wrote a bit about FreeBSD, and specifically about wanting to try it out on my yet to be delivered Framework 16 laptop. This got me thinking: why don't I try FreeBSD on my desktop first, then see if it's still worth trying out on a laptop? After all, my desktop has a spare SSD that I don't use much, so I could move its data elsewhere temporarily and install FreeBSD on this SSD, leaving my main system untouched.

What follows is a sort of transcript (with some editing) of doing just that, a process that took a total of some three hours. Because I wrote most of this while actually performing the work, it may feel a little chaotic at times, but I hope it gives a bit of insight into the process.

The hardware

The desktop in question uses an AMD Ryzen 5600X CPU, with an Intel Arc A380 GPU. The SSD FreeBSD will be installed on is a Samsung Evo 860 with 256 GiB of storage. The WiFi card is an Intel AX200, which is supported by FreeBSD.

Preparing a USB drive

I downloaded the latest FreeBSD 15 snapshot ISO format, then wrote it to a random USB drive using dd. I initially tried to use GNOME Disks to restore the ISO to the USB drive, but for some reasons this results in it not being a bootable drive. I vaguely recall having had similar issues in the past with Linux distributions, so this isn't FreeBSD specific.

Installing FreeBSD

Booting up worked and the installer detects the AX200, but then seemingly got stuck for a good minute or so, after which it moved on. I'm not sure why, but it didn't seem to matter much as the rest of the installer worked fine.

Using the installer I went with a ZFS on root setup and enabled disk encryption. In particular I enabled the "local_unbound" service to cache DNS lookups. Knowing this won't work with my router (which runs a local DNS server/cache) because it doesn't support DNSSEC, I was a bit surprised to see the installer not consider this at all, i.e. there's no "use local_unbound but without DNSSEC" option.

First boot

After installing FreeBSD I rebooted into the target SSD. The first thing I noticed was a bunch of error messages from the ntp daemon (which I enabled) saying it couldn't resolve a bunch of DNS names. This is because my router doesn't support DNSSEC. I fixed this by creating /var/unbound/conf.d/disable-dnssec.conf with the following contents:

server:
    module-config: "iterator"

Because FreeBSD ships vi by default (not vim, actual vi) this was a little annoying as vi works a little different compared to vim. After saving the file I restarted the local_unbound service, and all was well again.

FreeBSD offers both doas and sudo. I figured I'd give doas a try, mainly because I wanted to give it a try. This requires you to copy /usr/local/etc/doas.conf.sample to /usr/local/etc/doas.conf and edit it accordingly. I just used it with the permit :wheel rule, which is enough for most people. I then found out that doas doesn't support password persistence outside of OpenBSD, meaning you have to enter your password again for every doas command. While there appears to be a fork available called opendoas that does support it, it in turn doesn't appear to be actively maintained (judging by the GitHub repository). I ended up going back to sudo instead.

I then installed Fish and made it the default shell as follows:

chsh -s /usr/local/bin/fish yorickpeterse

I then logged out and back in again, and Fish works as expected.

FreeBSD shows a message-of-the-day when you log in, which I don't want as it's rather long. To disable this, I emptied /etc/motd.template then ran sudo service motd restart to re-generate the message, then disabled the service using sudo sysrc update_motd="NO". We also need to remove /var/run/motd. I think in hindsight editing the template wasn't required as I could've just disabled the service then remove /var/run/motd file. Ah well, lessons learned I guess.

Fighting the GPU

Now it's time to make sure the GPU is set up. The reason my desktop is using an Intel GPU is because it used to use an aging AMD RX 550, but after dealing with AMD driver bugs for a few months I got fed up and decided to replace it. I picked the A380 because it was the cheapest GPU with support for hardware decoding that I could find.

To do this we have to install drm-kmod, which pulls in about 130 driver related packages (yikes). Next we need to make sure the driver is loaded upon startup by adding it to /etc/rc.conf like so:

sudo sysrc kld_list+=i915kms

This doesn't affect the existing system though, so we also have to load the module using kldload (modprobe but for FreeBSD), so I ran this:

sudo kldload i915kms

This crashed my system. Brilliant. Worse, because I added the module to /etc/rc.conf it keeps crashing when you reboot. The error shown when FreeBSD tries to load the module says to run pkg install gpu-firmware-kmod to install the necessary firmware, but because the module is now loaded at startup we first have to figure out how to get back into a working system. I found a forum post that offered some suggestions, but they didn't work.

I ended up booting into the installation USB and mounted the host drive following the instructions from this article, using /dev/ada0p3 as the drive name. I then opened /mnt/etc/rc.conf and commented out the line that loads the i915kms driver, then rebooted. We have a working system again!

Now to do what that error said: install the missing package. Well, except it wasn't missing because when I installed it pkg said it was already installed. This is fine, I guess?

A bit of searching reveals this issue, first reported in August 2024. There's a pull request that should fix this, but I'm not going to compile a custom kernel just to get a working system. It also seems the PR has just been sitting around for a while, which doesn't bode well.

Most people would give up at this point, but I have one final trick up my sleeve: when I replaced my AMD RX 550 I didn't throw it away in case I ever needed it again, so I can temporarily use it instead of the A380. It shouldn't be necessary, but at this point I want to try and get a working desktop environment just so I can say I at least tried.

So after trying a few different screwdrivers to unscrew the GPU bracket screws and some cursing later, the A380 is replaced with the RX 550. I booted up the system and edited /etc/rc.conf to load the amdgpu driver instead of i915kms. I then decided to reboot the system for good measure, though this isn't strictly necessary. I am now presented with a system that works, except the console font is tiny for some reason. This article suggests using vidcontrol -f terminus-b32 which did the trick.

Installing a desktop environment

Where were we again? Oh yes, I was going to install a desktop environment. I'd use GNOME, but GNOME recently announced they were going to depend on systemd more and more, and the GNOME version provided by FreeBSD is a bit old at this point (GNOME 47). KDE seems better supported, so I'll give that a try. The FreeBSD installer is supposed to come with an option to install KDE for you, though the ISO I used for FreeBSD 15 didn't have that option. Either way, from what I found it uses X11 and I want to use Wayland, so I wouldn't have used it anyway. This article lists some steps to enable KDE. The socket options it suggests to apply seem a bit suspicious, as in, they look like the kind of setting people just copy-paste without thinking, so we'll skip those unless they turn out to be required after all.

Let's install the necessary packages:

sudo pkg install seatd kde sddm

This ends up installing close to 700 packages. This took a while since pkg downloads packages one at a time. Support for concurrent downloads was first requested back in 2017, but isn't implemented as of November 2025. This wouldn't be a huge problem if it wasn't for the FreeBSD mirrors only supporting speeds in the range of 5-20 Mib/sec, while my internet connection's maximum speed is 100 MiB/sec.

Upon the installation finishing, I realized I hadn't explicitly stated or switched to the latest branch for the FreeBSD ports, so I edited /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/FreeBSD.conf to be as follows:

FreeBSD-base {
  url: "pkg+https://pkg.freebsd.org/${ABI}/base_latest",
  enabled: yes
}

I then ran sudo pkg update followed by sudo pkg upgrade and there was nothing to update, so I guess we're all good.

Configuring the desktop environment

Now to enable the service we need for KDE. The linked article doesn't mention enabling SDDM but it seems to me like that would be required for it to start, so we'll give that a go as well:

sudo sysrc dbus_enable="YES"
sudo sysrc seatd_enable="YES"
sudo sysrc sddm_enable="YES"
sudo service dbus start
sudo service seatd start
sudo service sddm start

This results in SDDM starting and showing the login screen. The default session is set to Wayland already, and logging in works fine. Neat!

Moving the mouse around I'm noticing some weird artifacts on the desktop wallpaper:

Looking at the display settings I noticed scaling is set to 170%, while for this display it should be 200%. Changing this removed the artifacts, so I guess this is some sort of KDE bug?

Another thing I'm noticing when moving the cursor around or when window animations play is that it isn't as smooth as GNOME, as if the display's refresh rate is lower than it should be, though it's in fact set to 60hz. I vaguely recall having this issue on GNOME when I was still using the AMD RX 550, so maybe it's a GPU issue. Or maybe it's those socket options I decided not to enable initially, so let's give that a try, just in case, though it's a bit of a stretch. First I ran the following to apply the settings to the existing system:

sudo sysctl net.local.stream.recvspace=65536
sudo sysctl net.local.stream.sendspace=65536

The resulting output suggests this is already the default value, so I guess that's not the reason, and the settings might not be necessary at all.

Now let's get rid of some software I don't need such as Konqueror and Kate:

sudo pkg remove konqueror kate

Initially this gave me a bit of a heart attack as it tells you that the kde package will also be removed, but it turns out to be fine and not actually uninstall your entire KDE setup.

Audio

Audio works fine with no configuration necessary. Neat.

Network

While the network itself works, there's no GUI application of any kind to manage it, as NetworkManager isn't available on FreeBSD. I found networkmanager-shim which is required by kf6-networkmanager-qt. I installed the latter in case I'd also need that, logged out and back in again and...nothing. Searching a bit more lead to me finding networkmgr which is available as a FreeBSD package, so let's try that:

sudo pkg install networkmgr

Logging out and in again and there's now a network icon in the Plasma panel. Unfortunately, it seems to be an X11/Xwayland application and looks horrible:

It also doesn't appear to show anything related to WiFi. ifconfig doesn't list anything WiFi related either. I guess I have to set up wpa_supplicant or something along those lines, but I'd prefer it if my desktop environment could manage it for me.

Bluetooth doesn't appear to work either, probably for the same reasons because it's handled by the same AX200 chip. I found that wifimgr can be used to manage WiFi, but starting it results in it complaining I have to first configure a device in /etc/rc.conf. Ugh.

It's at this point that not only was it getting late, I also had enough. I can see the appeal of FreeBSD, and it's impressive how much up to date software there is in the ports repository, but there's a reason I moved away from Arch Linux several years ago: I just don't have the patience nor interest to endlessly fiddle with configuration files just to get a basic system up and running.

Conclusion

If you have enough patience and time I think you can set up a decent KDE desktop environment using FreeBSD, assuming your hardware is properly supported. That is also the biggest challenge though: FreeBSD developers have limited resources and port the Linux GPU drivers to FreeBSD, instead of using bespoke drivers. This means it will always lag behind Linux, ranging from maybe only a few weeks to months or even years.

Based on the challenges I ran into while trying to install FreeBSD on my desktop, I'm not going to try and install it on a laptop any time soon. I just don't have the patience or interest. If I did, I'd go back to using Arch Linux.

There are also some choices that FreeBSD makes that I don't agree with or don't want to deal with, such as the archaic way of writing service files or setting up log rotation, or the fact that the output of the -h option for the FreeBSD userspace utilities (e.g. ls) is as good as useless.

On the bright side, if the FreeBSD foundation continues focusing on improving the laptop and desktop experience of FreeBSD then all this could be different 1-2 years from now, so maybe I'll try again in the future.