I installed FreeBSD 13.2 with KDE today on my Dell Inspiron 5482. I have heard good things about FreeBSD primarily as an operating system for servers, but the project claims that it works well for desktop users as well. So, I thought I will give it a try. There were some things I had to figure out during the installation which I will note in this post for future reference. And I had to uninstall FreeBSD within hours of installation, due to issues I faced so it didn’t went well. I am going to list them here and how I figured out some things.
Regdomain selection during install
During install, the installer asked me to select a regdomain. I figured out that the default option – FCC/United States of America worked for me.
Xorg didn’t startup
Post installation, I installed xorg in FreeBSD and added a file /usr/local/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf as per the example 1 in the official handbook. But startx command wasn’t working, so I ran the command:
Xorg -configure
and then
cp /root/xorg.conf.new /usr/local/etc/X11/xorg.conf followed by editing the file /usr/local/etc/X11/xorg.conf by changing Driver value to "i1915kms" under the Section “Device”.
Managing brightness during startup
When using FreeBSD, my keyboard’s brightness buttons were not working. To decrease brightness, I used the preinstalled backlight utility.
backlight -f /dev/backlight/backlight0 10
Credits to this answer.
I couldn’t manage the brightness to be automatically low at startup. It was at 100% after very time I booted.
Crashed frequently
The system crashed frequently and wasn’t stabled at all. It automatically reboots after some time. I tried to debug and fix, but couldn’t. So, for now I have uninstalled FreeBSD.
If you know any of the fixes, please let me know.