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Need help with BSD on a modern laptop

[lounge] Anonymous @ 2026-06-29 16:45:48 [#4062] [4 replies]

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The past month I've been reading up on the BSD's, and since my daily driver laptop was running out of space I decided to do a clean install of FreeBSD onto it.

I prefer the BSD's more intentional design over Linux chaos and I enjoyed playing with it and tweaking it.

My only problem was that my laptop was overheating like crazy. The chassis got so hot that I could barely type on the built in keyboard.

Since this is my daily laptop I couldn't afford tweaking my config any longer but I tried all the stuff in the FreeBSD forums and what I could find in Reddit threads, without any luck. So for now I went back to Devuan with Sysvinit.

Has anyone managed to get FreeBSD running on modern laptop hardware without these kinds of thermal issues? Is there a solution? I would really like to play with BSD more on real hardware and not just in VMs.

Thanks for the guidance in advance.
Anonymous · 2026-07-04 20:15 [#4471] [report]
I don't know how do you expect anyone to help you when you gave no relevant information on your hardware except that your laptop is overheating.
Anonymous · 2026-07-04 20:24 [#4474] [report]
It could be that zfs is using a lot of resources because it's intensive so you could try installing freebsd with ufs and setting „powerd_enable="YES"‟ in rc.conf.

Though, it's merely a guess without the model name and the specs of your laptop.
Anonymous · 2026-07-06 00:29 [#4793] [report]
I also use Devuan and happen to be considering FreeBSD.
nayarei · 2026-07-27 10:13 [#12077] [report]
Have you tried enabling powerd and then rebooting?
It's really hard to try to help if you don't tell us what you already tried to fix the issue.

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