122: The BSD Black Box

This week on the show, we will be interviewing Alex Rosenberg, to

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OpenBSD user Isaac (.ike) Levy details his switch from a Mac to an OpenBSD laptop
He covers a bit about selecting hardware and dealing with wifi
Talks about binary packages and system upgrades
Talks about power management, suspend/resume, battery life
Show screenshots of some of his favourite window managers
Browsers and email clients are also discussed
Things he found missing in OpenBSD:
- A journaling file system, every unclean shutdown means a full fsck(1)
- UTF-8/unicode was not everywhere
- Syncing pictures and contacts to his phone
- Drawing tools ***

The DragonFlyBSD DRM stack continues to rapidly advance, now bringing in support from Linux 4.0!
Some of the notable features:
Basic Skylake support
- Panel Self-Refresh (PSR) now supported on Valleyview and Cherryview
- Preparations for atomic display updates
- Performance improvements on various GPU families, including Cherryview, Broadwell and Haswell
- GPU frequencies are now kept at a minimum of 450MHz when possible on Haswell and Broadwell, ensuring a minimum experience level for various types of workloads
- Improved reset support for gen3/4 GPUs, which should fix some OpenGL crashes on Core 2 and pre-2012 Atom machine
- Better sound/graphics driver synchronization for audio over hdmi support
- As usual, small bugfixes and stability improvements here and there ***

Larry over at Foss Force brings us his wish list for BSD support in 2016.
Since he has converted most of his daily desktop usage to PC-BSD, he is specifically wanting support for some desktop applications. Namely Google hangouts and Spotify.
This is something which has come up periodically among the PC-BSD community. At the moment most users are dual-booting or using alternatives, like WebRTC. However the Google Hangouts plugin is available for Linux, and perhaps this will encourage some developers to see if we can get it running with the newer Linux stack on -CURRENT.
Spotify also has a native Linux version, which may need testing on FreeBSD - CURRENT. It may be closer now, and should be updated on the Wanted Ports Page
https://wiki.freebsd.org/WantedPorts ***