BSD Cafe Billboard

Seven years of running FreeBSD on ThinkPads alongside Linux — lessons I'd give my younger self<https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/1tedyva/seven_years_of_running_freebsd_on_thinkpads/>＂I daily-drive Linux at work and FreeBSD on my personal ThinkPads (T480 & P52 currently). Both laptops and both operating systems, every day. I'm the kind of person who reads freebsd-update output and Phoronix benchmarks in the same hour.＂Recently saw the "is FreeBSD really that goated" thread and it brought back the timeline of my own journey. Started with a rough —call it version 0.9 — build that barely had X11 working, evolved through five iterations, landed on something I'd call "production-stable personal desktop" around version 2.0 on FreeBSD 15.0 with a heavily customized MATE, ZFS boot environments, BastilleBSD jails for microservices, WireGuard tunnels and PF.＂If I could send a packet back in time to my earlier self, here's what I'd put in the payload: …＂The image here is for <https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/1tedyva/comment/om1t5mg/> because we can all agree that em dashes make scintillating conversation.#goated #X11 #Wales #FreeBSD #BSD #Linux #ZFS #OpenZFS #Beastie #daemon #MyLittlePony #unicorn #dolphin #rainbow #IBM #Lenovo #BastilleBSD #WireGuard #AI #purple

One of my biggest "frustrations" when migrating from OpenBSD to FreeBSD as my daily driver, was the loss of of working media keys on my Das Keyboard - especially the very convenient volume jog wheel. After some poking around i confirmed that the usbhid driver was working - and also default enabled in FreeBSD15 kernel. Xev tool printed the correct keycode events keycode 122 = XF86AudioLowerVolume keycode 123 = XF86AudioRaiseVolume keycode 172 = XF86AudioPlay The problem narrowed down to how to map these event to something useful I found a working solution in this discussion thread, by using the x11/sxhkd daemon to pass the events to mixer(8) https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/howto-enabling-multimedia-keys-gamepads-joysticks-for-desktop-usbhid.84464/ I had to tweak the sxhkd config a bit to work properly with mixer ~/.config/sxhkd/sxhkdrc XF86Audio{Play,LowerVolume,RaiseVolume} mixer {vol.mute="toggle",vol="-3%", vol="+3%"} Then I invoke the sxhkd daemon from my ~/.xsession file sxhkd & exec /usr/local/bin/fvwm3 Viola! #FreeBSD #Solved #X11 #FVWM3 #Xorg #AskFedi