| Program Name | Laptop Support and Usability Improvements |
|---|---|
| Funding Body | FreeBSD Foundation, and Quantum Leap Research |
| Funding Status | Approved on September 27, 2024 |
| Program Sponsor | Ed Maste |
| Program Manager | Alice Sowerby |
| Objectives | Deliver a package of improved or new FreeBSD functionality that, together, will ensure that it runs well “out of the box” on a broad range of personal computing devices. |
| Organization goals | Laptop support and accessibility is a strategic priority for the FreeBSD Foundation to accelerate developer and corporate adoption, through:
|
| Output | Updates to FreeBSD 14.x and/or above that deliver contemporary WiFi, full audio, modern suspend and resume, improved graphics, Bluetooth, and other identified features. Documentation, and how-to guides for the new functionality. |
Explore scope by area of functionality
Laptop and Desktop Working Group - (community owned)
Foundation blog about the Laptop Project
In total, $750,000 has been committed to a program of work to improve the experience of laptop users who run FreeBSD.
The program will start in Q4, 2024 and will likely run for 1-2 years.
The high-level scope was outlined by the FreeBSD Foundation with input from the community, including users such as program co-funder, Quantum Leap Research, and from laptop vendors including Dell, AMD and Framework.
The scope will be unpacked month by month as we make progress, focusing on where the most high-value functionality can be achieved with the resources and support that we have available. Our roadmap will contain work items that are candidates for future months.
No, these are high-level placeholders to help us visualise our intended order of work and to help share our plans with the community. The actual date of delivery on any item will be subject to change based on project progress and other factors.
The Foundation will be managing staff and a group of contracted FreeBSD developers to work on different functional areas to deliver regular updates to the laptop experience.
The FreeBSD community hosts a Laptop and Desktop Working Group where all interested parties can share their experiences, work in progress, and offer and receive help and support. You can also join the Desktop mailing list for more general updates. At present there is not a dedicated Laptop mailing list, this may change if there is community support for it.
Our target user is developers. However, we hope to be able to improve the experience for all users by reducing the need to "go under the hood" to set up, manage, and use FreeBSD on a laptop.
Broadly speaking this work is focused on laptop user experience. However, many of the areas that apply to laptops will also benefit the desktop user experience. We recommend engaging with the Laptop and Desktop Working Group to advocate for any desktop-specific work items.
We are mindful that UX is an important part of making FreeBSD functional and enjoyable for laptop users. We are framing the work as “user stories” that describe what a user wants to be able to accomplish and why. This is a user-focused approach to defining functional requirements which will be familiar to anyone who has developed using Agile methodologies.
Yes, we are using many of the features of Agile in running this program:
- Timeboxed iterations. We will be working in month-long iterations that allow us enough time to deliver something meaningful but not so long that the scope becomes unwieldy.
- Just in Time (JIT) planning. We are unpacking manageable pieces of the work as we go to allow for us to benefit from the better understanding we’ll gain along the way, and to build a community engagement loop into the program. This will mean we can refocus as often as needed and with the best possible understanding of the context.
- User Stories. In every month’s iteration, we will aim to deliver completed user stories that will improve something concrete and usable in the laptop experience.
- Demos. We’ll show our completed work in the Laptop and Desktop Working Group meetings.
It’s worth pointing out that this isn’t a full Agile process, more of a conscious “Scrumbut” that evolves over time.
There are several ways to keep yourself in the loop.
- Read the monthly updates that are posted into this repo.
- Attend the Laptop and Desktop Working Group meetings. Work done as part of the program will be shared in these calls (these will also be recorded).
- Check out the public roadmap on GitHub. We are developing a practice of keeping the program work up to date and available for anyone to see.
- Sign up to the Desktop mailing list.
- Sign up to the FreeBSD Foundation newsletter. All announcements about the program will be included in our updates.
We are using this repo and associated GH project board as tools for capturing the roadmap and progress on work items at a high-level. We are not using it for source code management. The repo and project are read-only for the public.
