I’ll get back to FreeBSD when the most popular wifi card by a wide margin (iwlwifi, Intel AX200/AX2xx) will start working. That’s a shame, FreeBSD was long known for quality networking, and now what?
Not even 802.11ac, and of course no 802.11ax or more recent modes. (802.11ac appeared in 2013). This means that you get about 2 MB/s from it, which makes it completely unusable in 2024.
Ah, even 802.11n is not supported! This is a 2009 standard. So we are left with 802.11a/b, which is 2003. The wifi of 21 years ago.
I'm connecting to remote SSH endpoints for 20+ years and the connection quality actually improved over the years. Some of these connections are not just encrypted text-based stuff, but tunnelled VNC and other more throughput-hungry use-cases for using SSH (than logging into remote text-based terminal).
I'm curious - what do you do, or what use-case do you have in mind, that renders 16 Mbit/s throughput "completely unusable"? I never required 16 Mbit/s throughput for... anything related to my work. It's enough even for high-quality video conferencing.
Your comment suggests that FreeBSD is a thing of a past and no longer capable of "quality networking", due to poor WiFi support. I can only agree with the poor WiFi support part. But WiFi is by no means something you can judge networking stack dedicated for servers.
FreeBSD was never designed for consumer hardware networking. There were a few "desktop distros" but all have more or less died, and the few FreeBSD-based "storage distros" moved to Linux after FreeBSD changed its upstream for ZFS. And I'm saying this as someone who made a lot of effort to use FreeBSD on laptop over the years, and a current user of 15.0-CURRENT on ThinkPad.
But FreeBSD was and is THE choice for high-bandwidth wired networking. Netflix is both an early adopter and an active contributor to FreeBSD's networking codebase. They hack FreeBSD[0] to achieve cool numbers over and over[1][2].
Intel's device mentioned by you - AX200 - works "fine" on my ThinkPad, for a few months now. The device was on supported hardware list for more than a year prior, but the actual driver wasn't covering all vendor/device id pairs (different flavors of hardware or behavior all known as "the same" chip; this is a major problem with consumer devies since chip outages started).
That said, by "fine" I mean that I can use the card and finally can connect to 5GHz networks and avoid disruptions related to 2.4GHz congestion. But FreeBSD is still incapable of utilizing speeds offered by modern WiFi specifications. Even with 5GHz connection, only throughput typical for 802.11n can be expected.
At this point, I guess that modern WiFi (as protocol/specification) support will only mature in form of drivers ingested from Linux, and emulated via LinuxKPI[3]. And it's great! I'm using Ryzen's Radeon features and DRM stuff on FreeBSD thanks to the LinuxKPI compatibility layer, for a few years now.
It's great that whenever FreeBSD can suck some non-GPL codebase from Linux via extending its "compatibility layer" - there's no major hostility. FreeBSD failed with evolving WiFi support on it's own. KPI worked great with amdgpu/DRM, and I have high hopes that Linux codebase will allow FreeBSD to evolve its WiFi support most reasonably.
