Laptop and Desktop Working Group
The Laptop and Desktop Workgroup (LDWG) is a platform for the community to collaborate on development, testing, knowledge exchange, and advocacy for FreeBSD on laptops and desktops. Our mission is to advocate, support, and improve the use of FreeBSD on laptops and desktops for both business and personal users.
The next call date and time can be found in the Schedule section.
See Contact and Feedback to get in touch or give feedback!
Contents
Charter
Scope of Work
The WG focuses on:
- Encouraging contributions from a diverse range of stakeholders, including developers, testers, and industry experts, to enhance the usability of laptops and desktops running FreeBSD.
- Facilitating collaboration through code contributions, testing initiatives, operational support, and hardware insights.
- Creating content (recordings, articles, tutorials, documentation, system configurations, etc.) for a variety of stakeholders interested in FreeBSD on laptops and desktops
Providing context for the creation, validation, prioritization and delivery of user stories being tracked in the FreeBSD Foundation’s “Laptop Support and Usability” project.
Success Metrics
We will measure our success through:
- Regular Delivery: Consistent improvements to the user experience on laptops and desktops.
- Community Engagement: Active participation from all relevant community members, including the FreeBSD Foundation, FreeBSD Project, and users.
- Resource Investment: Steady or increasing commitment of time and resources from participants.
Deliverables
Our key deliverables will include:
- Enhanced Usability: Tangible improvements in the functionality of FreeBSD on laptops and desktops.
- Documentation: Comprehensive records of WG progress, along with best practices for deployment and usage.
- Community Growth: Expansion of the WG community, fostering a vibrant ecosystem of contributors and users.
In the future, we may expand our efforts to include expanding collaboration with hardware and peripheral vendors.
Calls
Schedule and Next Call
** !! WATCH OUT !! UTC TIME CHANGE FOR NEXT CALL !! **
The next Laptop and Desktop Work Group Call will start Wednesday, March 11, 10AM PT / 1PM ET / 6PM UTC. Join
Generally, the call is scheduled on the second Wednesday in a month.
You can subscribe to this Google Calendar iCal to make sure you get the correct dates and times.
Please note:
We use Jitsi to host and run the calls: Call link.
- The first call showed, that Jitsi seems to work best with a Chromium based browser; audio and video may break on other browsers.
Calls are recorded, and then shared on YouTube.
- Please plan for a 60 minutes call.
Agenda
- Minutes of the last meeting
- Approval
- Action items
- Call structure/Governance:
- Review the Foundation's Laptop Project board and planned activities
- Laptop Project update by Alice
- Updates on various activities and areas of interest
- Ownership / leadership for areas and next steps
- Updates on items
- Graduating, adopting new records based on our lifecycle approach
- Date, time, and duration of the third meeting.
Minutes, Recordings, Slides of Past Calls
Wednesday, February 11, 2026
Thank you for everyone, who joined the call!
- the recording broke this time, unfortunately; we got a 56MB webm file that apparently does not contain any video stream... planning to do our recordings slightly differently in the future.
Wednesday, January 14, 2026
Happy new year to all of you and thank you to everyone, who joined the last call on January 14, 2026!
Wednesday, December 10, 2025
Thank you for everyone, who joined the call on December 10, 2025!
Wednesday, November 11, 2025
Thank you for everyone, who joined the call on November 11, 2025!
Wednesday, October 8, 2025
Thank you for everyone, who joined the call on October 8, 2025!
Wednesday, September 10, 2025
Thank you for everyone, who joined the tenth call on September 10, 2025!
Wednesday, August 13, 2025
Thank you for everyone, who joined the ninth call on August 13, 2025!
Documentation for previous meetings
Thank you for all who joined any of our previous calls!
Date |
Slides |
Recording |
Minutes |
Chat log |
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Dec 16, 2024 |
- |
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Jan 20, 2025 |
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Feb 24, 2025 |
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Mar 12, 2025 |
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April 9, 2025 |
- |
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May 14, 2025 |
- |
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June 11, 2025 |
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July 9, 2025 |
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Documents can be found in structured form on Google Drive.
Lessons Learned
A few documented lessons learned from our calls, which we'll keep working on:
- exporting the chat at the end of the call - worked well
- exporting the participant list - did not work as expected
- sharing the slide deck live and in the recording broke and caused unnecessary waiting/idle time (lost time for participants), which had to be cut from the recording (more work)
- sharing the slide deck through a secondary browser worked for a while until it hung the whole system; otherwise Jitsi works great.
- chosen times make it difficult to join for participants from APAC region
- don't use Bluetooth audio headsets for the call
- stick to calls from home network, hotel wireless was not a reliable connection
- losing connectivity means losing recording - choose a reliable connection before the call because switching will mean dropping the call
- make a screen shot of the participants during the call - recordings don't reliably capture the list
Areas of Interest
The collected items of interest are documented in a Google Worksheet. Please get in touch with ChrisMoerz to get write level access.
During December 2024 and February 2025 we held a survey, public to everyone, to better understand the needs and interests of the community around using FreeBSD on laptops and desktops. Preliminary results were presented during the second LDWG call on January 20, 2025; final results were published as raw data and summary on February 15, 2025.
Contact and Feedback
We are using the official freebsd-desktop mailing list (sign up here). We'll keep our emails prefixed with [LDWG] to make our communication easier to filter and separate from other ports- and bug-fixing related emails.
There are ongoing conversations on Reddit or the FreeBSD Forums, which you are invited to join!