I used to daily drive PC-BSD while it was around: all I needed was web browsing and email. However, the lack of WiFi support did hurt, and so did the lack of direct Steam support. I do hope that FreeBSD addresses these 2 shortcomings and then resurrects PC-BSD for this particular market segment

Well, there are exceptions of CPUs that never got supported by NetBSD - Itanium comes to mind. But the main goal of NetBSD has been to never abandon support for legacy platforms that it once ran on, such as the WE 32000 CPU. FreeBSD and OpenBSD have no such hangups. FreeBSD has pretty much dropped support for things like Itanium, Alpha, Sparc, and MIPS, while OpenBSD, while supporting 64-bit versions of legacy platforms like Sparc & PowerPC, has dropped it for 32-bit

If there is a new emerging CPU, such as RISC-V, then it will get supported at least by FreeBSD and NetBSD. Dunno about OpenBSD

Except it's not 1994, and WIndows 7 was actually on par w/ Linux in most ways. It's another thing that Microsoft started devolving the OS from that point onwards

The way systemd was designed precludes it from running on BSD based systems. They have rc.d, openrc and launchd. In fact, that's one reason that former Linux people who hated systemd moved to the BSDs: this was before Devuan arrived

How is the current WiFi support? Also, is Lumina an available DE there like it was for PC-BSD?

Really? It wasn't that long ago (6 years) that there was a FreeBSD based distro targeted at desktops/laptops - called PC-BSD. They had a beautiful installation system called PBI (Push-Button Interface), which tested each package for its library dependencies, and separately collected any old ones needed by the package, so that the user wouldn't have had to resolve conflicts

Beyond that, they had a beautiful lightweight Qt-based DE called Lumina, which was very similar to LX/QT or Razor/QT on Linux. I used that as my daily driver for a while. The only shortcoming of that system was the non-existent WiFi support, which is why I needed an RJ-45 cable every time I wanted to be online. Other than that, it was a great system to use

If the FreeBSD Foundation leaders want to get it back on laptops, resurrect PC-BSD (I never cared for its rebranding as "TrueOS": keep the BSD part of the brandname!) and do a few things

1. 1. Improve the WiFi support and bring it up to at least Linux, if not WIndows or MacOS standards
2. 2. Make Lumina, rather than KDE, the default DE. Have choices if you like such as SonicDE, Mate, XFCE,... if you like
3. 3. Work w/ Valve on getting Steam natively ported to FreeBSD, w/o having to use either Wine/Proton or Linux containers, which is just more overhead and defeats the purpose of letting gamers use FreeBSD
4. 4. Port all this to all those new Arm based laptops. Windows on Arm is not gonna click the way macOS did on Apple's Arm silicon, or ChromeOS/Android on Snapdragon, simply b'cos Windows users can't abandon backwards compatibility the way macOS or Android users could. There is an acute shortage of native apps for Windows/Arm, and once those users realize it, they'll want something else to put on them. Linux is one option, but there are limitations due to the sheer variety of Arm variants. Having FreeBSD in its PC-BSD avatar on it would be a clean solution

The differences b/w the 3 BSDs are due to their different goals. NetBSD tries to be there on the widest assortment of hardware, from 1970s computers, and so it deliberately doesn't include features that can't be easily ported to all of them. OpenBSD is security obsessed, so disables any features that could be potential attack vectors. FreeBSD is the one most people might gravitate towards, since it's the one that tries to be competitive w/ Linux

Apt? Is that the only package manager in Linux? RedHat has rpm/yumm last I checked, Arch has pacman and Gentoo or Slackware has something else I forget. Are you sure that your favorite Linux package is supported by the package manager of your distro?

No, systemd doesn't exist on the BSDs after all these years, and they don't plan to either, given the number of Linux-specific dependencies they have. It's a tad different from Wayland, which although it also had Linux specific dependencies, has also developed somethings to work w/ the BSDs

Anyway, all the BSDs have endorsed XLibre, which is the only option left for platforms not going Wayland. Similarly, the BSDs are still on InitV or the other alternatives out there

That is something that TSMC has been doing at its own initiative, like w/ its plant at Chandler. However, while TSMC finds it easy to populate its fabs in Taiwan, it's a completely different story in other countries, especially the US

That was a threat a few years ago, but China's military has been somewhat degraded by the infighting b/w President Xi and the Generals of the PLA who are not in his faction of the CPC

Taiwan should still be wary and arm itself to the teeth, but the threat of a Chicom takeover has somewhat receded

Wouldn't v2 be backwards compatible w/ v1, the way CPUs are designed? What exactly would have been introduced into v2 that would have broken v1 compatibility to the point that one would need separate codebases for each? I can understand the 32-bit vs 64-bit argument, but not this

I can certainly understand ending support for 32-bit CPUs if 64-bit is now the norm

However, I don't get why beyond that, older CPUs have to be abandoned. I know that's not what was mentioned in this article, but if AMD introduced the Athlon-64 and the Opteron-64, I don't see why support for them needs to drop, since they use the same instruction set as today's Ryzens, sans whatever AMD may have introduced since. Since it's a subset, it can be a common base, and anything specific to newer CPUs can be added. If a CPU doesn't have the newer extensions, then supporting it w/ the subset of today's feature set shouldn't be an issue

Aside from being low performance and late to market, there were other challengers as well, such as Cyrix and later Centaur. So there were alternatives for PC buyers to shop, if they were into this level of detail

At least discontinue making sexuality a major thing w/ the employees. Let everybody just follow their own sexuality in private

Suggestion: make iCloud optional, and allow AirDrop b/w an iPhone, Mac, iPad and other Apple devices. All the devices are now 256GB or more of storage, so there's no need for a 5GB bottleneck while syncing those devices. Just allow those devices to sync w/ each other using AirDrop