There are some tricks with OpenBSD. First, with blueooth, if I recall, OpenBSD devs are not a huge fan of bluetooth. OpenBSD takes a security above all else approach I believe this plays a bit of a role since bluetooth is often poorly implemented by bluetooth devices, so there isn't a huge drive for it to work well on OpenBSD. Bluetooth is also a nightmare to implement and the interest in picking up the torch probably isnt there. Second, small dev team with limited access to hardware. If you want to get the best support for OpenBSD, I've always heard that running Lenovo Thinkpads are the way to go. Quiet a bit of the dev team mains Thinkpads for laptops and they dog food their own code. So the Thinkpads often get the fastest and best support.

I have been using FreeBSD as my primary OS since version 1.1.5, and I am currently running 12.4 on a Lenovo T480.

This is what works flawlessly on my configuration (SSD, 8G bytes of RAM): gigabit ethernet, second monitor via HDMI, USB mouse and keyboard, sound via audio jack, video playback on both the internal and external monitor. What I have not tried is Wifi, Bluetooth, the fingerprint reader, and the touchpad (disabled via BIOS). The trackpoint and buttons do work.

IMHO, FreeBSD is a nice system for everyday use. Note, though, that I do mostly terminal-based stuff (and some Ghostview, PDF reading, web browsing, occasional video watching, etc), so YMMV.

It's been a couple years since I daily drove FreeBSD on, my desktop/workstation and I never ran it on a laptop. Still chugging along on my home built NAS(read: shitty old tower with a bunch of disks in it) though.

I switched over from Arch on the desktop for a couple years at one point, and overall I was very happy. The FreeBSD project is still going strong, and they've been greatly improving their Linux syscall compat layer the last few years. ZFS support is great. It's perfectly viable as a desktop OS if you're experienced with Arch and you don't use a lot of weird hardware or software.

What I did when switching was just to install it and start slowly rebuilding my Arch setup as much as possible. It's a fun weekend project with some patience, and you'll quickly find what the pain points might be that way.

Just check that your hardware is supported before installing.

https://bsd-hardware.info/

>Is FreeBSD more suited to daily consumer laptop use? I use Arch btw

It can be, it depends on what you use your laptop for. For example, if you game, maybe sticking with Arch is for the best. Bluetooth is supported on Free and NetBSD, but I haven't used it on those os's. EDIT: FreeBSD supports bluetooth, but support might be spotty/depend on how old/new the hardware is. On Free/Net, bluetooth also seems less straightforward ("user friendly) than on linux or commerical OS's like MacOS.

Since you're used to arch, installing, configuring, and maintaining FreeBSD shouldn't be too difficult. Try it in a VM for a while until you get used to using vs linux.

WiFi - doesn't work, you're going to run a VM with linux and pass Wi-Fi device there or deal with 802.11g speed if card even works at all.

GPU - if you're okay with Nvidia blob, then it's all good. If not, then I hope you're okay with RX580 era AMD.

Bluetooth...I don't think people in community know what it is because stack was broken for probably a decade.

Consumer NICs sometimes don't work out of the box.

It's very unfriendly for consumer, which is what I liked, but at one point I had enough and switched to Linux. Still running FreeBSD on home server, tho because i'm too lazy to switch it...

I ran FreeBSD on my desktop for a while; it's fine as a daily driver. I can't speak to bluetooth, and I'm not sure I'd trust it on a laptop (given how hard it is to get suspend working properly even on Linux), but wifi and video work great (you can run the proper nvidia drivers same as Linux).