hd_scania The battery LED on the FreeBSD side was ALWAYS gone red, i.e. it reports the battery there was CRITICAL
On the Linux side, on the other hand, the battery LED is being OFF, i.e. the battery is on a safe level
I think you're mistaken--check this again.
Battery LED colour and blinking, and also charging, on your laptop, is controlled by the BIOS+EC (Embedded Controller). It is not under control of the OS. If battery status is CRITICAL on FreeBSD, then it will be the same on Linux also. (And, we've already seen that the battery values match.)
hd_scania I just haven’t even touched any CloverEFI configs,...
If you haven't made any ACPI-related overrides, then you can keep CloverEFI/rEFInd.
My verdict is that your battery is to blame, and not FreeBSD, for the mysterious shutdowns. Keep it on AC power always and I think FreeBSD should be stable.
And, if you use the correct binary graphics drivers (drm-kmod
or xf86-video-...
) with 12.1-RELEASE, then Plasma should work too (again, on AC power becaue your battery is flaky). If you run, -STABLE or -CURRENT, then, install the graphics drivers from source via ports.
There is one FreeBSD-related bug here, though, which could have been resposible for your WiFi not working earlier:
WARNING: attempt to domain_add(bluetooth) after domainfinalize()
WARNING: attempt to domain_add(netgraph) after domainfinalize()
If you see these 2 lines at boot-time, then networking won't work. I see these messages on FreeBSD-12.1-RELEASE when I boot into it directly after using Linux--ie. without a shutdown in between. The "fix" I use is to shutdown my laptop, and wait 10 seconds before booting into any (other) OS.