I was installing FreeBSD on a laptop, and FreeBSD wasn’t able to do stuff like use DHCP and stuff, but NomadBSD was able to just fine. I am wondering what NomadBSD does differently ontop of FreeBSD for the improved Wi-Fi capabilities and support. I am trying to install FreeBSD on an HP Stream 11, if you take time to answer this question, thank you very much!
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NomadBSD is optimized for usage on USB thumb drives and removable media in general.
By default, it puts all of your data inside your home directory inside a /data directory/partition and encrypts your entire OS install with Geli, FreeBSDs full-disk encryption and logical volume management solution, kinda like LUKS over on Linux.
It also uses resizefs to fully utilize the whole (micro)SD card / USB thumb drive storage during installation if I am not mistaken.
Standard FreeBSD does not do all of these things since FreeBSD assumes you install it onto actual storage media like an SSD or HDD for fast and reliable access. It also takes the entire storage media, formats it, puts a fs on it and so on and so forth.
NomadBSD on the other hand does not do that at the beginning but rather during installation of the OS.
I hope this clarified some things for you and it is useful to you.
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This is useful information, but I specifically asked about the network stack. Like, I for the life of me can’t get wifi to work on FreeBSD, and yet NomadBSD has it working out of the box, and even has DHCP working!
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NomadBSD, in terms of networking, has the networking stuff installed and preconfigured for you unlike FreeBSD where you might have to install the driver by yourself but this changes over time since the FreeBSD Project announced the Laptop & Desktop workstation initiative/workgroup where they focus on supporting newer hardware better by porting over drivers from other BSDs (most notably OpenBSD) and/or writing new drivers for various hardware bits and pieces from scratch, such as your WiFi and Bluetooth cards as well as audio controllers.
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Do you know what they do specifically? Like, what specific drivers they install or what things they enable?
Out of the box, FreeBSD tries to identify your WiFI and Bluetooth card in your computer then it installs the appropriate driver for that card if available. NomadBSD on the other hand installs various AMD and Intel GPU drivers for you, the latter assuming you have an Intel Arc GPU. For Nvidia, NomadBSD offers the drivers as a single-click install. Alternatively, you can download and install them through `pkg` manually in the console.
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For others with this question.
the FreeBSD Handbook has very detailed instructions on 7.2. Setting up the Network and many other topics.
I can definitely recommend it as the first go-to, when tinkering with and optimizing your system 
If your question is about vanilla FreeBSD, you will get a lot of friendly help on the ‘normal’ FreeBSD-forums.
NomadBSD already has installed drivers, entries in /etc/rc.conf, /boot/loader.conf and other (conf-)files.
This is a trade-off:
- NomadBSD has installed a wide array of drivers, so the chance of working out of the box is very large. But the system is not ‘optimized’ for your specific computer and NomadBSD take up more disk-space than needed by standard FreeBSD.
- On a standard install of FreeBSD you’re expected to install and configure it to your computer, network and your liking. That way you get a ‘lean and mean’ computer/server.
Needs a little more knowledge and time, but is definitely doable - just have a look at @RoboNuggie 's YT-channel
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