That is cool in ways, but many manufactures change the internals without changing the model number and so I'm not sure how much I can trust it. There is a recycled computers place near me that will sell me some of those cheap, but how can I be sure the one I'm buying is the same as the one tested (if indeed I can find any of those model numbers at all - which is a factor of what companies near me are recycling this month)
I have the latitude 7490 and it worked great with Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. The only issue is some hardware design issue where lifting it with one hand will cause it to freeze (possibly some stress causing a shock or a displacement).
In my opinion pre alder lake intel is the sweet spot for FreeBSD. Not sure about AMD but anything before 2020 should work just fine. Just avoid CPUs with heterogenous core configurations for now.
It's crazy how much negativity there is in comment threads like this. I would get it if FreeBSD was a product you paid for, or someone was evangelizing about how you're missing out if you don't get the FreeBSD laptop experience, or something.
As someone who liked FreeBSD in the past and curious to check it out again, I'm glad to have this handy list.
A few years back I attended a talk by one of the Netflix developers who contributed kTLS. It was very informative as he pointed the reasons why Netflix went with FreeBSD. The first question afterwards was “why not Linux”… Didn’t you listen to the talk, man…
Interesting. I use FreeBSD on my desktop too but it's really a desktop so I don't have to bother with WiFi or bluetooth. I generally dislike laptops for ergonomic reasons, and I never bring my computers anywhere anyway so I just buy NUCs. Not having to buy for a display, keyboard, trackpad, battery helps keep the price down.
I like it for several reasons. It's a holistic system which means it's much easier to understand, not a collection of random parts thrown together. There is only really one (big) distro so documentation is easy to come by and consistent. I love the way the updates of the system are uncoupled from the userland software so you can have rolling packages but a stable OS.
Also the ports collection is great (being able to manually compile every package with different flags where needed). And jails. And ZFS first-class citizen. Also I like the attitude. Less involvement from big tech, less strive to change for change's sake. It feels a lot more stable, every new version there's only a few things changed. It's not that with every major update I have to learn everything anew again because someone wanted to include their new init system (like systemd), configuration tools (like ifconfig -> ip), packaging system (like snap) etc. Things that work fine are just left alone.
It has some really good ideas also, like boot environments. But it's not linux. It's not meant to be.
But yeah if you want everything all figured out for you, don't use FreeBSD. Just take a commercial linux like ubuntu. You'll need to tinker a bit, which I like because it helps me understand my system. FreeBSD is a bit like Linux was in the early 2000s, it mostly works but you often have to dive into a shell for some magic. The good thing is having ZFS snapshots as a safety net though. Never really get caught out that way.
I'd say Juana Manso laptops are usable with FreeBSD. sure, you lose brightness control, you can't see how much battery remains, (I didn't try wifi but the 9650AC chip seems to be supported), but it is usable. audio works, USB works, video works when you load the Intel drivers.
I personally feel like the race to support a vast array of hardware is very costly for such a small team and might be a waste of their precious resources.
Of course I love FreeBSD and want it to be supported on my desktop or laptop but at what cost?
Here is the question I have always wanted to ask:
Why not make the ultimate compromise and say: you will be able to run FreeBSD on almost all laptops but it is gonna be through let say an Alpine Linux hypervisor and we are gonna ship it with all the glue you need to have a great experience.
About every CPU has great visualization capabilities nowadays and the perf are amazing.
Now some might start screaming at the idea but you already run your favorite operating system through a stack of software you do not trust or control: UEFI, CPU microcode, etc.
I believe we need OS diversity and if so much of the energy of project is spent on working on an infinite hardware support, how much is left for the real innovation?
Yeah you run into this head on trying to use BSD. It’s too much glue and compat work. By the end of it you no longer have a coherent system, you’re back to Linux.
I use FBSD on an old-ish Lenovo W540 without too many hiccups. No, it’s not for everyone and never was. I wouldn’t suggest to anyone to run a BSD as a daily driver, or at all, unless they have a good reason to. Once you cross that line you need to know what and why.
So you use FreeBSD on your laptop. You think people with reason should run it. You agree with others who have said you need to know the system to use it, and you do. So why does your response sound like you don't like it? I think you do cause you do.
One of the guys on the FreeBSD forums said, "FreeBSD is for professionals and serious computer enthusiasts." and I don't see anything wrong with that.
Love the Thinkpad line. It's kinda the hackers laptop of choice.
> X220/X230
These are pretty solid with dual batteries. Also popular for OpenBSD and 9front, the latter of which I run on an x230 (it stopped charging the removable battery :-/) You can get about 2 hours off the internal and 6~8 with a big fat removable battery, maybe more if the OS and drivers can properly throttle hardware power settings.
I have an X1 carbon 5th gen and it's quite light but not useful for 9front without some Ethernet driver tweaking (likely some phy bits need twiddling.) Instead I tossed Debian on it and run 9front in a VM if I need a local CPU. So far it just seems to work including Ethernet (via a dongle) and WiFi.
I just went through T14 Gen 1 hell. I tried to replace a broken LCD and the system just wouldn't boot. I fussed with it so much, the flimsy case cracked and broke in several places. I gave up and decided to use it as a clamshell, but had to keep the broken screen connected to boot.
But I couldn't get it to see the external monitor. I fought this for hours. I finally reached my patience threshold and tore the fucking LCD off the case. It hurt the hands a bit but was cathartic. Amazingly, it booted and saw the monitor, magically. I was astonished. With or without the broken screen, it wouldn't boot. But going psycho on it fixed it. Proof in the wholesomeness of violence, maybe not. But...
it's not running BSD. It's now my mom's desktop, and it's running Void. Works great, and I love the Ryzen 4700, with 16gb ram and atheros wifi chip. Delicate, but capable of some extremes :)
So can anyone give me a short explanation on why someone would use freeBSD over linux? I do run it technically, on my router (OPNSense), but that's not a personal computer, like a desktop or laptop. What are the advantages to running FreeBSD?
Some may call me a devil's advocate (I love FreeBSD as my first alternate OS, it's more sensible as a whole, and less chaotic then linux) it provided the network stack for Microsoft and a base for darwin (OSX) Maybe it's just the low brow art, maybe it's the root of evil and the label is on the tin, how cute!
Yeah. The reason is that a lot (almost all?) consumer hardware is broken, but in ways that either minimally impact Windows or which are worked around in drivers.
Ooh! I have lne of those T490 laptops. Except my wife had 1 liter of liquid detergent into it after putting a single bagged carton of it into my suitcase to bring on vacay. Great fun. The screen flickers.
35 comments
[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 39.0 ms ] threadThe best resource to check support is https://dmesgd.nycbug.org/dmesgd
> half of networking doesnt work, and it's the more important one for laptop(wifi)
I think they need to revise the scoring
As someone who liked FreeBSD in the past and curious to check it out again, I'm glad to have this handy list.
I like it for several reasons. It's a holistic system which means it's much easier to understand, not a collection of random parts thrown together. There is only really one (big) distro so documentation is easy to come by and consistent. I love the way the updates of the system are uncoupled from the userland software so you can have rolling packages but a stable OS.
Also the ports collection is great (being able to manually compile every package with different flags where needed). And jails. And ZFS first-class citizen. Also I like the attitude. Less involvement from big tech, less strive to change for change's sake. It feels a lot more stable, every new version there's only a few things changed. It's not that with every major update I have to learn everything anew again because someone wanted to include their new init system (like systemd), configuration tools (like ifconfig -> ip), packaging system (like snap) etc. Things that work fine are just left alone.
It has some really good ideas also, like boot environments. But it's not linux. It's not meant to be.
But yeah if you want everything all figured out for you, don't use FreeBSD. Just take a commercial linux like ubuntu. You'll need to tinker a bit, which I like because it helps me understand my system. FreeBSD is a bit like Linux was in the early 2000s, it mostly works but you often have to dive into a shell for some magic. The good thing is having ZFS snapshots as a safety net though. Never really get caught out that way.
The more accessible software becomes the more infra is required to support it, and the more complex and convoluted the software will be
Of course I love FreeBSD and want it to be supported on my desktop or laptop but at what cost?
Here is the question I have always wanted to ask: Why not make the ultimate compromise and say: you will be able to run FreeBSD on almost all laptops but it is gonna be through let say an Alpine Linux hypervisor and we are gonna ship it with all the glue you need to have a great experience.
About every CPU has great visualization capabilities nowadays and the perf are amazing.
Now some might start screaming at the idea but you already run your favorite operating system through a stack of software you do not trust or control: UEFI, CPU microcode, etc.
I believe we need OS diversity and if so much of the energy of project is spent on working on an infinite hardware support, how much is left for the real innovation?
I use FBSD on an old-ish Lenovo W540 without too many hiccups. No, it’s not for everyone and never was. I wouldn’t suggest to anyone to run a BSD as a daily driver, or at all, unless they have a good reason to. Once you cross that line you need to know what and why.
One of the guys on the FreeBSD forums said, "FreeBSD is for professionals and serious computer enthusiasts." and I don't see anything wrong with that.
ThinkPads:
- W520/W530/T520/T530/X220/X230/T420s
- T480
- T14 GEN1 (Intel)
- T14 GEN1 (AMD)
I needed to replace MediaTek WiFi card on T14 (AMD) into some Intel WiFi one.
Hope that helps.
Regards,
vermaden
> X220/X230
These are pretty solid with dual batteries. Also popular for OpenBSD and 9front, the latter of which I run on an x230 (it stopped charging the removable battery :-/) You can get about 2 hours off the internal and 6~8 with a big fat removable battery, maybe more if the OS and drivers can properly throttle hardware power settings.
I have an X1 carbon 5th gen and it's quite light but not useful for 9front without some Ethernet driver tweaking (likely some phy bits need twiddling.) Instead I tossed Debian on it and run 9front in a VM if I need a local CPU. So far it just seems to work including Ethernet (via a dongle) and WiFi.
But I couldn't get it to see the external monitor. I fought this for hours. I finally reached my patience threshold and tore the fucking LCD off the case. It hurt the hands a bit but was cathartic. Amazingly, it booted and saw the monitor, magically. I was astonished. With or without the broken screen, it wouldn't boot. But going psycho on it fixed it. Proof in the wholesomeness of violence, maybe not. But...
it's not running BSD. It's now my mom's desktop, and it's running Void. Works great, and I love the Ryzen 4700, with 16gb ram and atheros wifi chip. Delicate, but capable of some extremes :)
No, you don’t need linux to run your python webapp that you actually tested on your macbook.
What I'm missing in the list is the
(which is a steal when buying used here in Germany)