And stuff like this is why I've never stuck with FreeBSD when I've tried it. I screw around with debugging issues all day at work. Why would I want to try to figure out why something as fundamental as wifi isn't working in my spare time?
Yes, if you absolutely need 802.11ac wifi in particular, FreeBSD isn't a great choice. But many modern 802.11n NICs (and 802.11ac NICs, in 802.11n mode) "just work" out of the box, including the 'iwm' devices mentioned in the article, on more recent versions of FreeBSD.
FreeBSD 12.0 dates to 2018 — this is like installing Fedora 29 in 2020.
Why in the world would it lack support for one of the most ubiquitous, not to mention fastest, wireless standards? I mean, it’s been out since 2013.
Look how far we've come. Linux was the alternative OS just ~15 years ago. Now it's one of the mainstream OSes.
TBH, I'd like to see one of the BSDs to become one of the mainstream OSes too. :)
edit: Except macOS ofc. :)
If I gave you a new Mac or PC, you could spend hours "screwing around" with it tweaking and customizing it, Linux even more so. If you absolutely need 802.11ac, then FreeBSD is not the right OS for T480s. But how many people actually require that speed?
Don't forget this, which translated means suspend/resume doesn't work.
FWIW, suspend/resume is probably the worst, fiddliest thing about free OSs on a laptop.
The mere fact that you’re running a computer with *nix, and you get to tell everyone about it, outweighs the fact that 50% of your day is spent figuring out how to get common tasks working on it.
Would love to read a piece akin to “I’ve been running Ubuntu on a ThinkPad for two years without issue” which is a standard the other main OSes have established
Theoretically 802.11a is the same speed as 802.11g, but in practice it drops off super quickly and means a “simple” page (like gmail/outlook) is loading in 30s-1m.
One big item (which you'll see at the bottom of my install notes) is that intel chips in these thinkpads have a throttling issue. There's a nice python program to fix that, I run it as a systemd service on boot: https://github.com/erpalma/throttled
Sadly fan speed is not adjustable by the user in the last few generations.
I'm also curious about their new AMD offerings.
Fan seems to struggle to dissipate even 25 watts of heat. Sometimes it would be sitting at 50+ degrees C, just idling.
I asked our IT guys if I can repaste it, but they told me it's still on warranty. It might help, but I'll never know I guess.
Battery life is better than Windows. The touchpad is a little less pleasant to use (hard to click on a small target while using the laptop on the couch, the pointer always moves a little bit when taking the finger off). It definitely works better after some 30 minutes of usage but I have no idea why.
It's speedy, video calling works fine, can compile lots of code quickly, and it's refurbished and saved from the dumpster.
I hope to never buy a new computer again instead relying on refurbishing old ones as we go along. I keep all of my configurations and projects synced up so that booting up a new computer into my dev environment is straight forward. If I lose the device or it gets totaled it's a couple hundred bucks instead of $4k going out the door to get a new one in a few hours.
I've come to the same conclusion that it's generally not worth the premium cost to buy a new laptop when good hardware is so readily available in my neck of the woods.
As a result, the project is less focused on desktop use cases and free software/security at any cost ideology than on a) not breaking all the complicated crap built on top of it and b) providing drop-in perf and stability enhancements.
So, yeah, if you want a performant network stack and a consolidated kernel/userland that values stability (both in the "years of uptime" and the no "hey guys, we're jumping to systemd!" senses of the word) FreeBSD is a good option. As a bonus, FreeBSD's manpages are really really nice and give you basically everything you need to get down and do some serious systems programming or box-tuning. Go check out `man 7 tuning`.
Anecdotally, during my years as a sysadmin I ran a bunch of FreeBSD boxes alongside a bunch of Linux boxes - similar hardware, similar tasks. The FreeBSD boxes would routinely run for literal years without a hiccup, while we never got a similar level of stability from any other OS.
But what I wanted then (and dreamed of having a million or so to make it real) was a FreeBSD reference laptop - basically a distribution of FreeBSD that worked in this laptop series - you bought the laptop and a years support and basically three hackers just kept on producing patches and co-ordinating drivers and making simple tools and simple videos on how to keep your base running.
I work on top of my laptop. I would prefer to just take the barest plain vanilla, and not have to work on my laptop unless I choose to.
This is basically the business model of Apple Computers
With Fedora, everything (except the fingerprint reader) just worked, even firmware updates. No configuration, no messing around, the entire process was flawless.
I don't care for the fingerprint reader, and the USB-C dock uses DisplayLink, which is beyond awful.
Here's a link, but I see the price already gone up a little:
https://www.microcenter.com/product/612786/hp-pavilion-15-cs...
It has a slot for an M.2 card that does not interfere with the rotating SATA drive, so I'm about to try that. I'd like to have both installed. SSD is nice for Linux but is absolutely required for Windows.
One nice thing about Dell XPS: they have the Thunderbolt port. I theorize that this is potentially very useful for a corner case that I have: you can add a PCIe box and add a parallel printer port card that accepts ancient security dongles required by certain engineering software that I invested in the past.
I'm hoping 20.04 will be a smoother experience once it's released (we only run LTSs on development machines at work).
One of my new team members couldn't get her brand new XPS15 to output to a 4K TV (1080p internal disolay) on 18.04 yesterday. The screen would just constantly flash on and off. We had to settle for her using 1080 for presentations etc on the office TVs as no combination of proprietary drivers or Nvidia on/off resolved it.
I've felt the touchpad wasn't sensitive enough and the click action was way too feeble. Combined with the mushy feeling of the keyboard and the atrocious user experience of the OS, I can barely stand using it each day.
If I were in your shoe, I'd wait for a longer traveling version of the keyboard that's not butterfly.
I can get along with my 2015 for now, but I really miss the Retina display and it is pretty slow for doing heavier stuff.
The closest to a mac touchpad I have seen so far has been the Dell XPS touchpad, which imo is hands-down the best touchpad experience on a non-mac machine.
Yes, it lacks many gestures but, KDE has ample replacements for these gestures I think.
But if you prefer Ubuntu to macOS for whatever reason, I've found the Dell XPS line to be good enough to be tolerable.
This is why I bought a Macbook Air, they still have a physical escape key and my vim muscle movements will not allow me to remap that key anywhere else.
BTW The 16inch Macbook Pros also have a physical escape key now, to the left of the touchbar.
But, then, the newer T490's can have up to 64 gigs of RAM, SATA and an M2 ssd
I always disable the trackpad but I fear someday thinkpads might drop the trackpoint altogether as I don't see many people using them.
So far so good. Haven't had nearly the amount of hardware issues reported in this thread. Only the fingerprint scanner does not work, despite best efforts to install its drivers.
The hardest thing for me so far has been customising it to behave like macOS. The muscle memory of keyboard shortcuts is too hard to shake. But I've changed most of them.
Another thing to point out. The display scaling sucks. I have found anything between 100% and 200% unstable.
Edit: mine is a budget L380 model. Pretty good value for under $500 (current clearance price).
https://blog.habets.se/2013/11/TPM-chip-protecting-SSH-keys-...
But dim screens just don't work, no matter if it's matte or not. Bright screen with anti-reflective layer work much better, hate to say that.
alias rmouse="sudo modprobe -r psmouse && sudo modprobe psmouse"
9th Gen Intel® Core™ i9-9880H (16 Threads, 16 MB Cache)
NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1650 Max-Q 4GB
64 GB RAM
4K OLED display (better colors than Mac)
Great keyboard
Infrared Camera
Fingerprint Sensor
DOULBY Sound System
Water-Spoil-Protection
...
The first generation had some cooling issues, but it is solved now in the second generation.
Even the inside is better built. The plastic front clips of the T480 backplate break super easily, whereas the T480s has replaceable clips.
Holy shit, Lenovo finally switched from that non-standard Realtek thingy (https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=204521) to something that exposes SDHCI over PCIe?
While I still am not able to buy a Lenovo laptop without Windows preinstalled, at least Lenovo is open enough for other OSs (FreeBSD, Linux, etc) to run relatively flawlessly on them.
And good to hear it is just keyboard causing his hand problem. Feel sorry when a hacker have pain in using keyboard. Good article.
Until several months after release, support for the nvidia card was spotty on Ubuntu/Fedora so it would suck up power without it being used. It's better now, but my workflow doesn't really need a dgpu, and the igpu is enough to watch 1080p videos (probably not 4K, though).
That processor sure has the potential. A few modifications to the cooling system and some undervolting can get it running at 30+ Watt TDP indefinitely.
I've been running Ubuntu and Kali on a Dell machine for a few years and the trackpad has always been unusuable and the power switch is always power-down (instead of sleep, standby).
Yes, I've messed with the xorg settings for the trackpad and the ACPI settings for the button, but gave up.
Why?
If it's for funsies okay but pushing to use something wildly boutique is a major red flag for me at work. I have one guy who works for me who runs linux on the desktop and he's pretty much always having a problem of some sort. I put up with it because he's staff level, but it doesn't impress.
