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. :)
...on servers. It's still far, far from "mainstream" for desktops.
Still, that's a really big deal. I work for what is firmly a Microsoft shop, and nobody bat's an eyelid now if we use Linux VMs (as long as they're cloud-based).
I think 3 things in particular have driven the rise of Linux as a mainstream server OS:
1. docker/containerisation. Sure, Windows containers exist, but have you ever seen one in the wild?
2. The shift to the cloud, in conjunction with (3)
3. The rise of DevOps, in tandem with (2)
(and macOS can't really be called a BSD derivative; it is a mostly different OS that has taken some of its code from FreeBSD)
Some people are motivated by the allure of fringe projects. There's usually a lot of exploration and learning involved with those projects, which can be very rewarding. Not to mention you gain a deeper appreciation for the unbelievable amount of work that goes into the projects.
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.
Sadly I agree.
My requirements for a laptop are:
1. Working suspend resume
2. Good touch pad with working palm rejection
3. Good battery life
Sadly the only laptop that meets these requirements to my satisfaction is my macbook.
I have Linux on the three machines I use. But on each it's via a VM. I run Windows and MacOS on the machines. Where I work this is common as well. It's surely pretty prevalent. The other way a lot of people work on Linux where I work is on a VM on AWS.
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.
Nope, that never happened to me. I use 802.11a for the same reason as OP (Intel card on FreeBSD plus a 5GHz only network), an iperf3 test reports a perfectly stable 22.2 mbit/s. More than enough for surfing, in fact Tor limits the bandwidth more than this Wi-Fi :)
Not sure if that was a factor or just that being less popular there was less investment to make it "better".
I don't think I ever saw a card supporting 802.11a exclusively, it was part of a chip supporting multiple standards. And then you would always use 802.11g.
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.
NVidia, no way to working fine on Linux: you will wait for new drivers after each kernel update and tons of another issues.
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.
The need for 3rd party software (spectacles) to allow me to use hot-keys to shift windows around (native feature in Windows, Linux, and iirc even the windows manager in Sun V when I used it for a short time). Same story to alter the behavior of alt-tab.
I also can't prevent windows from stealing focus if some random app decides it wants to pop up something (again native option in every other OS I've used). That's apparently been an active complaint on the internet for somewhere close to a decade from what I've seen during my fruitless searches for a solution.
I've had numerous issues related to the App store randomly signing out, which may not be an issue to normal users, but in my case the office uses a shared app store account to handle App Store purchases, so that was exceedingly irritating but probably a "it's just you" type of complaint.
And none of that even touches the debacle that is Catalina. I ended up completely re-installing the OS, as a vast majority of software I needed wasn't compatible due to the deprecation of 32-bit support.
All in all, I personally hate the OS and can't stand it. I'm currently looking for a new role, and can't deny I'm giddy at the chance to get away from it. And honestly, I'd probably turn down a position if it came with the requirement to use OSX again.
However, I do recognize this is my experience and others really do enjoy OSX. But to each his own.
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.
I thought I was fine with the old screen turns out I was just used to it, the new one is such an upgrade, the tradeoff being that the processor power is about the same. Which don't matter to me that much as it's mostly text editing for me.
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.
True! I've come to realize that anti-reflective coating is more effective than matte screen.
EDIT: I might add as well, that part of the point of using a dark colortheme, is to not be looking into a lamp...so perhaps I am simply more okay with lower brightness, because I explicitly look for dark colorthemes. That does mean I am very sensitive to finding a colortheme with good contrast.
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.
