Top laptops to use with FreeBSD

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.

FreeBSD works perfectly on intel MacBooks if you've got one laying around: https://joshua.hu/FreeBSD-on-MacbookPro-114-A1398

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.

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.

> 9/10

> half of networking doesnt work, and it's the more important one for laptop(wifi)

I think they need to revise the scoring

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'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.

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.

There's an axiom here which is that the better your overall user experience is, the less hardware support you are going to have.

The more accessible software becomes the more infra is required to support it, and the more complex and convoluted the software will be

That's a very small list.

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).

The best resource to check support is https://dmesgd.nycbug.org/dmesgd

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?

Good old FreeBSD - always trying to catch up to Linux.