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.
>It's crazy how much negativity there is in comment threads like this
I think it's because this chart continues a trend I've noticed with BSD zealots. Namely, there's some sort of reality distortion effect at play.
Consider that there are obvious bullshit scores on TFA, like giving a laptop 9/10 when the fucking wifi doesn't work. In reality, this should be 5/10 or arguably 0/10. After all, what use is a laptop without wifi? If my laptop's wifi didn't work I wouldn't just buy a usb-ethernet adapter and never bring it anywhere; I would get a new laptop because a laptop without WiFi is useless.
On top of that there was a while here where every BSD thread had:
- a comment about how BSD powers the PlayStation, Netflix, and other FAANGs, except those corps don't contribute enough back because of the license so won't you please subsidize these giant corps by donating to BSD?
- people who argue BSD is superior because it's "more cohesive" and "feels cleaner" or similar
- OpenBSD zealots claiming it's 110% secure because trust me bro
Mostly I'm just tired of people claiming BSD is this amazing new thing with no flaws, when reality is that it has got some niche use cases, I suspect lots of its developers don't even dogfood it, and is otherwise superceded by Linux in nearly every meaningful way.
I have no problem with BSD, and I have two boxes in my basement running freeBSD right now, but I'm not delusional about BSD's limitations.
It’s fine bro you don’t need audio or suspend or Bluetooth or WiFi or multi touch. All you need is a serial cable and emacs to actually have a good computer experience. Please bro just try BSD. It has the ports system.
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)
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.
Years ago, there was a project combining Debian with the kernel from FreeBSD. That never made sense to me and the project seems to have died meanwhile. More sensible, IMHO, might be to bolt the FreeBSD user space unto the Linux kernel. That way one would get fairly broad and current hardware support and could still enjoy a classic Unix look&feel and stable ABI.
Moreover, many laptops working on Linux perfectly, are not Ubuntu certified. Lenovo Legion series generally works well, but it is not in the Ubuntu list. Id we'd make a list of all 8/10 or more compatible laptops, it would be huge.
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).
This happened exactly to me also, I suspect some flexing in the motherboard or other component; right now it is complaining about the RAM and reseating hasn’t fixed it. Great laptop otherwise however!
Now to be fair, in a few ways I think it is ahead. Now if you said "catch up to Linux in hardware support" I would fully agree.
Last I heard, its VM (swap/memory) processes is still better, but seems many Linux people avoid swap space these days. FWIW, I always have swap on any system that allows it.
And Jails, IMO nothing on Linux comes close to how good FreeBSD Jails is.
Incus is pretty damn good to be fair. You can mix and match VMs and containers, the terraform provider "just works", the setup is fast and easy, it plays well with ZFS. Now I wouldn't be surprised if it still lags jails (or Illumos Zones) in robustness or some capabilities but I'm a happy user of them 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.
>It's crazy how much negativity there is in comment threads like this
I think it's because this chart continues a trend I've noticed with BSD zealots. Namely, there's some sort of reality distortion effect at play.
Consider that there are obvious bullshit scores on TFA, like giving a laptop 9/10 when the fucking wifi doesn't work. In reality, this should be 5/10 or arguably 0/10. After all, what use is a laptop without wifi? If my laptop's wifi didn't work I wouldn't just buy a usb-ethernet adapter and never bring it anywhere; I would get a new laptop because a laptop without WiFi is useless.
On top of that there was a while here where every BSD thread had:
- a comment about how BSD powers the PlayStation, Netflix, and other FAANGs, except those corps don't contribute enough back because of the license so won't you please subsidize these giant corps by donating to BSD?
- people who argue BSD is superior because it's "more cohesive" and "feels cleaner" or similar
- OpenBSD zealots claiming it's 110% secure because trust me bro
Mostly I'm just tired of people claiming BSD is this amazing new thing with no flaws, when reality is that it has got some niche use cases, I suspect lots of its developers don't even dogfood it, and is otherwise superceded by Linux in nearly every meaningful way.
I have no problem with BSD, and I have two boxes in my basement running freeBSD right now, but I'm not delusional about BSD's limitations.
> 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
It seems like the best way to get WiFi working in FreeBSD is to run Linux in bhyve and tunnel your connections through there.
the fact that this is a widely accepted/encouraged practice is genuinely unhinged
It’s fine bro you don’t need audio or suspend or Bluetooth or WiFi or multi touch. All you need is a serial cable and emacs to actually have a good computer experience. Please bro just try BSD. It has the ports system.
FreeBSD works perfectly on intel MacBooks if you've got one laying around: https://joshua.hu/FreeBSD-on-MacbookPro-114-A1398
Probably not T2 MacBooks though.
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)
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.
That's a very small list.
Yeah, compare to https://ubuntu.com/certified/laptops it is.
Years ago, there was a project combining Debian with the kernel from FreeBSD. That never made sense to me and the project seems to have died meanwhile. More sensible, IMHO, might be to bolt the FreeBSD user space unto the Linux kernel. That way one would get fairly broad and current hardware support and could still enjoy a classic Unix look&feel and stable ABI.
Moreover, many laptops working on Linux perfectly, are not Ubuntu certified. Lenovo Legion series generally works well, but it is not in the Ubuntu list. Id we'd make a list of all 8/10 or more compatible laptops, it would be huge.
It’s a subset of a subset. The sets being (FreeBSD users (with laptops (who can be bothered to write about them on an obscure wiki)))
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
This happened exactly to me also, I suspect some flexing in the motherboard or other component; right now it is complaining about the RAM and reseating hasn’t fixed it. Great laptop otherwise however!
Good old FreeBSD - always trying to catch up to Linux.
Glad to see this list, will keep an eye on it !
Now to be fair, in a few ways I think it is ahead. Now if you said "catch up to Linux in hardware support" I would fully agree.
Last I heard, its VM (swap/memory) processes is still better, but seems many Linux people avoid swap space these days. FWIW, I always have swap on any system that allows it.
And Jails, IMO nothing on Linux comes close to how good FreeBSD Jails is.
Incus is pretty damn good to be fair. You can mix and match VMs and containers, the terraform provider "just works", the setup is fast and easy, it plays well with ZFS. Now I wouldn't be surprised if it still lags jails (or Illumos Zones) in robustness or some capabilities but I'm a happy user of them now.