Recommended laptop for FreeBSD 10.2 Xfce workstation?

[Torfinn Ingolfsen]

On Fri, 25 Mar 2016 23:15:42 -0700
David Christensen <dpchrist at holgerdanske.com> wrote:

> freebsd-mobile:
> 
> I'm looking for a new or used laptop that is known to work correctly 
> with FreeBSD 10.2, Xfce, Firefox, Thunderbird, (whatever free) Office, 
> etc., plus encryption and virtualization.
> 

Notes on your points:
1. Intel Graphics might not work. Most modern laptops use UEFI, which allows you to use scfb - it might work, but it isn't a graphics race horse.
13. There are only a limited number of sd card controllers that has been tested - if the laptop has a different one, it might not be detected at all.

Some things you haven't mentioned:
suspend / hibernation - this might not work at all. FWIW, my newest laptop have a SSD instead of a "spinning rust" hard drive - this makes shutdown / startup time acceptable for me, so I don't need suspend - I simply shutdown my laptop before going somewhere else. YMMV.
battery time - on some laptops, FreeBSD's power management isn't as good as in other operating systems (for example Linux), resulting in a shorter run-time on battery when you run FreeBSD on the machine.

Question:
4. Why do you want to have an optical drive built into your laptop? Do you use optical media that often? For me, I use optical media rarely these days, so a usb connected optical reader / burner is enough.

It is hard to recommend anything specific; currently any given laptop model lasts about 3 - 6 months before the vendor drops it (or changes internal components). Also, figuring out what the internal components actually are (in hope of matching against FreeBSD supported hardware list) is difficult as vendors rarely describe the specification at that level of detail.

HTH
-- 
Torfinn Ingolfsen <torfinn.ingolfsen at getmail.no>