Recommended laptop for FreeBSD 10.2 Xfce workstation?

[Ian Smith]

On Thu, 31 Mar 2016 14:22:43 +0200, Torfinn Ingolfsen wrote:
 > 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.

If David is prepared to consider a used laptop, a bit earlier than the 
latest bleeding-edge hardware, there are likely quite a few suitable 
machines that won't have many of the issues that are still problematic 
with the very latest kit, whoever the manufacturer.

 > 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.

FreeBSD doesn't do hibernation (S4, suspend-to-disk) at all, but there 
are quite a few laptops that do a great job of S3 (suspend-to-RAM), for 
instance most of the higher-end Lenovos (T- and X- series especially), 
which have been and are frequently used by some FreeBSD developers.

Explore the wiki: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Laptops

For an example of something not much older that might tick a lot of your 
boxes: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Laptops/Thinkpad_T540p

 > 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.

I get nearly 6 hours at idle on my (older again) Lenovo X200 with the 
smaller 6-cell battery, but that's more a notebook.  Power management 
responds well to some tuning, eg whether using the deeper sleep states 
and tuning powerd(8) for desired power saving vs responsiveness, etc.

 > 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.

Agreed, this requirement would seriously limit available choices.

 > 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.

Well, as others on freebsd-questions responded on this topic, it's 
rarely worth buying new and cheap.  With Lenovos, for example, the 
cheaper W- and G-series seem generally far more problematic than the 
more upmarket ones .. whereas if buying used you can probably get two 
higher-quality machines for the price of one lesser-quality new one, 
speaking generally of course.

cheers, Ian  (who still has one working IBM T23 with three spares :)