
ThinkPad T480 is my new main laptop which runs FreeBSD - sev
https://genneko.github.io/playing-with-bsd/hardware/freebsd-on-thinkpad-t480/
======
xxpor
>Ethernet and WiFi work, although WiFi is a bit slow (only up to 802.11a?)
compared to 802.11n/802.11ac capable OSes.

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?

~~~
tedunangst
Because it's fast enough you don't notice it's "slow" outside of benchmarks?

~~~
dijit
802.11a is not just slow in benchmarks. That’s easily perceptibly slow, even
when doing ordinary web browsing (given that web pages are orders of magnitude
larger than when 802.11a was mainstream)

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.

~~~
reidrac
It operates on the 5GHz frequency, instead of 2.4GHz of 802.11b/g (802.11b was
more popular when 802.11g was still a draft).

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.

~~~
martey
> _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._

This ignores the historical fact that 802.11a cards predate 802.11g by
multiple years - A-only cards were available in 2001 when the initial draft of
the G standard was announced.

~~~
reidrac
I'm talking about the year 2003 in Spain. Perhaps I should have mentioned it.

802.11g was still a draft. There were serious issues to use cards from
different vendors to talk to each other, and 802.11b cards were common.

Anyway, 802.11a frequency didn't play well with walls (or other solids), added
to the shorter range compared with 802.11b (and g), in 2003 b was king and g
was introduced early because of the higher speed.

------
vesche
I also use a T480 as my main laptop and love it. Here are my notes & dotfiles
for running Arch Linux:
[https://github.com/vesche/t480](https://github.com/vesche/t480)

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](https://github.com/erpalma/throttled)

~~~
nextos
Is it silent? I've found recent Thinkpads to be a hit and miss in terms of
good thermal cooling and fan firmware.

Sadly fan speed is not adjustable by the user in the last few generations.

I'm also curious about their new AMD offerings.

~~~
weystrom
I have one at work and it's not, I ended up using my personal MBP13 instead.

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.

~~~
organsnyder
My T480 is fairly quiet unless it's under pretty heavy load. I do have the
model with discrete graphics, which apparently has much better cooling (even
when the discrete chip isn't being used).

------
gruturo
Checking in with a Lenovo Carbon X1 gen1 running FreeBSD flawlessly.
Everything works including suspend/resume, the only things I never tried to
use are the camera and fingerprint reader but I guess I'll check out of
curiosity.

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.

------
agentultra
I use one of those too and made the switch rather recently from a MBPr. I used
Linux Mint on it.

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.

~~~
ajford
This is exactly what I've done for the last 5 years or so. I'm currently
running a T460 I picked up almost two years ago for under $500 and is now
running Xubuntu 18.04. My wife's running an X1 Yoga gen 2 that I picked up for
around $400.

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.

~~~
zhte415
ThinkPads last forever. I'm still on a T420 and X220 (travel), upgraded SSD
and new batteries, and have no desire to change.

------
yingw787
I’ve been eying FreeBSD for my next project once feature parity is finalized
and I begin to lock down the build chain for long term storage. I think one
nice thing about FreeBSD is how the entire ecosystem is maintained by the same
team of core developers vs. Linux which focuses on the kernel and has a wider
more heterogeneous ecosystem. I want something stable, that has great console
mode, and has great Ethernet support, and is absolutely rock solid. Does
FreeBSD fit the bill there?

~~~
livueta
Probably fits your requirements. One interesting thing to remember about
FreeBSD is that a lot of commercial users of it use it as a base for
enterprise appliances (think storage arrays, proxies, DPI boxes, etc). This
means that the project as a whole is fairly beholden to these users, who
provide a nice chunk of the project's funding and many of its professional
committers.

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.

------
lifeisstillgood
I dropped FreeBSD as my main laptop about four years ago (and have invested a
fair bit of time on dockerising my experience on ubuntu so going back is hard)

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.

~~~
zelly
> 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.

This is basically the business model of Apple Computers

~~~
jonhohle
I had a professor who made this same comment all the way back in 2003. I had
mentioned it would be nice to have a supported Unix-like OS on a laptop. A few
months later I bought my first PowerBook and have been using a commercially
supported Unix ever since (and FreeBSD on my headless computers).

------
chx
4 months ago I wrote up how insane value the T480 is:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/dd2i3y/can_we_tal...](https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/dd2i3y/can_we_talk_for_a_moment_about_how_insane_a_value/)
and most of that still stands.

~~~
hnruss
I paid twice as much for mine when it was the latest model (I got few
upgrades, though). I'm pretty happy with the T480 overall, but if Lenovo
releases another T-series with a significantly better CPU then I'll probably
get it. I didn't think that I needed the dedicated graphics card, but now I
think that having the additional cooling would help.

------
revicon
I also have a t480, mines running Ubuntu but unfortunately I’m giving it up
for a new MacBook Air. The touchpads on the thinkpads are beyond horrible
after using macs for many years, it’s finally too annoying for me to keep
going :(

~~~
wldlyinaccurate
If you want to stick with Linux, I can vouch for Dell's XPS range. I've been
running Ubuntu and Arch on various generations of XPS 13 for about 8 years now
with minimal issues. Honestly, my work-issued Macbooks have been more
problematic than my XPS laptops. It definitely helps that Dell actively
support Ubuntu and provide kernel patches.

~~~
jhallenworld
If you want something cheap: For Linux 18.04 / Windows 10 dual boot, I just
bought an HP 15-cs2073cl: $450 refurb from Microcenter. Everything works and I
think the price is pretty good for a Core-i7 / 16 GB / 1920 / 1TB laptop.

Here's a link, but I see the price already gone up a little:

[https://www.microcenter.com/product/612786/hp-
pavilion-15-cs...](https://www.microcenter.com/product/612786/hp-
pavilion-15-cs2073cl-156-laptop-computer-refurbished---blue)

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.

~~~
paulcarroty
> NVIDIA GeForce MX250

NVidia, no way to working fine on Linux: you will wait for new drivers after
each kernel update and tons of another issues.

~~~
jhallenworld
You are not wrong, this is what I've found:

As installed: 18.04 works, but long delay when you login because nouveau
driver is having problems (a bunch of timeouts from it in dmesg). But it does
seem to work (I didn't understand the reason for the delay at first).

Install Nvidia closed-source "435" driver: the above problem is fixed, but now
it does not recover from suspend.

Force it to use the Intel GPU with "nvidia-settings". Now all is good. Intel
driver is supposed to be lower power anyway.

It's interesting that the there are two GPUs that can share the same video
port.

There is also something going with the WIFI driver:

    
    
         iwlwifi 0000:00:14.3: FW already configured (0) - re-configuring
         iwlwifi 0000:00:14.3: BIOS contains WGDS but no WRDS
    

But it does work.

I've found that installing a 1 TB M.2 EVO 860 SSD works, and you can also have
the mechanical hard drive at the same time. However, the BIOS is stupid: it
always wants to boot from the 2.5" drive, so you need to install grub on it. I
used a Samsung migration tool to move Windows 10 to the SSD, but Windows
itself is stupid- it's random whether it boots the new SSD partition or the
old 2.5" partition.

------
ptcampbell
Mac user here. Still use a desktop Mac mini daily, but have replaced my 13"
Macbook Pro for a 14" Thinkpad running Ubuntu.

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).

~~~
city41
I run Ubuntu MATE 18 on three different Thinkpads and they all work perfectly
with zero tinkering. The only issue is they chew through the battery in no
time, but since I’m almost always plugged in I’ve not bothered to investigate
a fix.

~~~
ptcampbell
I've found the "CPU Power Manager" add-on pretty good for battery life. I
flick between the profiles depending on what I'm doing. Could be better, but I
still get at least 4 hours on the "Multimedia" setting.

------
castratikron
Why disable the TPM? One cool thing you can do is store your SSH private key
inside:

[https://blog.habets.se/2013/11/TPM-chip-protecting-SSH-
keys-...](https://blog.habets.se/2013/11/TPM-chip-protecting-SSH-keys-
properly.html)

~~~
zelly
Yes but the TPM can only generate its own RSA key. You can't take an existing
private key and store it in the TPM.

~~~
Thorrez
That's generally what you want. If the private key only ever existed in the
TPM then you know there aren't any copies in an attacker's hands somewhere
(ignoring hardware vulnerabilities). But if you copy a key into the TPM, there
could have been malware that stole a copy of the key beforehand.

------
namirez
The other good development with Thinkpads is the introduction of AMD
processors in their mainstream offerings (T495, T495s, X395, etc.).
Unfortunately their screens suck though.

~~~
funklute
The screens are actually the very reason I choose a thinkpad over a mac. Gloss
screens are pretty much impossible to work on if you prefer dark colorschemes,
and at least the thinkpads give you the matte option.

~~~
hdkwowjdj
Another of these things I don't get. Matte screens become unreadable with
indirect light. I've been a long time ThinkPad user.

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.

~~~
funklute
I don't think I fully understand what conditions you are talking about. I very
rarely put my screen brightness any higher than 50%, and I've never maxed it
out. My first thought is that it's not the brightness, but the contrast, that
is the cause of your problems? Or perhaps I just have a model with a brighter
screen... (currently on a T460, though I don't remember the screen specifics)

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.

~~~
hdkwowjdj
Let's say you have a lamp behind your screen. The light will be visible on
your screen in some way.

With a reflective screen, you'll see a reflection of lamp, bright and clear. I
think everybody agrees that this is annoying.

With matte screen, the reflection isn't strong or clear, but a larger portion
of the screen is affected, since the matte layer scatters the light.

With a anti-reflective but non-matte screen, you'll see a 1:1 reflection - but
only very very dim.

In my experience across the Lenovo matte screens, and comparing it to MacBook
screens, I found the latter to work better.

There's a significant difference between the MacBook and cheapo reflective
screens.

------
rhabarba
Ah, finally: A thread where everyone can just post their hardware and software
combinations.

~~~
rv-de
this.

------
orisho
I use a Thinkpad T490s and it works great with Ubuntu out of the box. Only
thing that doesn't work is clicking the touchpad for right click, but since
the Thinkpad comes with physical left and right buttons that was a non-issue.

~~~
ahnick
On my T480 I can use two fingers to trigger a right-click. The only issue I
ran into with the mouse was where both right-click and two finger scrolling
don't work after I have resume the laptop from sleep. To workaround this issue
I just reload the mouse driver. It doesn't really bother my workflow much, but
if it does then I'll run this rmouse command in the terminal. (I probably
should script this to run on resume automatically, but I'm lazy :-) )

 _alias rmouse= "sudo modprobe -r psmouse && sudo modprobe psmouse"_

~~~
revicon
Wow, this is something that's been bugging me constantly. Thanks for the tip.

------
moneromoney
Try the new Thinkpad X1 Extreme Gen 2:

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.

------
gzu
The T480s has so much better build quality. Its all metal vs T480 which is
plasticity and soft touch. Not sure why you would choose T480 unless you
REALLY need > 24gb ram or giant extended battery.

Even the inside is better built. The plastic front clips of the T480 backplate
break super easily, whereas the T480s has replaceable clips.

~~~
ahnick
I have a T480 and I've definitely needed >24GB of ram before when running some
VMs. It has come in handy. Don't forget too that the T480 has hot-swappable
batteries, which is really nice on extended coding sessions where I'm not
plugged in or if I'm traveling. Also, I love the rubbery feel of it. It feels
solid in my hand and doesn't slip at all. Admittedly that is subjective
though. :-)

------
floatboth
> SD card reader seems to work

Holy shit, Lenovo finally switched from that non-standard Realtek thingy
([https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=204521](https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=204521))
to something that exposes SDHCI over PCIe?

------
linuxhansl
Have been running Linux on Lenovo laptops forever. A T500, then a T440p, now
an X1E Gen2 (can't remember what I used before the T500).

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.

------
867-5309
i7-8550U paired with a 1TB 5400rpm? that's not a bottleneck, that's a bottle
cap with a pinhole.

------
caycep
I hate the trackpad/nubbins on those things. At least for Win10. the
response/behavior isn't really consistent between it seeming to want a swipe,
a tap, right or left buttons and whatnot.

------
enjoyyourlife
Reminds me of Stallman's "How I do my computing" post

[https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html](https://stallman.org/stallman-
computing.html)

~~~
ngcc_hk
That is one of few pieces of him that is comfortable to read. No feeling of an
angry old man shouting at you. Quite a statesman like talking his way of life
in fact. Enjoyable read.

And good to hear it is just keyboard causing his hand problem. Feel sorry when
a hacker have pain in using keyboard. Good article.

------
vharish
Have you worked on external monitors with this setup? The last time I've
tried, it had been a pain. The monitors were detected fine, but the scaling
was completely off.

------
devgoth
I really want to try a ThinkPad with Ubuntu. Currently using an older DELL XPS
13 with Ubuntu and no issues so far expect the trackpad is going out

------
2ion
I won't buy another laptop without dedicated graphics card, which rules out
most Thinkpads. Sorry, but igpu is not enough these days.

~~~
jtreminio
Funnily enough, I had wanted to purchase my Dell XPS 9570 (15") without dgpu,
but they only offered it for their 13" model.

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).

~~~
migglesnz
I have a T480S powering a 4k monitor on the igpu and it's more than happy to
play 4k Youtube even without hardware acceleration.

------
fmakunbound
Admire the dude who spend time tinkering and getting it right like that.

------
jotm
Replacing the main desktop, huh?

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.

~~~
jotm
As always I wonder what sad fucks downvoted this. Just ban this account and
put me out of my misery.

------
0xff00ffee
How about the trackpad? And the power switch?

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.

~~~
allochthon
Slightly related: I'm running Ubuntu on a Thinkpad and the trackpad is pretty
painful to use (after using macOS for years). I went out and bought a mouse a
few days ago for this reason.

~~~
0xff00ffee
It is bizarre how good mac laptop touchpads are. I've used a number of Windows
laptops and nothing comes close (caveat: I've never used a top-tier Win
laptop).

------
whatsmyusername
I mean, I'm going to ask the question.

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.

