
FreeBSD on the Lenovo Thinkpad - dddddaviddddd
https://www.davidschlachter.com/misc/t480-freebsd
======
floatboth
Please stop cargo culting all the loader tunables and sysctls you've seen :)
You need approximately zero i915 related ones because they're enabled by
default just like on Linux. You especially don't need both drm.i915 and
compat.linuxkpi copies. (The former is for older drivers, the latter is for
new ones)

Also moused is not a great way to use a touchpad. At least on 12-stable (idk
if it made it into a 12.x-release) EVDEV_SUPPORT is enabled out of the box, so
you can just set kern.evdev.rcpt_mask=12 and get proper evdev events,
separately for the trackpoint and touchpad, with full gesture support on the
touchpad.

And since you like i3, might want to try Sway – HiDPI is much better supported
on Wayland ;)

~~~
peterwwillis
This is why I won't use open source for a desktop anymore. It's so convoluted
and changes so often that I have to constantly keep track of multiple kernel
and userland systems in order to know what tweaks I _don 't_ need to make.

"Don't use the faffle-fille.123456 tweak, that's for the 2016 driver; the 2019
driver inherits the booble-babble hack from the nzudzu core. Also, the
611-double-decker-dev release added FOO_MANCHU support so you just need the
abcdefghijk=999 argument to set up all the things you would expect to work by
default."

I just want to pay someone to make my computer work the way it's designed to.

~~~
m712
If you are hinting to proprietary systems in your last sentence, you can go
ahead and pay someone to lock you into their ecosystem. This is how Free
Software works and I wouldn't have it any other way. People work on their own
and bring it together into one whole system, and that can cause
incompatibilities. However lock-step design is also one of the key ways to
destroy innovation. If you lack the desire to learn how to configure your
system, then you will probably not want to use a Free system. That's just how
it is.

~~~
zbentley
I hope this doesn't sound rude, but that is exactly why desktop Linux and
friends are a piss-poor experience compared to their proprietary counterparts.

There is a negative feedback look here. With enough of that kind of
"customization freaks only, casuals need not apply, enjoy your non-innovative
proprietary shitware" talk, user bases stay small and niche, people get
alienated, and don't contribute to or use free OSes.

It's perfectly reasonable to want to trade customizability for usability.
Chasing people who think that away from free software helps nobody.

~~~
floatboth
There's plenty of free polished out-of-the-box experiences, from
Ubuntu/Mint/elementary/whatever to _hardware_ from Purism and system76.

There's definitely some "customization freaks only" assholes on the internet
too, but…

very very often, it seems like some people perceive _that_ when a non-out-of-
the-box OS just _exists_ and people like using it just _personally for
themselves_.

~~~
zbentley
There is definitely progress here since the early '00s. However, there's a
very long way to go until even the most polished home-user Linux distros
approach the level of usability (and supportability, even more critical) of
proprietary OSes for non-power-users.

And I wasn't trying to paint everyone who wants to tinker with the same
"gatekeeping" brush, sorry if I came off that way. GP equated proprietary
software with "pay[ing] someone to lock you into their ecosystem" and
"destroy[ing] innovation", and ended with

> If you lack the desire to learn how to configure your system, then you will
> probably not want to use a Free system. That's just how it is.

That's the sentiment I had trouble with. Not the existence of knobs (which
should continue existing! Just with better tuning experience for casual users,
and saner defaults).

------
gen3
Would this be considered the standard amount of things someone would need to
work out to get a bsd laptop up and useable?(or are there more preconfigured
images?) Are Thinkpads best for support?

~~~
lars_francke
As someone who's just (last week) started to get Arch Linux up and running on
a T490 I would assume that: Yes, this is _at least_ the amount of things you
need to do but if my experience is any indication this is only like 10% of it.

Most of the things in Thinkpads work but not all (notably the latest WWAN LTE
Modems don't have support).

I could write up my experience if there's interest.

~~~
faizshah
I just set up a new laptop with fedora because I figured Arch would be too
much effort. Is it really that easy to get running? I figured with arch when
you run into an issue it must be much harder to fix than fedora or ubuntu. I
just want to open up an ide, terminal, and a browser but arch seems to be a
whole hobby in itself.

~~~
jplayer01
If you like to tinker for hours, Arch. Otherwise Manjaro, which works out of
the box and still gives you the benefits of Arch.

~~~
eptcyka
Manjaro is strictly worse when it comes to the quality of software.

I wouldn't agree that installing Arch is that big of a hassle - yes, you don't
a nice menu based installer, but really, after setting up all of your
partitions, installing the root filesystem, adding a user, and installing some
packages, and installing hte bootloader, what else is there to do? To be fair,
the install process has become easier over the years, as things like timezones
and locales are becoming easier to configure due to systemd. But I must
concede, if you've never partitioned a drive manually, or added a user, you'll
want to take your time. And I always read the wiki's install instructions
anyway. And whilst this does mean that there's a bit more complexity
associated with setting up Arch, if you're using installing a non-standard OS
on your hardware, the knowledge you gain will by doing so will almost always
turn out to be useful in some way. As far as tinkering with it, I've never had
to explicitly tinker with exotic configs to get my hardware to work as good or
better than it would on Ubuntu, and to get my exotic config requirements to
work is far easier on Arch than it is on Debian, Ubuntu or Fedora. Manjaro is
so broken that I can't even boot the gnome installer on a VM. Besides, it's
far easier to manage my machine if there's no auto-updater grabbing a lock on
my package manager on for the first 15 minutes of a boot, every boot (looking
at you Fedora), or having an update process that may leave you with a severely
outdated kernel even though you jumped through the hoops to get a recent
kernel (Looking at you Ubuntu 16.04 LTS).

~~~
jplayer01
> Manjaro is strictly worse when it comes to the quality of software.

I haven't made this experience with Manjaro on several systems.

Setting up Arch isn't just about partitioning and adding a user. That's
trivial stuff that I'm simply not talking about. Though somehow Arch's
documentation has become significantly worse for complete newbies ever since
they got rid of the new user's guide and you end up having to read a bunch of
utterly irrelevant stuff in order to find the magic incantation that actually
works (and no, it doesn't actually explain anywhere why it works the way it
does).

I've had to do tons of messing around with settings just to get Arch working
properly on different systems. I had problems with resume working properly on
my Thinkpad for forever, and less decently supported systems had more issues.
I'm just not that kind of user anymore and I don't want to be my own tech
support. I have enough to juggle in userland pertaining to my actual job that
I simply do. not. want. anything going wrong that I'll have to dig into some
obscure config file somewhere to fix.

Manjaro gives me most of the benefits of Arch without having to waste my time
with setting up an Arch system just perfectly so it simply works. I have
access to the AUR and I have reasonably up-to-date packages (and I do run
unstable on my laptop, which usually works fine).

Some people just want to use Linux, not _live and breath_ Linux, and this
constant resistance against users who don't want to wade knee-deep in config
bullshit is completely infuriating.

You run Arch. Successfully. Congratulations. You're better than everybody
else.

~~~
eptcyka
I never tried to imply that running one distribution implies any kind of
supremacy, so I do apologize if I came across like that. My opinion that
Manjaro provides bad software stems from two things - my short experiences
trying to set it up to test userland things that did not work correctly on
Manjaro and a significant amount of bug reports coming in from Manjaro when
compared to other distros. But this being Linux, it's feasible that you've had
a much better experience with Manjaro, and since I don't have any good
statistical data about the bug reports I am aware of, I'll concede that is is
just a fluke. However, the packages do seem to lag behind by quite a bit. I'll
have to disagree that the current installation wiki is worse than the
beginner's guide - it might containt irrelevant things, but that is only
because there isn't one correct way to install Arch, and most of the
duplication stems from different filesystem setups and different bootloaders.
It's not meant to be read as prose, but the original beginners guide wasn't
either, since it too had a lot of duplication of steps to deal with the
multiplicity of installation options.

------
gchokov
Things like these are still the reason I am not switching away from Mac OS

~~~
kbumsik
Congrats, now you literally can't switch away from macOS! Thanks for the new
T2 chip you can't use native Linux/BSD (anything other than Windows and
macOS.)

UEFI is fine booting a third party OS when SecureBoot is disabled BUT the T2
chip blocks accessing the internal storage from those OSs [1][2]

[1]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/a4thsc/the_actual_fu...](https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/a4thsc/the_actual_full_story_about_apples_t2_chip_from/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app)

[2]
[https://twitter.com/LinusTech/status/1067232394934083584](https://twitter.com/LinusTech/status/1067232394934083584)

~~~
dchest
T2 chip doesn't block access, Linux just didn't have a suitable driver ("It's
not NVMe compliant, hence it won't work with the in-kernel NVMe driver"
[https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=202567](https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=202567)).
There's a kernel patch to make it work:
[https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux/issues/71#issuecom...](https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux/issues/71#issuecomment-507325112)

------
JeremyMorgan
I am trying to think of valid reasons why someone would use FreeBSD in this
day and age as a desktop. I'm not being snarky, I'm genuinely curious.

I used FreeBSD a TON from around 1998-2004 or so. I did it because I could
configure an environment to develop in that ran fast on the hardware.

At some point the type of development I do (Web) really took off on Linux and
OSX so I drifted that way.

I'm going to spin up a VM of FreeBSD just to check it out, but why are folks
using it as a Desktop these days?

~~~
asveikau
I think the reason to use it over desktop Linux is pretty similar to the time
range you talk about. It has a different feel and some people are more
comfortable with the *BSD way.

The difference in personality has widened a bit as Linux comes up with things
like systemd. If you just want a light Unix workstation that isn't trying to
imitate Windows or Mac, the BSDs will get in your way less. That or a very
conservative Linux distro.

~~~
JeremyMorgan
I'm an Arch user right now, for the last 8 or 9 years. I've gotten very
comfortable in that ecosystem. I don't imagine things would be much different
doing what I do now in BSD I would just need a good reason to switch. In the
past, much of it was based on performance and being able to script everything,
which I still get with Arch.

~~~
asveikau
In my limited use of arch it does seem to be one of the distros that someone
with *BSD type aesthetics wouldn't mind.

------
gaspoweredcat
may have a crack at this, ive been meaning to look into desktop freeBSD for a
while and i suspect these tweaks should be similar for the X1C6

------
philliphaydon
So I could put this on my X1 Extreme? I wonder if it would improve battery
life.

~~~
LeonM
Only if you are willing to invest lots of time to get it somewhat usable, and
if you don't use too many peripherals.

I can't even get Ubuntu to run properly on my X1E, the 4K display completely
breaks grub and the dual GPU situation causes loads of problems when
connecting an external display though thunderbolt. Battery life is worse
compared to Windows (3h vs 5h).

~~~
mbi
FWIW, I installed Ubuntu 19.04 on my X1E-4k using this [0] guide and it has
been working flawlessly (with an external display via thunderbolt).

The battery life _is_ much worse than on Windows, can't deny that.

0: [https://bauklimatik-
dresden.de/privat/nicolai/index.html?htt...](https://bauklimatik-
dresden.de/privat/nicolai/index.html?https&&&bauklimatik-
dresden.de/privat/nicolai/html/en/lenovo_x1_extreme_ubuntu1804.html)

~~~
LeonM
Thanks for the link, looks like there are some good tips on there! I'll try it
out tonight.

One of the problems I've ran into is that my external 4k monitor (40") runs at
100% scaling and my laptop 4k monitor at 200%, which causes all sorts of
rendering bugs. After some searching I found that this has nothing to do with
the X1E or Ubuntu for that matter. It's a X11/Wayland issue that just isn't
properly implemented yet.

Edit: it looks like this guide also instructs to switch to 'discrete graphics'
in the BIOS. This is a hack and not what you want. This causes the nVidia
graphics chip to be always on (instead of letting the OS choose). This causes
terrible battery life. Don't do that.

------
pcr910303
The comments about using macOS instead of Linux or {Free,Open}BSD are getting
downvoted in somewhat obscure reasons.

It's not that Linux isn't usable with minimal tweaking, I'm pretty sure macOS
users also do a fair amount of tweaking (with, e.g. mapping keys with
Karabiner (swapping Control & Caps Lock doesn't need third-party apps BTW),
making the TouchBar useful again with HapticKey, etc...).

The problem is that Linux doesn't get fundamental things (in a user-
perspective) right. It's a few months ago, so I'm not sure if the bug still
remains, but the latest version of Ubuntu still has HiDPI problems (at least
in VMware Fusion - and VMs are pretty standard to test OSes, right?) related
to mouse pointer size, sleep doesn't work without configuring with systemd for
a few hours about one-third of all of my Linux laptops, WPA2 Enterprise Wi-Fi
connecting is an hassle, configuring input-systems for CJK languages require
making a systemd service manually(!), installing packages are needed to use
exFAT USB (I've heard that the Linux Kernel has now gained exFAT support by
Microsoft, but it's still months later for the user), adding apt repository
hangs when done with aptitude so the user has to touch /etc/, and the list
goes on...

Are these issues really 'configurable' issues? They aren't, but everyone kinda
says, 'Fiddle with {systemd and you will get manageable {battery life,Wi-Fi
connection,HiDPI support, etc...}' And that's the reason why people just use
macOS instead.

~~~
Carpetsmoker
I don't go around macOS stories with "macOS sucks, this is why I use Linux".
It's off-topic noise at best, and just pointless caring about what systems
other people run at worst.

So yeah, -1 from me to all of those posts, and also the Arch Linux one (I'm
typing this from an Arch machine). I don't think the reasons are that obscure:
it's off-topic and doesn't contribute. Your post at least has some depth to
it, but on the other hand, it's the same discussion ... every time.

~~~
peterwwillis
If someone posted a story called "Driving on Water", and it was all about how
you could modify your car to get it to drive on a lake... sure, it's
interesting... but it would certainly be worth pointing out that boats exist,
and that boats are perhaps much easier at doing what you're trying to do,
which is transportation on water. Maybe there's some reason the original
posters aren't using boats, and they can share that information. We don't know
until we start communicating about it.

~~~
Carpetsmoker
Everyone here is already familiar with all the major operating systems,
including macOS. There is no value in rehashing this debate all over again
here – which isn't even what most comments are doing, they're just digs at
FreeBSD/Linux.

~~~
peterwwillis
I don't think we're trying to debate as much as point out problems unique to
some OSes, and how we wish it were different. I would very much like to use
Linux as a desktop, if setting it up weren't a garbage fire. It doesn't have
to be this way.

------
gfiorav
It's such a risk you take by getting a WQHD screen on Linux. I've had trouble
to get things to scale, setting for the workable (albeit far from perfect)
option to scale fonts. I wonder how well this setup works with different UIs,
system icons, etc.

~~~
dddddaviddddd
Lots of things are not quite right (e.g. save dialogs never seem to be sized
logically), most things are okay though. What I use most (terminal, browser)
are great.

------
PPAqualifier
Arch Linux is the only Linux. It's so easy to learn and use. Arch Linux is the
only operating system. It takes 20 minutes to learn arch if you know Linux and
Unix.

~~~
enriquto
arch feels to me like an over-engineered mess. For a truer unix experience I'd
rather suggest void or slack.

~~~
mruts
I used to run Slackware, and the user experience is pretty terrible compared
to Arch or OpenBSD. The absence of a package manager that tracks dependencies
is not a “truer” Unix experience. All the BSDs provide a more Unixy experience
than Linux and they all track dependencies.

If Slackware was updated more often, the system would work better. The dynamic
libs are always way out of date, and god help you if you want to install a
newer version.

~~~
enriquto
this depends on your point of view. For me, being able to install a package
even when some dependences are not met is a fundamental feature.

Regarding the versions, slackware-current is a very up-to-date rolling distro
(e.g. much more so than ubuntu).

~~~
mruts
I mean, you can install packages without deps with Arch as well. Also, why is
that important to you?

~~~
bildung
Same for Debian and its forks (dpkg --ignore-depends) and I'm pretty sure
rpm/yum has a similar option.

------
peterkelly
And this is why I still use a mac

~~~
whynotminot
Haha, right? I understand if someone genuinely enjoys configuration.

But gosh I just need my machine to get up and going so I can make some money
and then go back to living.

~~~
8draco8
FreeBSD is for people that like to thinker with OS. Same as Arch on Linux
side. I'm using Ubuntu for pretty much everything for over 10 years now and
everything is just easy and fast. My current installation of Ubuntu Mate has
been done 3.5 years ago as 16.04. Since then I went trough 4 distro upgrades,
16.04 > 16.10 > 17.04 > 17.10 > 18.04LTS and since in 18.04 they introduced
snaps I decided to stick to LTS releases with my apps like JetBrains apps
installed via snaps for latest updates. Somewhere in that update cycle I
upgraded my machine and just pulled SSD from old machine and plugged it in
into the new one and it just worked. The system is also being backed up into
Synology NAS so when in meantime I bought small laptop for travel I basically
"restored" my main PC into that laptop so I didn't have to manually setup
everything. It's pretty simple. Unfortunately it doesn't move applications
like TimeMachine does, only the settings so I had to install apps like
SublimeText myself but settings was already in there.

If your workflow can be moved outside of MacOS ecosystem then it's worth to
checkout Linux especially Ubuntu (and all it flavors) as an alternative.

~~~
whynotminot
I actually do use Ubuntu every day for development. I also use macOS every
day. They both get the job done relatively painlessly. I enjoy macOS more in
general, but I like using Ubuntu in a VM because I can snapshot and restore.

