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Ask HN: Laptop for FreeBSD?

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Re: Ask HN: Laptop for FreeBSD?

#41

Post by jdeve1op »

I used to use FreeBSD 4.3 ⇒ 9.0 on desktops/laptops since 2002, and on 2012 I gave up and installed Arch Linux. Now I don't care much of broken ports or some inconsistencies in my local make.conf, "make buildworld" is a forgotten nightmare - if comparing with an update of linux kernel, which just works fine through pacman.

The most of pain I've got from USB support - literally I have been fighting with getting my built-in SD cardreader actually reading cards - not pretending to do so, for months. And nobody from USB-team even bothered to reply something other than "try to experiment with some quirks".

The final decision to move to Linux was lack of Java support - OpenJDK isn't that cool as Oracle's twin-mate.

Its not a hate-speeh or a flamewar ignition, it's just my IMHO - FreeBSD is not a comfortable to have it on a laptop, especially with some proprietary drivers involved.

Re: Ask HN: Laptop for FreeBSD?

#43

Post by RexRollman »

superuser2 wrote: post #31
jrgifford wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"OS X is very good at not having hardware compatibility issues" is a really, really old (and flawed) argument. The thing that makes OS X so darn "stable" is that they write drivers for a very limited set of hardware - the reference implementation. On the Linux reference implementation, everything works properly (See the ThinkPad T series). On the Windows reference implementation, everything works properly (See the Su…

>Simply because something works when it's built for a piece of hardware (think embedded systems) doesn't mean that it will work when running on something that it wasn't designed for. No one is advocating doing that. And no one gives a shit about how hard it was for the engineers. You should buy a Macbook precisely because it is a reference implementation that works as a consumer product. Let OSX deal with laptop-y de…

I've been doing that with NetBSD and VMWare Fusion on my 2013 Macbook Air with 8GB RAM. It's nice but I do miss running NetBSD on bare hardware.

OS X does add a lot of overhead and I would love to run NetBSD on a dedicated hypervisor. In particular I want to try with the free Hyper-V Server because it has such great hardware/driver support but HVS doesn't support wireless networking.

Re: Ask HN: Laptop for FreeBSD?

#44

Post by UNIXgod »

octix wrote: post #9

Does FreeBSD play nice with resolutions higher than 1080? I mean, I know linux still has issues and I always thought *BSD a re bit behind when it comes to Desktop experience. I think you should look for a good linux laptop 1st and check for FreeBSD compatibility.

I've been using FreeBSd since 4.x. I'm assuming your referring to video drivers and the xwindowing system which is non operating system specific. I should remind you that this is a subsystem (or extension) and should be viewed from the point of a view as power users (and engineers) already know where to find out about chipsets, their relabeling, and of course the ability to set up their configuration intelligently. More importantly a recommendation like this shouldn't be considered unless you've spent significant time building and customizing your OS and graphical layer.

Re: Ask HN: Laptop for FreeBSD?

#45

Post by TimSchumann »

I've been trying to talk myself out of using one of the BSD's as my day to day OS because I'm afraid all the productive hours in my life will turn into threads like this.

Mostly just commenting so I remember to check back on this tomorrow :-)

Re: Ask HN: Laptop for FreeBSD?

#47

Post by detaro »

tiffanyh wrote: post #36
cperciva wrote: post #12

I have been running FreeBSD on laptops since 2004. Right now the major problem you'll run into is that almost every system out there has Haswell video, and FreeBSD doesn't have a working driver for that yet. That said, there have been a lot of commits recently preparing the tree for importing a version of the linux Haswell driver, so I'm optimistic that this will be fixed soon. In the mean time, unless your need for…

>> "there have been a lot of commits recently preparing the tree for importing a version of the linux Haswell driver" Not meaning to start a license flame war, but how does this work? How does FreeBSD import something that's presumably GPL'ed?

By having the authors license the relevant bits under BSD as well.

Re: Ask HN: Laptop for FreeBSD?

#48

Post by bitshepherd »

Having been running FreeBSD on laptops since ~2004-2005, I've had the best luck out of Dell laptops. ThinkPads are a close second, but ACPI is wonky on mine, resulting in being able to sleep but not wake up. Fun times when I need to be mobile. :)

As with most things FreeBSD, you'll have better luck not running current generation of hardware, but the previous generation, as support for the newest hardware usually lags a bit.

Re: Ask HN: Laptop for FreeBSD?

#49

Post by contingencies »

Yeah, FreeBSD always sucked for hardware. For a random option with bonus hardcore points, you could consider running the SeL4 microkernel, then both Linux and FreeBSD as paravirtualized guests, letting Linux do the video. See http://sel4.systems/ and http://www.nicta.com.au/pub?pslides=8203

Re: Ask HN: Laptop for FreeBSD?

#50

Post by wsha »

bsg75 wrote: post #46

Curious (new to *BSD), why FreeBSD and not PC-BSD for a laptop?

PC-BSD is built on top of FreeBSD, so there's likely not much difference between something can run one vs. the other, especially if you want to set up a desktop environment (basically what PC-BSD provides).
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