231–240 of 245 posts
I won't buy another laptop without dedicated graphics card, which rules out most Thinkpads. Sorry, but igpu is not enough these days.
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It is. I never hear the fan running. But annoyingly, they've put the fan vent on the right side of the machine, so every now and then I can feel the hot air from the vent when my mouse is close to it, but I never hear it. Even in the quietest environments.
Sounds great. What component setup (CPU and GPU) do you have?
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Updates since 2004? It's like they took an old snapshot of BSD userspace and some of the syscall interface, except somewhat broken (see the long saga of broken select/kqueue in OSX). Fundamentally Darwin is a completely different beast based on Mach. It's radically different from the core BSD kernel. Most of their userspace is built on Objective-C, which has 0 overlap with BSDs. It's cool that the Mac community used…
> ...but they've forked whatever they took; they never work to integrate their changes back upstream. This is why I personally force GPLv3 licenses in my own projects, even if it's fairly small. MIT is a beautiful license but, unfortunately this happens when idealism collides head-on with private corporations.
The limited exception is Clang/LLVM, where to some extent they are the upstream.
(A clarification: I also like the MIT license, but the majority of BSD is published under the so-named BSD license, with some number of other clauses. You might already know that, and if so, sorry for repeating the explanation; I wasn't sure from your comment. They're both permissive, but not identical licenses.)
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FreeBSD dev here — I don't like this line of argument. It is always used to rationalize any defect in FreeBSD. Sometimes we just have defects! That's just the truth of things; we don't need to pretend we're defective on purpose . Many developers run FreeBSD on their daily driver laptops or workstations because it is (perhaps tautologically) one of the best platforms to develop FreeBSD on. Our wifi support isn't 100%…
Being honest about a defect/weakness like this while being a FreeBSD developer gives me (as non-FreeBSD user) faith in your platform. I've recently tried NixOS and I'm impressed. Have you considered adopting Nix into FreeBSD?
I don't know anything about Nix. So the short but perhaps unsatisfying answer is that I have not considered adopting Nix.
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FreeBSD dev here — I don't like this line of argument. It is always used to rationalize any defect in FreeBSD. Sometimes we just have defects! That's just the truth of things; we don't need to pretend we're defective on purpose . Many developers run FreeBSD on their daily driver laptops or workstations because it is (perhaps tautologically) one of the best platforms to develop FreeBSD on. Our wifi support isn't 100%…
I really wanted to run FreeBSD in my T470s and the lack of hardware support pushed me over to Ubuntu. I loved setting up FreeBSD and it felt snappy for a lot of stuff but it would be cool if some of the devs who do live on laptops would just release a package they tune for their particular hardware.
https://wiki.freebsd.org/Laptops#T-Z
And for the T470s in particular (yes, it's somewhat sparse, and the links suggest a non-ideal amount of effort required, but purportedly it seems to work at the end): https://wiki.freebsd.org/Laptops/Thinkpad_T470s
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FreeBSD dev here — I don't like this line of argument. It is always used to rationalize any defect in FreeBSD. Sometimes we just have defects! That's just the truth of things; we don't need to pretend we're defective on purpose . Many developers run FreeBSD on their daily driver laptops or workstations because it is (perhaps tautologically) one of the best platforms to develop FreeBSD on. Our wifi support isn't 100%…
How difficult would it be to flesh out this rough spot? For others, it seems like a FreeBSD dev might not at all be able to get ac support for hardware with the drivers as locked down as they are. But if I knew the problem was tractable I might try my hand at it someday. Could be a good resume driven project.
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Linux has the best gaming performance?
Some games see a significant performance boost running through Wine.
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> Going from a MacBook trackpad to literally any other laptop is an exercise in extreme frustration. For you. I don't mind TrackPoint on thinkpads at all. In fact I would probably prefer that usually. Everybody's got different tastes. It's not a problem.
I've owned five or six thinkpads over the years and in my opinion the only reason people feel the trackpoint is acceptable is because the trackpads on those machines are so awful. I used to prefer the trackpoint too, until I used a laptop with a trackpad that wasn't hot garbage. For example the trackpoint on my T70 actually drifts backwards in the opposite direction after you let go, and this is typical for trackpoin…
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 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
>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?
The mere fact that you’re running a computer with *nix, and you get to tell everyone about it, outweighs the fact that 50% of your day is spent figuring out how to get common tasks working on it.
Would love to read a piece akin to “I’ve been running Ubuntu on a ThinkPad for two years without issue” which is a standard the other main OSes have established