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ThinkPad T480 is my new main laptop which runs FreeBSD

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Re: ThinkPad T480 is my new main laptop which runs FreeBSD

#61

Post by livueta »

yingw787 wrote: post #17

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 sup…

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.

Re: ThinkPad T480 is my new main laptop which runs FreeBSD

#62

Post by floatboth »

dijit wrote: post #22
tedunangst wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

> 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.

Nope, that never happened to me. I use 802.11a for the same reason as OP (Intel card on FreeBSD plus a 5GHz only network), an iperf3 test reports a perfectly stable 22.2 mbit/s. More than enough for surfing, in fact Tor limits the bandwidth more than this Wi-Fi :)

Re: ThinkPad T480 is my new main laptop which runs FreeBSD

#63

Post by petepete »

wldlyinaccurate wrote: post #13
revicon wrote: post #7

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 :(

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.

I just switched from an older XPS13 to a 2019 ThinkPad X1 Carbon.

With Fedora, everything (except the fingerprint reader) just worked, even firmware updates. No configuration, no messing around, the entire process was flawless.

I don't care for the fingerprint reader, and the USB-C dock uses DisplayLink, which is beyond awful.

Re: ThinkPad T480 is my new main laptop which runs FreeBSD

#64

Post by floatboth »

jandrese wrote: post #26
holtalanm wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in the non-mac world, ThinkPads have some of the best touchpads, too. The closest to a mac touchpad I have seen so far has been the Dell XPS touchpad, which imo is hands-down the best touchpad experience on a non-mac machine.

The only issue I have with the trackpads on Linux is palm rejection not working. This is an annoyingly common problem unfortunately, so you rest your wrist for just a second while typing and the cursor jumps to some random point on the screen and clicks.

Recent libinput's palm rejection works fine for me. Though I've had to test that deliberately… on the Pixelbook, my wrists are always on the rubber wrist rest thingies and never on the touchpad.

Re: ThinkPad T480 is my new main laptop which runs FreeBSD

#65

Post by ahnick »

vesche wrote: post #4

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

Awesome, thanks for sharing. I have my own notes as well for running under Ubuntu that I really should get around to polishing up and publishing as well. I second that throttled fix. I boosted single core performance by 34% and multi-core by 63%! (https://twitter.com/xan_nick/status/1199821047840817153)

Re: ThinkPad T480 is my new main laptop which runs FreeBSD

#66

Post by ahnick »

orisho wrote: post #45

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.

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"

Re: ThinkPad T480 is my new main laptop which runs FreeBSD

#67

Post by martey »

reidrac wrote: post #47
dijit wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

> 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.

Re: ThinkPad T480 is my new main laptop which runs FreeBSD

#68

Post by slacka »

xxpor wrote: post #2

>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?

I have a T430 at home that runs FreeBSD that acts as a spare PC/browser/home media server. I never have to screw around with anything. FreeBSD has come a long, long way.

If I gave you a new Mac or PC, you could spend hours "screwing around" with it tweaking and customizing it, Linux even more so. If you absolutely need 802.11ac, then FreeBSD is not the right OS for T480s. But how many people actually require that speed?

Re: ThinkPad T480 is my new main laptop which runs FreeBSD

#69

Post by jhallenworld »

wldlyinaccurate wrote: post #13
revicon wrote: post #7

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 :(

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.

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...

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.

Re: ThinkPad T480 is my new main laptop which runs FreeBSD

#70

Post by reidrac »

martey wrote: post #67
reidrac wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

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.

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