I'm the proud owner of a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 3. I am extremely satisfied with this machine. I'm currently running FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE on it and the overall experience is just great! Amazing battery life (more on that later), super portable, quite powerful, great (non-glare!) 2.5K display and great keyboard/trackpad/trackpoint.
Other than the well known WiFi driver issue (Intel iwm - can't get 802.11ac) pretty much everything works.
However...
The machine is getting notably "old". The biggest pressure points are:
Does anybody here have had the chance to run FreeBSD on an X1 Carbon Gen 9? Do things most things work out of the box?
I've seen this wiki page which has no entry on the Gen 9 but does list some issues regarding the GPU (driver) on the Gen 8. I didn't really manage to figure out reliably whether this is still the case as of today. This of course also doesn't say much about the Gen 9.
Then there is again (or rather still) the big debacle with WiFi: There are ongoing efforts sponsored by the FreeBSD Foundation towards an 802.11ac and 802.11ax driver for intel cards. But it would also seem that the new driver will only work in FreeBSD 14.0 (HEAD). Would I really want to run FreeBSD 14.0 on my daily laptop? Probably not, eh?
Honestly I am somewhat okay with 802.11n speeds on the Gen 3. Not great, but also somewhat okay given that I don't really browse "the big popular websites". But the WiFi card in the Gen 9 is not supported at all. Could get a dongle, but really...?
There's that sneaky "trick" of running OpenWRT in bhyve, passing through the WiFi card. Some people seem to be doing that quite successfully.
Other than that I have very few requirements. Webcam would be great, but could do without. Audio via bluetooth and that's pretty much it.
So - would anybody who was kind enough to read through all of this be able to comment on this? Is the X1 Carbon Gen 9 a good pick after the very satisfying Gen 3 experience?
And yes: These are very much luxurious problems. But hey - the company offered a new laptop.
Other than the well known WiFi driver issue (Intel iwm - can't get 802.11ac) pretty much everything works.
However...
The machine is getting notably "old". The biggest pressure points are:
- Battery Life: The battery life is obviously not what it used to be. A battery swap ("non-replaceable") would be doable but at least where I live an off-brand battery would be ~250.- USD.
- RAM: This machine has (soldered) 8GB of memory. Running out of memory more than I like.
- I/O (USB-C): I guess I don't have to explain how not only ubiquitous but also versatile and powerful USB-C has become in recent times. This laptop only has USB 3.0 USB-A ports. There are so many nice USB-C docks and other peripherals out there. And USB-C PD: I really like this X1 Carbon Gen 3. It packs a lot of punch in a very small highly portable format. It's small (14" for the win!), light (1.3kg -ish) and very robust. Fits into pretty much any bag & situation. Yet I find myself more and more bringing the very bulky, poor battery-life Thinkpad P1 mobile workstation (Xeon, Quadro, ECC, ...) for purely one reason: It charges via USB-C PD. I don't have to bring that dedicated powersupply for just the laptop. I can bring a medium-sized USB-C PD power supply and occasionally a 100Wh power bank. I can charge my phone, headphones, the laptop, the powerbank itself - can´t deny that this is great. Even better: If I know that I have access to an USB-C power supply through othermeans I just don't bring any). But when I bring the X1 Carbon which I very much prefer for most occations that aren't "a longer stay" I have to bring a dedicated power supply (aka "the brick").
- CPU: Not really an issue - but a CPU upgrade would be neat. 2C/4T nothing to complain about but for what I use it I´d certainly appreciate a 4C/8T upgrade with better single-core performance (linking anybody...?). Yes yes, I know, battery life...
Does anybody here have had the chance to run FreeBSD on an X1 Carbon Gen 9? Do things most things work out of the box?
I've seen this wiki page which has no entry on the Gen 9 but does list some issues regarding the GPU (driver) on the Gen 8. I didn't really manage to figure out reliably whether this is still the case as of today. This of course also doesn't say much about the Gen 9.
Then there is again (or rather still) the big debacle with WiFi: There are ongoing efforts sponsored by the FreeBSD Foundation towards an 802.11ac and 802.11ax driver for intel cards. But it would also seem that the new driver will only work in FreeBSD 14.0 (HEAD). Would I really want to run FreeBSD 14.0 on my daily laptop? Probably not, eh?
Honestly I am somewhat okay with 802.11n speeds on the Gen 3. Not great, but also somewhat okay given that I don't really browse "the big popular websites". But the WiFi card in the Gen 9 is not supported at all. Could get a dongle, but really...?
There's that sneaky "trick" of running OpenWRT in bhyve, passing through the WiFi card. Some people seem to be doing that quite successfully.
Other than that I have very few requirements. Webcam would be great, but could do without. Audio via bluetooth and that's pretty much it.
So - would anybody who was kind enough to read through all of this be able to comment on this? Is the X1 Carbon Gen 9 a good pick after the very satisfying Gen 3 experience?
And yes: These are very much luxurious problems. But hey - the company offered a new laptop.