What computers do you use?

L

lionoceros

I've been running FreeBSD in a virtual machine, but at some point I hope to install it on bare metal. While searching for compatible hardware, what I found was discouraging. The Wiki's laptop list is quite short, and each entry seems to have some major incompatibility (booting, suspend and resume, camera, etc.). I've read on these forums that the devs seem to like Thinkpads, but the laptop list on the wiki does not provide information about the latest ones, and some of them even have major incompatibilities such as non-function suspend/resume.

The hardware notes page lists individual hardware components, but not desktops or laptops I can buy. I understand this is by design, but as a user it seems difficult to identify fully compatible computers.

So now I'm here to ask you directly: What kind of computer do you use? Are there any desktops or laptops that are fully compatible with FreeBSD?
 
For what it's worth, my refurbished Thinkpad L420 (no webcam) required a USB wireless adapter (that worked with FreeBSD-10.x, not 9.x). I don't <sniffle> have anything new, so can't be much help otherwise. The UX31E, the first generation Asus Zenbook also works well with FreeBSD, though I don't use suspend and resume. Again, with 10.x. With 9.x, I was unable to get its wireless (an Atheros, can't remember the number right now), working.
 
They are not recent, but I have had good success with the Thinkpad x200. Battery life is pretty decent as well. You will have issues getting ZFS on ROOT on the T420s and a few others such as the T520. I am not sure how much progress has been made with it, but FreeBSD-current might be working now.

x200 under 10.1 the only thing that I was not able to have complete success with was resume. it suspends, but then does not resume or resumes without working USB ports. I know that Adrian Chad and others have been putting some work in on suspend/resume so a lot of progress might have been made in the last year or so. I am not sure what your needs are, but FreeBSD runs pretty smoothly on the x200 and most likely the T400.

The Thinkpad x230, which is a lot newer and a pretty excellent laptop IMO, also runs pretty decently under FreeBSD.

If you really need suspend and resume, you'll probably get more mileage with OpenBSD on Thinkpads. I ran it on the x200 for a while and it suspended and resumed flawlessly every time. Wireless generally works well under OpenBSD as well.

Newer Haswell and Broadwell based laptops are supposed to be supported under DragonflyBSD, but wireless cards could be hit or miss.
 
The compatibility lists on wiki are not recent so best to search on the Internet to find anyone reporting the hardware you're considering is compatible with FreeBSD.

Same thing for webcams. If laptop webcam don't work then Logictech webcam with USB will work. It most cases FreeBSD will work with most hardware but the issue is internal wireless network and webcam but these are easily fixable.
 
Don't know about laptops cause it's been too long since I ran FreeBSD on my Compaq but I've never had a hardware issue. I built a new system last year using a new motherboard from Gigabyte using the latest Intel chip back then while plugging in nVidia graphics boards. The only issue I had is the motherboard came with two network ports, one worked but the other ran off Broadcom, I think, and they didn't supply the drivers but I didn't need it anyway. I should check to see if I can get it to work now that I think of it.

Too many people look at the hardware lists and see some other OS has 10,000 supported motherboards while FreeBSD only has 7,634 and cry about deficiencies. Ignore them. You can walk into any electronics store or online store and easily find bleeding edge hardware that supports FreeBSD and does whatever you want. And I'm not talking about having to buy "Joe's Motherboard version1" but the latest from Asus and Gigabyte, etc. along with anything else you need.
 
As of a few weeks ago, brightness control started working on the X220 running 10-STABLE. Now everything works: wireless, webcam, suspend/resume. The only drawback, and it's a problem with other OSes as well, is that there is a BIOS bug that prevents the combination of legacy booting and GPT partitions.
 
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Laptops are designed to run MS Windows, period. In a rare case you might find some machines that are certified to run some type of Linux and usually those are also quite well supported by FreeBSD because availability of open source drivers for Linux usually implies open source drivers for FreeBSD and other BSD type OSes. Outside that you have to do a lot of research beforehand to make sure all of the individual components have drivers in FreeBSD and work properly.
 
lionoceros said:
I've read on these forums that the devs seem to like Thinkpads, but the laptop list on the wiki does not provide information about the latest ones, and some of them even have major incompatibilities such as non-function suspend/resume.
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The latest-and-greatest laptops likely won't run FreeBSD without some problems, namely incompatible integrated graphics and suspend-and-resume. Everything works perfectly on my Thinkpad---My four-year-old T520. That's just how it is with FreeBSD: complete hardware support is a year or two behind Windows and (to an extent) Linux.

Bear in mind, though, that when it comes to laptops the only real compatibility issue anyone will face in the long-term is ACPI, since every manufacturer thinks they can do it "better" than every other and thus there's no real standard. Crappy ACPI is what causes suspend-and-resume and power management issues, and possibly boot problems on really cheap machines (low-end Toshiba laptops, for example, used to have ACPI implementations designed to only work with the latest version of Windows). As long as an OS has drivers for a machine's networking and graphics hardware, though, all the important stuff will work just fine in FreeBSD or any other operating system. If suspend-to-RAM doesn't work, well, that's just a minor inconvenience.
 
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