Best High End FreeBSD Laptop?

[patmaddox]

Yeah, I get what you are saying. We are a team of developers, building software that is deployed on FreeBSD. Using FreeBSD for dev is soooo much better than a VM or cloud instance. But you bring up a good point: I haven't tried to use webcamd or zoom on this thing yet, and I'm not sure if I will. I use my old Mac for that right now. We also do a lot of remote pair programming, and I'm not sure how or if I'll be able to screen share.

While there's a lot of upside in terms of programming productivity, there's another big aspect of my job that it's not really a good fit for.

 

[BaronBS]

but the version in FreeBSD's ports is too outdated to be usable in real-world scenarios. You gonna miss the meeting over that?

How about web meetings in zoom and/or teams? Work on FreeBSD?

 

[GlitchyDot]

I dont know what is High End Laptop but i was running FreeBSD 13.1-Release on ThinkPad P71 with intel xeon, quadro p5000, 4k screen, ECC memory. fingerprint , pantone was not tested as usually they wont work out of the box even in Linux PAM is finicky but wifi worked out of the box, some buttons like mute worked.
ThinkPad`s are generally best suited for open source maybe others too but i have no idea im TP enthusiast and dont know other laptop brands.
Edit: There is a trick with thinkpad`s fingerprint to power on laptop or enter bios: every time im installing windows firs, set up finger print trough windows and then do clean wipe of hdd/sdd and installing OS. Trough bios i setting up password and on X1 Yoga i was able to use FP for boot instead of password and if i recall - enter bios later one im not sure.

 

[astyle]

I dont know what is High End Laptop but i was running FreeBSD 13.1-Release on ThinkPad P71 with intel xeon, quadro p5000, 4k screen, ECC memory. fingerprint ,

Specs you mention are in fact high-end. A minimally useful laptop runs for $500 with an i3, integrated graphics and an OK screen. About triple the price ($1500) for beefier specs, as in i7, RTX 3060, better screen, and more RAM. $3k will net your specs.

 

[indgy]

FWIW I have a couple of Thinkpads here:
14" T470s 8Gb Intel i5 7300u? this runs FreeBSD perfectly, it's as simple as adding myself to video, operator and wheel groups during install then reboot pkg install Xorg install the drm-kmod pkg and kldload i915kms then startx the touchpad and trackpoint work fine, wifi works but is not 5Ghz (I don't really notice) sleep/wake on lid works fine, the led pulses while it's sleeping, sounds, webcamd even the touchscreen works fine (not tried multitouch, just drag windows and click buttons) but I haven't tested bluetooth as I don't use it.

15" X1 Extreme Gen 1 i7 8850? 32Gb 512ssd in one slot, the other slot is empty.. it has Nvidia Optimus with a 1050 something and a Dolby HDR 4k display.. it looks just as good as my work MacBook Pro in fact I prefer the machine to the MacBook.. however the X1 requires more setup and I haven't found a way to control the backlight as the usual commands don't seem to work. Also the Optimus setup is much better handled in Linux. I'd love to get FreeBSD working better on this but I don't have much time to tinker. It also has an infrared webcam module, I'm not sure if that worked in FreeBSD.

I've just received a new T495s with AMD Ryzen and will test that over the weekend.