Cheap laptop recommendation

froggit9000 · Monday at 8:36 PM

cracauer@ said:
It's a mess buying laptops, and I mean not only for FreeBSD, for Linux and Windows, too. There always some details the vendor screwed up or things that have drivers, but bad drivers.

I had wished for the Laptop working group to focus on the Thinkpad Carbon X1 and get one of each generation for testing. But for now that seems to be targeted at Framework.

Yes too many devices with not enough testing giving flaky user experiences.
So Frameworks have the attention, but expensive second hand I guess? Not looked at one yet on ebay but will do.

Looked, almost no framework laptops on ebay and expensive. Back to T14 gen 1 AMD I think.

cracauer@ · Monday at 8:39 PM

froggit9000 said:
Yes too many devices with not enough testing giving flaky user experiences.
So Frameworks have the attention, but expensive second hand I guess? Not looked at one yet on ebay but will do.

I wouldn't mind that Frameworks are a bit more expensive, but from what I see people don't have very positive experiences out there. Not sure how up to date my impression is.

froggit9000 · Monday at 8:42 PM

cracauer@ said:
I wouldn't mind that Frameworks are a bit more expensive, but from what I see people don't have very positive experiences out there. Not sure how up to date my impression is.

Hmm I wonder why?
Anyway there was only one on ebay I saw and that was about three times more than I wanted to pay, so...T14 I think.

cracauer@ · Monday at 8:44 PM

froggit9000 said:
Hmm I wonder why?
Anyway there was only one on ebay I saw and that was about three times more than I wanted to pay, so...T14 I think.

I think the BIOS is not very good on Frameworks. Which is excusable given their low volumes. But it needs workarounds that FreeBSD doesn't have. The Carbon X1 is absolutely mass-market in comparison.

froggit9000 · Monday at 8:50 PM

cracauer@ said:
I think the BIOS is not very good on Frameworks. Which is excusable given their low volumes. But it needs workarounds that FreeBSD doesn't have. The Carbon X1 is absolutely mass-market in comparison.

That's a pity as a good solid BIOS is the heart of the machine and for good performance etc.
Is this Carbon X1 good hardware? What's the FreeBSD compatibility like?

cracauer@ · Monday at 8:57 PM

froggit9000 said:
That's a pity as a good solid BIOS is the heart of the machine and for good performance etc.
Is this Carbon X1 good hardware? What's the FreeBSD compatibility like?

I only have a 4th gen with an i7-6600U but I don't remember what it did in FreeBSD. It's currently on Linux DAW duty. If that model interests you I could give it a spin.

froggit9000 · Monday at 9:16 PM

cracauer@ said:
I only have a 4th gen with an i7-6600U but I don't remember what it did in FreeBSD. It's currently on Linux DAW duty. If that model interests you I could give it a spin.

What's the cpu core specs etc? 2 cores 4 threads - from quick look?
I can't find any of that model on ebay for some reason.

cracauer@ · Monday at 9:27 PM

froggit9000 said:
What's the cpu core specs etc? 2 cores 4 threads - from quick look?
I can't find any of that model on ebay for some reason.

Yeah, sounds about right on the core count.

Probably sold out due to good compatibility and they often come with 16 GB RAM. They were nice workhorses.

froggit9000 · Monday at 9:30 PM

cracauer@ said:
Yeah, sounds about right on the core count.

Probably sold out due to good compatibility and they often come with 16 GB RAM. They were nice workhorses.

I see