17 ms·

ThinkPad T480 is my new main laptop which runs FreeBSD

338 points by sev 7y ago

rhabarba 7y ago
Ah, finally: A thread where everyone can just post their hardware and software combinations.
- rv-de 7y ago
  this.
xxpor 7y ago
>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?
- PrimeDirective 7y ago
  Because you like the tinkering and believe there should be (fringe) alternatives to mainstream OSes?
  - bayindirh 7y ago
    > ...mainstream OSes? Look how far we've come. Linux was the alternative OS just ~15 years ago. Now it's one of the mainstream OSes. TBH, I'd like to see one of the BSDs to become one of the mainstream OSes too. :) edit: Except macOS ofc. :)
    - criddell 7y ago
      Is Android still built on Linux?
      - bayindirh 7y ago
        Yes.
      - pjmlp 7y ago
        It is, but userspace isn't aware of it. For userspace what matters is ART, ISO C, ISO C++ and Android NDK APIs.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
        It uses a (slightly modified) Linux kernel, yes, although its user land is decidedly not GNU or particularly Unix-like.
        loeg 7y ago
        Doesn't each phone basically ship its own modified Android-Linux with hacked up drivers specific to the model?
        Fnoord 7y ago
        Ever since Project Treble it got standardized.
        yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
        I thought Treble just made the hacked up drivers use a standard ABI so you could combine them with a different userspace?
    - thaeli 7y ago
      Well, a BSD-branded BSD isn't. (MacOS is technically a BSD.)
      - TallGuyShort 7y ago
        Some BSD userspace only, and with few of the things most BSD people like about BSD.
        azinman2 7y ago
        What’s it missing?
        berbec 7y ago
        Zfs
        TallGuyShort 7y ago
        Open-source, for one, but that's more than just a philosophy in BSD. One of the key design considerations touted by BSD communities is that the kernel and userspace are distributed and built as one cohesive system for which you can get all the source / rebuild on your system. And that's done far more often than in Linux and other more mainstream OSs. But it's not a BSD kernel and what's distributed / used is very far removed from open-source Darwin and anything you could rebuild yourself. On the more subjective side of things, BSDs tend to value simplicity and correctness over new features. OpenBSD takes this to an extreme, but FreeBSD still takes it a lot further than Apple does. But other than having more claim to the UNIX title than Linux and having some BSD userland, it's really not technically a BSD at all. I'll grant you it's arguably a distant descendant of BSD under the surface or in your shell.
        loeg 7y ago
        Updates since 2004? It's like they took an old snapshot of BSD userspace and some of the syscall interface, except somewhat broken (see the long saga of broken select/kqueue in OSX). Fundamentally Darwin is a completely different beast based on Mach. It's radically different from the core BSD kernel. Most of their userspace is built on Objective-C, which has 0 overlap with BSDs. It's cool that the Mac community used some BSD code way back when — that's why we use a permissive license — but they've forked whatever they took; they never work to integrate their changes back upstream. To the extent that they're a BSD, they're a very very divergent fork of a historical BSD. And that's fine, for them. I don't know if that makes them a BSD or not in some ontological sense.
    - nh2 7y ago
      "Stardate 2020. There is a mainstream OS with great driver support and the best gaming performance, that everybody uses (Linux). There are two other OSs battling for survival: One run by open source fanatics that release open source editors, browsers and programming languages and which frantically tries to emulate the mainstream OS (WSL), and one where stuff constantly breaks on upgrades, fundamental hardware like keyboards doesn't work, and keeping enter pressed logs you in as root (OSX)."
      - drewbug 7y ago
        open source browsers?
        nine_k 7y ago
        They joined the Chromium project.
      - Thorrez 7y ago
        Linux has the best gaming performance?
        tpxl 7y ago
        Some games see a significant performance boost running through Wine.
        Thorrez 7y ago
        Sure some get a performance boost, but I believe more get a performance hit than a boost (and that's not counting the ones that don't even run at all).
        nh2 7y ago
        Check out some of the recent Phoronix benchmarks.
      - pjmlp 7y ago
        Stardate 2030: Everyone is now doing Chrome apps, with three major companies sharing the cloud OS resources. Some old people keep talking about the crazy idea of owning computers and installing OSes.
    - swalsh 7y ago
      I think Linux went mainstream when the default installation of one of the distributions came with an icon that opened up "Amazon.com"
      - FillardMillmore 7y ago
        Color me ignorant, but which distribution is that?
        bayindirh 7y ago
        coughubuntucough IIRC, they recently discontinued the link and related data sharing though.
        Fnoord 7y ago
        It was always possible to uninstall it. Just a nuisance that you have to, while clearly no users ever desired it. It was also terrible that all search requests went plaintext to Amazon.
        carterehsmith 7y ago
        Ubuntu did some years ago; it did cause some uproar. Just search for "Ubuntu Amazon"
    - GordonS 7y ago
      > Now it's one of the mainstream OSes ...on servers. It's still far, far from "mainstream" for desktops. Still, that's a really big deal. I work for what is firmly a Microsoft shop, and nobody bat's an eyelid now if we use Linux VMs (as long as they're cloud-based). I think 3 things in particular have driven the rise of Linux as a mainstream server OS: 1. docker/containerisation. Sure, Windows containers exist, but have you ever seen one in the wild? 2. The shift to the cloud, in conjunction with (3) 3. The rise of DevOps, in tandem with (2)
      - pjmlp 7y ago
        > 1. docker/containerisation. Sure, Windows containers exist, but have you ever seen one in the wild? I have. What is done on .NET stays on Windows, for UNIX like OSes we get to use Java. Yes there is .NET Core, it is the future, not all MS shops are buying into it due to the current limitations, waiting to see how .NET 5 will actually look like.
        GordonS 7y ago
        I'm truly surprised you've seen Windows containers in the wild - across dozens of engagements with very firm Microsoft shops, I've never seen them, nor seen the need. Gods, even MSSQL runs on Linux these days! I'm also very surprised you'd claim that not all Microsoft shops are buying into dotnet core - I've seen the very opposite; every client I've worked with has known dotnet framework has been superceded by core, and has been eager to move. A decent portion of this is driven by certain containerisation, which (realistically) means dotnet on Linux. The only real limitation with dotnet core has been the lack of managed C++ support - a niche use case, and only relevant on Windows, but even this has been resolved in dotnet core 3.1. Considering the not insubstantial performance improvements in dotnet core, and of course the benefit of cross-platform code, I'm really interested to hear about the limitations of dotnet core you've found (the switch for me and all the enterprise clients I've worked with has been great)?
        pjmlp 7y ago
        Plenty of Microsoft shops are deeply invested in technologies like WCF, EF6, ODP.NET, WPF/Forms component libraries, commercial CMS stacks (e.g. Sitecore), and aren't willing to allocate budgets to rewrite what is working perfectly fine. The kind of enterprises where deployments on IIS, with AD infrastructure on premises, Windows on all company layers are still the name of the game, with some Linux servers for running SAP and a couple of other Java based services. What is missing from .NET Core 3.1? Besides what I have listed above, EF 6 on Core doesn't support the Visual Studio graphical tooling nor the EF 6 .NET Framework EF providers, WPF/Forms designers are still WIP and have issues with commercial component libraries, WCF well, no one is looking forward to rewrite their working code with gRPC. And many are still a little burned with Silverlight and how the whole WinRT, UAP, UWP story went. Back in the .NET Code 2.0 days, I had a project to rewrite a .NET Application into Java, because the customer in question saw a better business value in doing so than investing in .NET Core. Mainly because .NET Core didn't had support for some critical libraries being used in the .NET Application, while the libraries vendor did support a Java counterpart for them. Yes, they will eventually move to .NET Core, when it makes business sense to allocate budget to do so. That is just my experience, others will vary.
    - umanwizard 7y ago
      BSD was mainstream before Linux existed... (and macOS can't really be called a BSD derivative; it is a mostly different OS that has taken some of its code from FreeBSD)
  - jordache 7y ago
    who cares if its not a mainstream os? how many people in the world actually cares?
    - dpbriggs 7y ago
      Apparently OP does -- What are you asking? Some people are motivated by the allure of fringe projects. There's usually a lot of exploration and learning involved with those projects, which can be very rewarding. Not to mention you gain a deeper appreciation for the unbelievable amount of work that goes into the projects.
- namirez 7y ago
  FreeBSD developers and people who use FreeBSD on a daily basis need laptops too. There are not many options out there unless they opt for ancient hardware.
  - zelly 7y ago
    Most of them use Macs and work on FreeBSD in a VM (I'm not kidding)
    - emaste 7y ago
      There are certainly some, but "most" is unsupported by evidence.
    - sien 7y ago
      It'd be really interesting to know the proportion of Linux users who are now running under a VM for their desktop Linux use. I have Linux on the three machines I use. But on each it's via a VM. I run Windows and MacOS on the machines. Where I work this is common as well. It's surely pretty prevalent. The other way a lot of people work on Linux where I work is on a VM on AWS.
      - umanwizard 7y ago
        Raises hand. I'm typing this from an Arch instance running in VMWare Fusion on a macOS host. It's a bit annoying though -- the trackpad is emulated as a scroll wheel, making everything janky, and I can't use my host's full 32gb of RAM... I almost never do anything but run VMWare on the host -- the only reason I haven't given back my MBP and asked work to buy me a Linux machine is because I'm waiting for the 32gb Dell XPS 13 to come out, supposedly sometime this month.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
        I keep hearing this, and I don't understand it. Windows is just so... messy. At my last job I kept a Windows VM for Skype (S4B) and the odd non-portable app, but I wouldn't want that on bare metal. I don't have experience with Darwin; maybe the experience is better there.
- tedunangst 7y ago
  Because it's fast enough you don't notice it's "slow" outside of benchmarks?
  - dijit 7y ago
    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.
    - reidrac 7y ago
      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.
      - martey 7y ago
        > 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.
        reidrac 7y ago
        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.
- slacka 7y ago
  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?
  - utxaa 7y ago
    i am really glad to read this. it is great that freeBSD continues to improve this way. we all win.
- na85 7y ago
  >Suspend/resume works almost fine as the same level as Windows (they sometimes get weird anyway). Don't forget this, which translated means suspend/resume doesn't work.
  - asveikau 7y ago
    Can't speak for TFA's hardware but suspend/resume works fine on my lenovo x1 6th gen running freebsd, with the only caveat being that I had to load some drivers that were not loaded by default. (I think it was called acpi_ibm. Manpage says that's for the Fn key combos, maybe it was something else.) FWIW, suspend/resume is probably the worst, fiddliest thing about free OSs on a laptop.
    - na85 7y ago
      >FWIW, suspend/resume is probably the worst, fiddliest thing about free OSs on a laptop. Sadly I agree. My requirements for a laptop are: 1. Working suspend resume 2. Good touch pad with working palm rejection 3. Good battery life Sadly the only laptop that meets these requirements to my satisfaction is my macbook.
      - allset_ 7y ago
        XPS 13 Developer edition meets these requirements. The touch pad isn't as good as a MacBook (none are) but it's plenty sufficient for working when not at a desk and if you do Docker based development having a Linux OS is actually much more performant.
        selectodude 7y ago
        Going from a MacBook trackpad to literally any other laptop is an exercise in extreme frustration. Even going from Mac OS X to Windows in Boot Camp makes one want to pull their hair out.
        asveikau 7y ago
- loeg 7y ago
  They almost certainly mean 802.11g or n, not the archaic a. FreeBSD has generally good 802.11n support. It lacks 802.11ac. Yes, if you absolutely need 802.11ac wifi in particular, FreeBSD isn't a great choice. But many modern 802.11n NICs (and 802.11ac NICs, in 802.11n mode) "just work" out of the box, including the 'iwm' devices mentioned in the article, on more recent versions of FreeBSD. FreeBSD 12.0 dates to 2018 — this is like installing Fedora 29 in 2020.
  - 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
    > It lacks 802.11ac. Why in the world would it lack support for one of the most ubiquitous, not to mention fastest, wireless standards? I mean, it’s been out since 2013.
    - markjdb 7y ago
      Because there are not many people with the ability to add 802.11ac support to drivers, the resources to do so (datasheets, test hardware), and the time required. The 802.11 stack does support at least some 11ac features.
    - loeg 7y ago
      Time, resources, interest; lack of open datasheets and corporate sponsorship from the hardware vendors making the parts. These things don't just happen magically; people make them happen. Linux finally has enough market power that vendors willingly write drivers for it, but I remember a very similar situation with Linux in the 2000s when Microsoft was the only player around with that kind of market clout.
      - bjornjajajaja 7y ago
        Also, who really NEEDS 802.11 ac?? If you’re that picky wtf not plug into Ethernet??
        outside1234 7y ago
        Planes
- JudasGoat 7y ago
  You should be able to swap the wifi card for something with better drivers. Not being a BSD user, I couldn't give a recommendation.
- mvkel 7y ago
  Totally. This is the virtue signaling of the workstation world. The mere fact that you’re running a computer with *nix, and you get to tell everyone about it, outweighs the fact that 50% of your day is spent figuring out how to get common tasks working on it. Would love to read a piece akin to “I’ve been running Ubuntu on a ThinkPad for two years without issue” which is a standard the other main OSes have established
namirez 7y ago
The other good development with Thinkpads is the introduction of AMD processors in their mainstream offerings (T495, T495s, X395, etc.). Unfortunately their screens suck though.
- funklute 7y ago
  The screens are actually the very reason I choose a thinkpad over a mac. Gloss screens are pretty much impossible to work on if you prefer dark colorschemes, and at least the thinkpads give you the matte option.
  - post_break 7y ago
    You can buy matte screen protectors. I put one on my macbook and it was night and day.
    - funklute 7y ago
      Do you think it was as good as a factory-produced matte screen? While I was aware you can do this, I'm a little hesitant to do something which is an absolute minimum for usability, in case I'm not happy with the outcome. It feels a bit like having to install a keyboard on the laptop myself, because the laptop didn't come with one...
      - post_break 7y ago
        I honestly couldn't tell the difference. You lose some output and viewing angle, but you did so on the matte screen as well. I had it on for like 6 years and my wife still has hers on from 2011.
  - hdkwowjdj 7y ago
    Another of these things I don't get. Matte screens become unreadable with indirect light. I've been a long time ThinkPad user. But dim screens just don't work, no matter if it's matte or not. Bright screen with anti-reflective layer work much better, hate to say that.
vesche 7y ago
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 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 https://github.com/erpalma/throttled
- nextos 7y ago
  Is it silent? I've found recent Thinkpads to be a hit and miss in terms of good thermal cooling and fan firmware. Sadly fan speed is not adjustable by the user in the last few generations. I'm also curious about their new AMD offerings.
  - jotm 7y ago
    Which models? Afaik you can adjust fan speed on most, probably all, laptops by directly changing the embedded controller values.
  - weystrom 7y ago
    I have one at work and it's not, I ended up using my personal MBP13 instead. Fan seems to struggle to dissipate even 25 watts of heat. Sometimes it would be sitting at 50+ degrees C, just idling. I asked our IT guys if I can repaste it, but they told me it's still on warranty. It might help, but I'll never know I guess.
    - organsnyder 7y ago
      My T480 is fairly quiet unless it's under pretty heavy load. I do have the model with discrete graphics, which apparently has much better cooling (even when the discrete chip isn't being used).
    - Izkata 7y ago
      All the laptops I've had over the years (HP, Dell, 2 Asus, now a Thinkpad, plus like 3 Dells at work) have idled at about 50 C. Is that not supposed to be normal?
revicon 7y ago
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 :(
- bayindirh 7y ago
  I have an HP EliteBook 850 G2 and a MacBook Pro. I don't find the trackpoint and trackpad on my HP to be off-putting TBH. Yes, it lacks many gestures but, KDE has ample replacements for these gestures I think.
- holtalanm 7y ago
  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.
  - jandrese 7y ago
    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.
    - floatboth 7y ago
      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.
  - johnward 7y ago
    Haven't had a thinkpad for a few years. Are they still dimpled? edit: doesn't look like it
- wldlyinaccurate 7y ago
yingw787 7y ago
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 support, and is absolutely rock solid. Does FreeBSD fit the bill there?
- livueta 7y ago
  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.
gzu 7y ago
The T480s has so much better build quality. Its all metal vs T480 which is plasticity and soft touch. Not sure why you would choose T480 unless you REALLY need > 24gb ram or giant extended battery. Even the inside is better built. The plastic front clips of the T480 backplate break super easily, whereas the T480s has replaceable clips.
- ahnick 7y ago
  I have a T480 and I've definitely needed >24GB of ram before when running some VMs. It has come in handy. Don't forget too that the T480 has hot-swappable batteries, which is really nice on extended coding sessions where I'm not plugged in or if I'm traveling. Also, I love the rubbery feel of it. It feels solid in my hand and doesn't slip at all. Admittedly that is subjective though. :-)
- adtac 7y ago
  Similarly, I can vouch for the T495s' sturdiness. The whole thing genuinely feels like a slab of solid rock (but is still lightweight); I can't quantify how robust this thing is, but Lenovo guarantees that every T495s has been through some sort of military testing where it sits in different environments for several hours (sandstorm, scorching heat, freezing cold, humidity).
- leppr 7y ago
  Personally I much prefer plastic on my laptops. Less likely to bend and doesn't pass current and heat to my hands.
caycep 7y ago
I hate the trackpad/nubbins on those things. At least for Win10. the response/behavior isn't really consistent between it seeming to want a swipe, a tap, right or left buttons and whatnot.
0xff00ffee 7y ago
How about the trackpad? And the power switch? I've been running Ubuntu and Kali on a Dell machine for a few years and the trackpad has always been unusuable and the power switch is always power-down (instead of sleep, standby). Yes, I've messed with the xorg settings for the trackpad and the ACPI settings for the button, but gave up.
- allochthon 7y ago
  Slightly related: I'm running Ubuntu on a Thinkpad and the trackpad is pretty painful to use (after using macOS for years). I went out and bought a mouse a few days ago for this reason.
  - 0xff00ffee 7y ago
    It is bizarre how good mac laptop touchpads are. I've used a number of Windows laptops and nothing comes close (caveat: I've never used a top-tier Win laptop).
  - Izkata 7y ago
    Switching from xinput to synaptics was a big improvement on the touchpad for me (Ubuntu 18.04 on T490)
lifeisstillgood 7y ago
I dropped FreeBSD as my main laptop about four years ago (and have invested a fair bit of time on dockerising my experience on ubuntu so going back is hard) But what I wanted then (and dreamed of having a million or so to make it real) was a FreeBSD reference laptop - basically a distribution of FreeBSD that worked in this laptop series - you bought the laptop and a years support and basically three hackers just kept on producing patches and co-ordinating drivers and making simple tools and simple videos on how to keep your base running. I work on top of my laptop. I would prefer to just take the barest plain vanilla, and not have to work on my laptop unless I choose to.
- zelly 7y ago
  > basically a distribution of FreeBSD that worked in this laptop series - you bought the laptop and a years support and basically three hackers just kept on producing patches and co-ordinating drivers and making simple tools and simple videos on how to keep your base running. This is basically the business model of Apple Computers
  - jonhohle 7y ago
    I had a professor who made this same comment all the way back in 2003. I had mentioned it would be nice to have a supported Unix-like OS on a laptop. A few months later I bought my first PowerBook and have been using a commercially supported Unix ever since (and FreeBSD on my headless computers).
jotm 7y ago
Replacing the main desktop, huh? That processor sure has the potential. A few modifications to the cooling system and some undervolting can get it running at 30+ Watt TDP indefinitely.
- jotm 7y ago
  As always I wonder what sad fucks downvoted this. Just ban this account and put me out of my misery.
agentultra 7y ago
I use one of those too and made the switch rather recently from a MBPr. I used Linux Mint on it. It's speedy, video calling works fine, can compile lots of code quickly, and it's refurbished and saved from the dumpster. I hope to never buy a new computer again instead relying on refurbishing old ones as we go along. I keep all of my configurations and projects synced up so that booting up a new computer into my dev environment is straight forward. If I lose the device or it gets totaled it's a couple hundred bucks instead of $4k going out the door to get a new one in a few hours.
- organsnyder 7y ago
  Two-year-old ThinkPads (the real ones like the T and X series) are great deals. I did buy my T480 new (I wanted features like the best screen that are hard to find used), but my wife and mom are both using T470 units that we bought off of eBay. My mom's unit turned out to have a charging issue, but we discovered that it was still under a three-year extended warranty, which is tied to the machine rather than the purchaser; Lenovo replaced the motherboard on it with little fuss.
- ajford 7y ago
  This is exactly what I've done for the last 5 years or so. I'm currently running a T460 I picked up almost two years ago for under $500 and is now running Xubuntu 18.04. My wife's running an X1 Yoga gen 2 that I picked up for around $400. I've come to the same conclusion that it's generally not worth the premium cost to buy a new laptop when good hardware is so readily available in my neck of the woods.
  - zhte415 7y ago
    ThinkPads last forever. I'm still on a T420 and X220 (travel), upgraded SSD and new batteries, and have no desire to change.
enjoyyourlife 7y ago
Reminds me of Stallman's "How I do my computing" post https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html
- ngcc_hk 7y ago
  That is one of few pieces of him that is comfortable to read. No feeling of an angry old man shouting at you. Quite a statesman like talking his way of life in fact. Enjoyable read. And good to hear it is just keyboard causing his hand problem. Feel sorry when a hacker have pain in using keyboard. Good article.
orisho 7y ago
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.
- ahnick 7y ago
  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"
  - revicon 7y ago
    Wow, this is something that's been bugging me constantly. Thanks for the tip.
floatboth 7y ago
> SD card reader seems to work Holy shit, Lenovo finally switched from that non-standard Realtek thingy (https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=204521 https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=204521) to something that exposes SDHCI over PCIe?
fmakunbound 7y ago
Admire the dude who spend time tinkering and getting it right like that.
castratikron 7y ago
Why disable the TPM? One cool thing you can do is store your SSH private key inside: https://blog.habets.se/2013/11/TPM-chip-protecting-SSH-keys-properly.html https://blog.habets.se/2013/11/TPM-chip-protecting-SSH-keys-...
- zelly 7y ago
  Yes but the TPM can only generate its own RSA key. You can't take an existing private key and store it in the TPM.
  - Thorrez 7y ago
    That's generally what you want. If the private key only ever existed in the TPM then you know there aren't any copies in an attacker's hands somewhere (ignoring hardware vulnerabilities). But if you copy a key into the TPM, there could have been malware that stole a copy of the key beforehand.
chx 7y ago
4 months ago I wrote up how insane value the T480 is: https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/dd2i3y/can_we_talk_for_a_moment_about_how_insane_a_value/ https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/dd2i3y/can_we_tal... and most of that still stands.
- hnruss 7y ago
  I paid twice as much for mine when it was the latest model (I got few upgrades, though). I'm pretty happy with the T480 overall, but if Lenovo releases another T-series with a significantly better CPU then I'll probably get it. I didn't think that I needed the dedicated graphics card, but now I think that having the additional cooling would help.
ptcampbell 7y ago
Mac user here. Still use a desktop Mac mini daily, but have replaced my 13" Macbook Pro for a 14" Thinkpad running Ubuntu. So far so good. Haven't had nearly the amount of hardware issues reported in this thread. Only the fingerprint scanner does not work, despite best efforts to install its drivers. The hardest thing for me so far has been customising it to behave like macOS. The muscle memory of keyboard shortcuts is too hard to shake. But I've changed most of them. Another thing to point out. The display scaling sucks. I have found anything between 100% and 200% unstable. Edit: mine is a budget L380 model. Pretty good value for under $500 (current clearance price).
- pedrocr 7y ago
  I've been running 1.3x fake scaling for years by just tweaking fonts. In previous Ubuntu versions with Unity that was just a standard setting. Now I need to set the font scaling in the tweak tool and in the firefox about:config. After that everything just looks fine.
  - ptcampbell 7y ago
    I was using an add-on to enable experimental scaling but it's noticeably slower and my remote desktop client doesn't adjust its scaling accordingly. But you're right – browser scaling gets you half way.
- city41 7y ago
  I run Ubuntu MATE 18 on three different Thinkpads and they all work perfectly with zero tinkering. The only issue is they chew through the battery in no time, but since I’m almost always plugged in I’ve not bothered to investigate a fix.
  - ptcampbell 7y ago
    I've found the "CPU Power Manager" add-on pretty good for battery life. I flick between the profiles depending on what I'm doing. Could be better, but I still get at least 4 hours on the "Multimedia" setting.
moneromoney 7y ago
Try the new Thinkpad X1 Extreme Gen 2: 9th Gen Intel® Core™ i9-9880H (16 Threads, 16 MB Cache) NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1650 Max-Q 4GB 64 GB RAM 4K OLED display (better colors than Mac) Great keyboard Infrared Camera Fingerprint Sensor DOULBY Sound System Water-Spoil-Protection ... The first generation had some cooling issues, but it is solved now in the second generation.
linuxhansl 7y ago
Have been running Linux on Lenovo laptops forever. A T500, then a T440p, now an X1E Gen2 (can't remember what I used before the T500). While I still am not able to buy a Lenovo laptop without Windows preinstalled, at least Lenovo is open enough for other OSs (FreeBSD, Linux, etc) to run relatively flawlessly on them.
gruturo 7y ago
Checking in with a Lenovo Carbon X1 gen1 running FreeBSD flawlessly. Everything works including suspend/resume, the only things I never tried to use are the camera and fingerprint reader but I guess I'll check out of curiosity. Battery life is better than Windows. The touchpad is a little less pleasant to use (hard to click on a small target while using the laptop on the couch, the pointer always moves a little bit when taking the finger off). It definitely works better after some 30 minutes of usage but I have no idea why.
867-5309 7y ago
i7-8550U paired with a 1TB 5400rpm? that's not a bottleneck, that's a bottle cap with a pinhole.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
2ion 7y ago
I won't buy another laptop without dedicated graphics card, which rules out most Thinkpads. Sorry, but igpu is not enough these days.
- jtreminio 7y ago
  Funnily enough, I had wanted to purchase my Dell XPS 9570 (15") without dgpu, but they only offered it for their 13" model. Until several months after release, support for the nvidia card was spotty on Ubuntu/Fedora so it would suck up power without it being used. It's better now, but my workflow doesn't really need a dgpu, and the igpu is enough to watch 1080p videos (probably not 4K, though).
  - migglesnz 7y ago
    I have a T480S powering a 4k monitor on the igpu and it's more than happy to play 4k Youtube even without hardware acceleration.
- ntw1103 7y ago
  I have the T495, that has the Vega 10 amdgpu. While it is builtin with the cpu, It performs pretty decently. After proper configuration, I was able to get 20FPS in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, at max settings, on Linux.
whatsmyusername 7y ago
I mean, I'm going to ask the question. Why? If it's for funsies okay but pushing to use something wildly boutique is a major red flag for me at work. I have one guy who works for me who runs linux on the desktop and he's pretty much always having a problem of some sort. I put up with it because he's staff level, but it doesn't impress.
vharish 7y ago
Have you worked on external monitors with this setup? The last time I've tried, it had been a pain. The monitors were detected fine, but the scaling was completely off.
devgoth 7y ago
I really want to try a ThinkPad with Ubuntu. Currently using an older DELL XPS 13 with Ubuntu and no issues so far expect the trackpad is going out

338 points by sev 7y ago

rhabarba 7y ago

Ah, finally: A thread where everyone can just post their hardware and software combinations.

rv-de 7y ago
this.

xxpor 7y ago

>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?

PrimeDirective 7y ago
Because you like the tinkering and believe there should be (fringe) alternatives to mainstream OSes?
- bayindirh 7y ago
  > ...mainstream OSes? Look how far we've come. Linux was the alternative OS just ~15 years ago. Now it's one of the mainstream OSes. TBH, I'd like to see one of the BSDs to become one of the mainstream OSes too. :) edit: Except macOS ofc. :)
  - criddell 7y ago
    Is Android still built on Linux?
    - bayindirh 7y ago
      Yes.
    - pjmlp 7y ago
      It is, but userspace isn't aware of it. For userspace what matters is ART, ISO C, ISO C++ and Android NDK APIs.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
      It uses a (slightly modified) Linux kernel, yes, although its user land is decidedly not GNU or particularly Unix-like.
      - loeg 7y ago
        Doesn't each phone basically ship its own modified Android-Linux with hacked up drivers specific to the model?
        Fnoord 7y ago
        Ever since Project Treble it got standardized.
        yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
        I thought Treble just made the hacked up drivers use a standard ABI so you could combine them with a different userspace?
  - thaeli 7y ago
    Well, a BSD-branded BSD isn't. (MacOS is technically a BSD.)
    - TallGuyShort 7y ago
      Some BSD userspace only, and with few of the things most BSD people like about BSD.
      - azinman2 7y ago
        What’s it missing?
        berbec 7y ago
        Zfs
        TallGuyShort 7y ago
        Open-source, for one, but that's more than just a philosophy in BSD. One of the key design considerations touted by BSD communities is that the kernel and userspace are distributed and built as one cohesive system for which you can get all the source / rebuild on your system. And that's done far more often than in Linux and other more mainstream OSs. But it's not a BSD kernel and what's distributed / used is very far removed from open-source Darwin and anything you could rebuild yourself. On the more subjective side of things, BSDs tend to value simplicity and correctness over new features. OpenBSD takes this to an extreme, but FreeBSD still takes it a lot further than Apple does. But other than having more claim to the UNIX title than Linux and having some BSD userland, it's really not technically a BSD at all. I'll grant you it's arguably a distant descendant of BSD under the surface or in your shell.
        loeg 7y ago
        Updates since 2004? It's like they took an old snapshot of BSD userspace and some of the syscall interface, except somewhat broken (see the long saga of broken select/kqueue in OSX). Fundamentally Darwin is a completely different beast based on Mach. It's radically different from the core BSD kernel. Most of their userspace is built on Objective-C, which has 0 overlap with BSDs. It's cool that the Mac community used some BSD code way back when — that's why we use a permissive license — but they've forked whatever they took; they never work to integrate their changes back upstream. To the extent that they're a BSD, they're a very very divergent fork of a historical BSD. And that's fine, for them. I don't know if that makes them a BSD or not in some ontological sense.
  - nh2 7y ago
    "Stardate 2020. There is a mainstream OS with great driver support and the best gaming performance, that everybody uses (Linux). There are two other OSs battling for survival: One run by open source fanatics that release open source editors, browsers and programming languages and which frantically tries to emulate the mainstream OS (WSL), and one where stuff constantly breaks on upgrades, fundamental hardware like keyboards doesn't work, and keeping enter pressed logs you in as root (OSX)."
    - drewbug 7y ago
      open source browsers?
      - nine_k 7y ago
        They joined the Chromium project.
    - Thorrez 7y ago
      Linux has the best gaming performance?
      - tpxl 7y ago
        Some games see a significant performance boost running through Wine.
        Thorrez 7y ago
        Sure some get a performance boost, but I believe more get a performance hit than a boost (and that's not counting the ones that don't even run at all).
      - nh2 7y ago
        Check out some of the recent Phoronix benchmarks.
    - pjmlp 7y ago
      Stardate 2030: Everyone is now doing Chrome apps, with three major companies sharing the cloud OS resources. Some old people keep talking about the crazy idea of owning computers and installing OSes.
  - swalsh 7y ago
    I think Linux went mainstream when the default installation of one of the distributions came with an icon that opened up "Amazon.com"
    - FillardMillmore 7y ago
      Color me ignorant, but which distribution is that?
      - bayindirh 7y ago
        coughubuntucough IIRC, they recently discontinued the link and related data sharing though.
        Fnoord 7y ago
        It was always possible to uninstall it. Just a nuisance that you have to, while clearly no users ever desired it. It was also terrible that all search requests went plaintext to Amazon.
      - carterehsmith 7y ago
        Ubuntu did some years ago; it did cause some uproar. Just search for "Ubuntu Amazon"
  - GordonS 7y ago
    > Now it's one of the mainstream OSes ...on servers. It's still far, far from "mainstream" for desktops. Still, that's a really big deal. I work for what is firmly a Microsoft shop, and nobody bat's an eyelid now if we use Linux VMs (as long as they're cloud-based). I think 3 things in particular have driven the rise of Linux as a mainstream server OS: 1. docker/containerisation. Sure, Windows containers exist, but have you ever seen one in the wild? 2. The shift to the cloud, in conjunction with (3) 3. The rise of DevOps, in tandem with (2)
    - pjmlp 7y ago
      > 1. docker/containerisation. Sure, Windows containers exist, but have you ever seen one in the wild? I have. What is done on .NET stays on Windows, for UNIX like OSes we get to use Java. Yes there is .NET Core, it is the future, not all MS shops are buying into it due to the current limitations, waiting to see how .NET 5 will actually look like.
      - GordonS 7y ago
        I'm truly surprised you've seen Windows containers in the wild - across dozens of engagements with very firm Microsoft shops, I've never seen them, nor seen the need. Gods, even MSSQL runs on Linux these days! I'm also very surprised you'd claim that not all Microsoft shops are buying into dotnet core - I've seen the very opposite; every client I've worked with has known dotnet framework has been superceded by core, and has been eager to move. A decent portion of this is driven by certain containerisation, which (realistically) means dotnet on Linux. The only real limitation with dotnet core has been the lack of managed C++ support - a niche use case, and only relevant on Windows, but even this has been resolved in dotnet core 3.1. Considering the not insubstantial performance improvements in dotnet core, and of course the benefit of cross-platform code, I'm really interested to hear about the limitations of dotnet core you've found (the switch for me and all the enterprise clients I've worked with has been great)?
        pjmlp 7y ago
        Plenty of Microsoft shops are deeply invested in technologies like WCF, EF6, ODP.NET, WPF/Forms component libraries, commercial CMS stacks (e.g. Sitecore), and aren't willing to allocate budgets to rewrite what is working perfectly fine. The kind of enterprises where deployments on IIS, with AD infrastructure on premises, Windows on all company layers are still the name of the game, with some Linux servers for running SAP and a couple of other Java based services. What is missing from .NET Core 3.1? Besides what I have listed above, EF 6 on Core doesn't support the Visual Studio graphical tooling nor the EF 6 .NET Framework EF providers, WPF/Forms designers are still WIP and have issues with commercial component libraries, WCF well, no one is looking forward to rewrite their working code with gRPC. And many are still a little burned with Silverlight and how the whole WinRT, UAP, UWP story went. Back in the .NET Code 2.0 days, I had a project to rewrite a .NET Application into Java, because the customer in question saw a better business value in doing so than investing in .NET Core. Mainly because .NET Core didn't had support for some critical libraries being used in the .NET Application, while the libraries vendor did support a Java counterpart for them. Yes, they will eventually move to .NET Core, when it makes business sense to allocate budget to do so. That is just my experience, others will vary.
  - umanwizard 7y ago
    BSD was mainstream before Linux existed... (and macOS can't really be called a BSD derivative; it is a mostly different OS that has taken some of its code from FreeBSD)
- jordache 7y ago
  who cares if its not a mainstream os? how many people in the world actually cares?
  - dpbriggs 7y ago
    Apparently OP does -- What are you asking? Some people are motivated by the allure of fringe projects. There's usually a lot of exploration and learning involved with those projects, which can be very rewarding. Not to mention you gain a deeper appreciation for the unbelievable amount of work that goes into the projects.
namirez 7y ago
FreeBSD developers and people who use FreeBSD on a daily basis need laptops too. There are not many options out there unless they opt for ancient hardware.
- zelly 7y ago
  Most of them use Macs and work on FreeBSD in a VM (I'm not kidding)
  - emaste 7y ago
    There are certainly some, but "most" is unsupported by evidence.
  - sien 7y ago
    It'd be really interesting to know the proportion of Linux users who are now running under a VM for their desktop Linux use. I have Linux on the three machines I use. But on each it's via a VM. I run Windows and MacOS on the machines. Where I work this is common as well. It's surely pretty prevalent. The other way a lot of people work on Linux where I work is on a VM on AWS.
    - umanwizard 7y ago
      Raises hand. I'm typing this from an Arch instance running in VMWare Fusion on a macOS host. It's a bit annoying though -- the trackpad is emulated as a scroll wheel, making everything janky, and I can't use my host's full 32gb of RAM... I almost never do anything but run VMWare on the host -- the only reason I haven't given back my MBP and asked work to buy me a Linux machine is because I'm waiting for the 32gb Dell XPS 13 to come out, supposedly sometime this month.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
      I keep hearing this, and I don't understand it. Windows is just so... messy. At my last job I kept a Windows VM for Skype (S4B) and the odd non-portable app, but I wouldn't want that on bare metal. I don't have experience with Darwin; maybe the experience is better there.
tedunangst 7y ago
Because it's fast enough you don't notice it's "slow" outside of benchmarks?
- dijit 7y ago
  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.
  - reidrac 7y ago
    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.
    - martey 7y ago
      > 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.
      - reidrac 7y ago
        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.
slacka 7y ago
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?
- utxaa 7y ago
  i am really glad to read this. it is great that freeBSD continues to improve this way. we all win.
na85 7y ago
>Suspend/resume works almost fine as the same level as Windows (they sometimes get weird anyway). Don't forget this, which translated means suspend/resume doesn't work.
- asveikau 7y ago
  Can't speak for TFA's hardware but suspend/resume works fine on my lenovo x1 6th gen running freebsd, with the only caveat being that I had to load some drivers that were not loaded by default. (I think it was called acpi_ibm. Manpage says that's for the Fn key combos, maybe it was something else.) FWIW, suspend/resume is probably the worst, fiddliest thing about free OSs on a laptop.
  - na85 7y ago
    >FWIW, suspend/resume is probably the worst, fiddliest thing about free OSs on a laptop. Sadly I agree. My requirements for a laptop are: 1. Working suspend resume 2. Good touch pad with working palm rejection 3. Good battery life Sadly the only laptop that meets these requirements to my satisfaction is my macbook.
    - allset_ 7y ago
      XPS 13 Developer edition meets these requirements. The touch pad isn't as good as a MacBook (none are) but it's plenty sufficient for working when not at a desk and if you do Docker based development having a Linux OS is actually much more performant.
      - selectodude 7y ago
        Going from a MacBook trackpad to literally any other laptop is an exercise in extreme frustration. Even going from Mac OS X to Windows in Boot Camp makes one want to pull their hair out.
        asveikau 7y ago
loeg 7y ago
They almost certainly mean 802.11g or n, not the archaic a. FreeBSD has generally good 802.11n support. It lacks 802.11ac. Yes, if you absolutely need 802.11ac wifi in particular, FreeBSD isn't a great choice. But many modern 802.11n NICs (and 802.11ac NICs, in 802.11n mode) "just work" out of the box, including the 'iwm' devices mentioned in the article, on more recent versions of FreeBSD. FreeBSD 12.0 dates to 2018 — this is like installing Fedora 29 in 2020.
- 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
  > It lacks 802.11ac. Why in the world would it lack support for one of the most ubiquitous, not to mention fastest, wireless standards? I mean, it’s been out since 2013.
  - markjdb 7y ago
    Because there are not many people with the ability to add 802.11ac support to drivers, the resources to do so (datasheets, test hardware), and the time required. The 802.11 stack does support at least some 11ac features.
  - loeg 7y ago
    Time, resources, interest; lack of open datasheets and corporate sponsorship from the hardware vendors making the parts. These things don't just happen magically; people make them happen. Linux finally has enough market power that vendors willingly write drivers for it, but I remember a very similar situation with Linux in the 2000s when Microsoft was the only player around with that kind of market clout.
    - bjornjajajaja 7y ago
      Also, who really NEEDS 802.11 ac?? If you’re that picky wtf not plug into Ethernet??
      - outside1234 7y ago
        Planes
JudasGoat 7y ago
You should be able to swap the wifi card for something with better drivers. Not being a BSD user, I couldn't give a recommendation.
mvkel 7y ago
Totally. This is the virtue signaling of the workstation world. The mere fact that you’re running a computer with *nix, and you get to tell everyone about it, outweighs the fact that 50% of your day is spent figuring out how to get common tasks working on it. Would love to read a piece akin to “I’ve been running Ubuntu on a ThinkPad for two years without issue” which is a standard the other main OSes have established

namirez 7y ago

The other good development with Thinkpads is the introduction of AMD processors in their mainstream offerings (T495, T495s, X395, etc.). Unfortunately their screens suck though.

funklute 7y ago
The screens are actually the very reason I choose a thinkpad over a mac. Gloss screens are pretty much impossible to work on if you prefer dark colorschemes, and at least the thinkpads give you the matte option.
- post_break 7y ago
  You can buy matte screen protectors. I put one on my macbook and it was night and day.
  - funklute 7y ago
    Do you think it was as good as a factory-produced matte screen? While I was aware you can do this, I'm a little hesitant to do something which is an absolute minimum for usability, in case I'm not happy with the outcome. It feels a bit like having to install a keyboard on the laptop myself, because the laptop didn't come with one...
    - post_break 7y ago
      I honestly couldn't tell the difference. You lose some output and viewing angle, but you did so on the matte screen as well. I had it on for like 6 years and my wife still has hers on from 2011.
- hdkwowjdj 7y ago
  Another of these things I don't get. Matte screens become unreadable with indirect light. I've been a long time ThinkPad user. But dim screens just don't work, no matter if it's matte or not. Bright screen with anti-reflective layer work much better, hate to say that.

vesche 7y ago

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 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 https://github.com/erpalma/throttled

nextos 7y ago
Is it silent? I've found recent Thinkpads to be a hit and miss in terms of good thermal cooling and fan firmware. Sadly fan speed is not adjustable by the user in the last few generations. I'm also curious about their new AMD offerings.
- jotm 7y ago
  Which models? Afaik you can adjust fan speed on most, probably all, laptops by directly changing the embedded controller values.
- weystrom 7y ago
  I have one at work and it's not, I ended up using my personal MBP13 instead. Fan seems to struggle to dissipate even 25 watts of heat. Sometimes it would be sitting at 50+ degrees C, just idling. I asked our IT guys if I can repaste it, but they told me it's still on warranty. It might help, but I'll never know I guess.
  - organsnyder 7y ago
    My T480 is fairly quiet unless it's under pretty heavy load. I do have the model with discrete graphics, which apparently has much better cooling (even when the discrete chip isn't being used).
  - Izkata 7y ago
    All the laptops I've had over the years (HP, Dell, 2 Asus, now a Thinkpad, plus like 3 Dells at work) have idled at about 50 C. Is that not supposed to be normal?

revicon 7y ago

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 :(

bayindirh 7y ago
I have an HP EliteBook 850 G2 and a MacBook Pro. I don't find the trackpoint and trackpad on my HP to be off-putting TBH. Yes, it lacks many gestures but, KDE has ample replacements for these gestures I think.
holtalanm 7y ago
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.
- jandrese 7y ago
  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.
  - floatboth 7y ago
    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.
- johnward 7y ago
  Haven't had a thinkpad for a few years. Are they still dimpled? edit: doesn't look like it
wldlyinaccurate 7y ago

yingw787 7y ago

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 support, and is absolutely rock solid. Does FreeBSD fit the bill there?

livueta 7y ago
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.

gzu 7y ago

The T480s has so much better build quality. Its all metal vs T480 which is plasticity and soft touch. Not sure why you would choose T480 unless you REALLY need > 24gb ram or giant extended battery. Even the inside is better built. The plastic front clips of the T480 backplate break super easily, whereas the T480s has replaceable clips.

ahnick 7y ago
I have a T480 and I've definitely needed >24GB of ram before when running some VMs. It has come in handy. Don't forget too that the T480 has hot-swappable batteries, which is really nice on extended coding sessions where I'm not plugged in or if I'm traveling. Also, I love the rubbery feel of it. It feels solid in my hand and doesn't slip at all. Admittedly that is subjective though. :-)
adtac 7y ago
Similarly, I can vouch for the T495s' sturdiness. The whole thing genuinely feels like a slab of solid rock (but is still lightweight); I can't quantify how robust this thing is, but Lenovo guarantees that every T495s has been through some sort of military testing where it sits in different environments for several hours (sandstorm, scorching heat, freezing cold, humidity).
leppr 7y ago
Personally I much prefer plastic on my laptops. Less likely to bend and doesn't pass current and heat to my hands.

caycep 7y ago

I hate the trackpad/nubbins on those things. At least for Win10. the response/behavior isn't really consistent between it seeming to want a swipe, a tap, right or left buttons and whatnot.

0xff00ffee 7y ago

How about the trackpad? And the power switch? I've been running Ubuntu and Kali on a Dell machine for a few years and the trackpad has always been unusuable and the power switch is always power-down (instead of sleep, standby). Yes, I've messed with the xorg settings for the trackpad and the ACPI settings for the button, but gave up.

allochthon 7y ago
Slightly related: I'm running Ubuntu on a Thinkpad and the trackpad is pretty painful to use (after using macOS for years). I went out and bought a mouse a few days ago for this reason.
- 0xff00ffee 7y ago
  It is bizarre how good mac laptop touchpads are. I've used a number of Windows laptops and nothing comes close (caveat: I've never used a top-tier Win laptop).
- Izkata 7y ago
  Switching from xinput to synaptics was a big improvement on the touchpad for me (Ubuntu 18.04 on T490)

lifeisstillgood 7y ago

I dropped FreeBSD as my main laptop about four years ago (and have invested a fair bit of time on dockerising my experience on ubuntu so going back is hard) But what I wanted then (and dreamed of having a million or so to make it real) was a FreeBSD reference laptop - basically a distribution of FreeBSD that worked in this laptop series - you bought the laptop and a years support and basically three hackers just kept on producing patches and co-ordinating drivers and making simple tools and simple videos on how to keep your base running. I work on top of my laptop. I would prefer to just take the barest plain vanilla, and not have to work on my laptop unless I choose to.

zelly 7y ago
> basically a distribution of FreeBSD that worked in this laptop series - you bought the laptop and a years support and basically three hackers just kept on producing patches and co-ordinating drivers and making simple tools and simple videos on how to keep your base running. This is basically the business model of Apple Computers
- jonhohle 7y ago
  I had a professor who made this same comment all the way back in 2003. I had mentioned it would be nice to have a supported Unix-like OS on a laptop. A few months later I bought my first PowerBook and have been using a commercially supported Unix ever since (and FreeBSD on my headless computers).

jotm 7y ago

Replacing the main desktop, huh? That processor sure has the potential. A few modifications to the cooling system and some undervolting can get it running at 30+ Watt TDP indefinitely.

jotm 7y ago
As always I wonder what sad fucks downvoted this. Just ban this account and put me out of my misery.

agentultra 7y ago

I use one of those too and made the switch rather recently from a MBPr. I used Linux Mint on it. It's speedy, video calling works fine, can compile lots of code quickly, and it's refurbished and saved from the dumpster. I hope to never buy a new computer again instead relying on refurbishing old ones as we go along. I keep all of my configurations and projects synced up so that booting up a new computer into my dev environment is straight forward. If I lose the device or it gets totaled it's a couple hundred bucks instead of $4k going out the door to get a new one in a few hours.

organsnyder 7y ago
Two-year-old ThinkPads (the real ones like the T and X series) are great deals. I did buy my T480 new (I wanted features like the best screen that are hard to find used), but my wife and mom are both using T470 units that we bought off of eBay. My mom's unit turned out to have a charging issue, but we discovered that it was still under a three-year extended warranty, which is tied to the machine rather than the purchaser; Lenovo replaced the motherboard on it with little fuss.
ajford 7y ago
This is exactly what I've done for the last 5 years or so. I'm currently running a T460 I picked up almost two years ago for under $500 and is now running Xubuntu 18.04. My wife's running an X1 Yoga gen 2 that I picked up for around $400. I've come to the same conclusion that it's generally not worth the premium cost to buy a new laptop when good hardware is so readily available in my neck of the woods.
- zhte415 7y ago
  ThinkPads last forever. I'm still on a T420 and X220 (travel), upgraded SSD and new batteries, and have no desire to change.

enjoyyourlife 7y ago

Reminds me of Stallman's "How I do my computing" post https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

ngcc_hk 7y ago
That is one of few pieces of him that is comfortable to read. No feeling of an angry old man shouting at you. Quite a statesman like talking his way of life in fact. Enjoyable read. And good to hear it is just keyboard causing his hand problem. Feel sorry when a hacker have pain in using keyboard. Good article.

orisho 7y ago

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.

ahnick 7y ago
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"
- revicon 7y ago
  Wow, this is something that's been bugging me constantly. Thanks for the tip.

floatboth 7y ago

> SD card reader seems to work Holy shit, Lenovo finally switched from that non-standard Realtek thingy (https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=204521 https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=204521) to something that exposes SDHCI over PCIe?

fmakunbound 7y ago

Admire the dude who spend time tinkering and getting it right like that.

castratikron 7y ago

Why disable the TPM? One cool thing you can do is store your SSH private key inside: https://blog.habets.se/2013/11/TPM-chip-protecting-SSH-keys-properly.html https://blog.habets.se/2013/11/TPM-chip-protecting-SSH-keys-...

zelly 7y ago
Yes but the TPM can only generate its own RSA key. You can't take an existing private key and store it in the TPM.
- Thorrez 7y ago
  That's generally what you want. If the private key only ever existed in the TPM then you know there aren't any copies in an attacker's hands somewhere (ignoring hardware vulnerabilities). But if you copy a key into the TPM, there could have been malware that stole a copy of the key beforehand.

chx 7y ago

4 months ago I wrote up how insane value the T480 is: https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/dd2i3y/can_we_talk_for_a_moment_about_how_insane_a_value/ https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/dd2i3y/can_we_tal... and most of that still stands.

hnruss 7y ago
I paid twice as much for mine when it was the latest model (I got few upgrades, though). I'm pretty happy with the T480 overall, but if Lenovo releases another T-series with a significantly better CPU then I'll probably get it. I didn't think that I needed the dedicated graphics card, but now I think that having the additional cooling would help.

ptcampbell 7y ago

Mac user here. Still use a desktop Mac mini daily, but have replaced my 13" Macbook Pro for a 14" Thinkpad running Ubuntu. So far so good. Haven't had nearly the amount of hardware issues reported in this thread. Only the fingerprint scanner does not work, despite best efforts to install its drivers. The hardest thing for me so far has been customising it to behave like macOS. The muscle memory of keyboard shortcuts is too hard to shake. But I've changed most of them. Another thing to point out. The display scaling sucks. I have found anything between 100% and 200% unstable. Edit: mine is a budget L380 model. Pretty good value for under $500 (current clearance price).

pedrocr 7y ago
I've been running 1.3x fake scaling for years by just tweaking fonts. In previous Ubuntu versions with Unity that was just a standard setting. Now I need to set the font scaling in the tweak tool and in the firefox about:config. After that everything just looks fine.
- ptcampbell 7y ago
  I was using an add-on to enable experimental scaling but it's noticeably slower and my remote desktop client doesn't adjust its scaling accordingly. But you're right – browser scaling gets you half way.
city41 7y ago
I run Ubuntu MATE 18 on three different Thinkpads and they all work perfectly with zero tinkering. The only issue is they chew through the battery in no time, but since I’m almost always plugged in I’ve not bothered to investigate a fix.
- ptcampbell 7y ago
  I've found the "CPU Power Manager" add-on pretty good for battery life. I flick between the profiles depending on what I'm doing. Could be better, but I still get at least 4 hours on the "Multimedia" setting.

moneromoney 7y ago

Try the new Thinkpad X1 Extreme Gen 2: 9th Gen Intel® Core™ i9-9880H (16 Threads, 16 MB Cache) NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1650 Max-Q 4GB 64 GB RAM 4K OLED display (better colors than Mac) Great keyboard Infrared Camera Fingerprint Sensor DOULBY Sound System Water-Spoil-Protection ... The first generation had some cooling issues, but it is solved now in the second generation.

linuxhansl 7y ago

Have been running Linux on Lenovo laptops forever. A T500, then a T440p, now an X1E Gen2 (can't remember what I used before the T500). While I still am not able to buy a Lenovo laptop without Windows preinstalled, at least Lenovo is open enough for other OSs (FreeBSD, Linux, etc) to run relatively flawlessly on them.

gruturo 7y ago

Checking in with a Lenovo Carbon X1 gen1 running FreeBSD flawlessly. Everything works including suspend/resume, the only things I never tried to use are the camera and fingerprint reader but I guess I'll check out of curiosity. Battery life is better than Windows. The touchpad is a little less pleasant to use (hard to click on a small target while using the laptop on the couch, the pointer always moves a little bit when taking the finger off). It definitely works better after some 30 minutes of usage but I have no idea why.

867-5309 7y ago

i7-8550U paired with a 1TB 5400rpm? that's not a bottleneck, that's a bottle cap with a pinhole.

deleted 7y ago

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2ion 7y ago

I won't buy another laptop without dedicated graphics card, which rules out most Thinkpads. Sorry, but igpu is not enough these days.

jtreminio 7y ago
Funnily enough, I had wanted to purchase my Dell XPS 9570 (15") without dgpu, but they only offered it for their 13" model. Until several months after release, support for the nvidia card was spotty on Ubuntu/Fedora so it would suck up power without it being used. It's better now, but my workflow doesn't really need a dgpu, and the igpu is enough to watch 1080p videos (probably not 4K, though).
- migglesnz 7y ago
  I have a T480S powering a 4k monitor on the igpu and it's more than happy to play 4k Youtube even without hardware acceleration.
ntw1103 7y ago
I have the T495, that has the Vega 10 amdgpu. While it is builtin with the cpu, It performs pretty decently. After proper configuration, I was able to get 20FPS in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, at max settings, on Linux.

whatsmyusername 7y ago

I mean, I'm going to ask the question. Why? If it's for funsies okay but pushing to use something wildly boutique is a major red flag for me at work. I have one guy who works for me who runs linux on the desktop and he's pretty much always having a problem of some sort. I put up with it because he's staff level, but it doesn't impress.

vharish 7y ago

Have you worked on external monitors with this setup? The last time I've tried, it had been a pain. The monitors were detected fine, but the scaling was completely off.

devgoth 7y ago

I really want to try a ThinkPad with Ubuntu. Currently using an older DELL XPS 13 with Ubuntu and no issues so far expect the trackpad is going out