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OpenBSD on the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Nano
- Jkvngt 6y agoOpenBSD just gets better every day. Kudos to the developers, it’s nice to have an alternative to Linux which works so well on the desktop.
- maxerickson 6y agoToday I learned that Lenovo touchpads have a mechanical click mechanism. After ~2 years.
- Jkvngt 6y agoWho would really notice when the TrackPoint is so much better?
- maxerickson 6y agoI mostly use a bluetooth mouse. I don't think I'm bothered by the pause when it wakes up from sleeping, and other than that it works great, no dropouts or whatever. If I'm not using the mouse I double tap for click+hold.
- denimnerd42 6y agoI love the trackpoint but it's an RSI creating machine in my experience.
- nhumrich 6y agoI have the opposite experience.
- GekkePrutser 6y agoMe too. I just cannot use them. I remove the red nub too because I don't like how it feels when I'm typing. I just wish a touchpoint-free keyboard was simply an option. Other than that I think ThinkPads are perfect though I lament the lack of ac real Ethernet port on recent models
- Proven 6y agoThe first hardware device I always disable on my new ThinkPad. The second is camera. The third is bluetooth.
- adultSwim 6y agoI strongly support a fixed touchpad. Tap to click is so much better than constant "thunking"
- maxerickson 6y agoThe one on my X1 G6 is pretty stiff, that's why I never noticed it. I only ever tap for click and double tap for click+hold.
- kiwijamo 6y agoInteresting, it was the first thing I checked. Loved that feature on the MacBooks so was very happy my X1 Carbon 5th Gen had it.
- gcblkjaidfj 6y ago> Suspend / resume No The firmware does not support ACPI S3 suspend. Lol at the state of hardware.
- cwlb 6y agofor real! some later versions of the X1C have had S3 patched in but when the X1C6 was first released this was a surprise to me. Apparently Windows is moving towards S1-only and that gets reflected in firmwares originally designed for windows computers. For the uninitiated, without S3 closing the laptop lid will either continue to drain battery pretty damned quickly (S1) OR cause the OS to take much longer to resume completely from disk (S4 aka hibernate). As SSDs get bigger/faster/cheaper in comparison to RAM, S4 will start to seem more equivalent, but to make this sensible on an ultrabook you might want to opt for that 1+TB NVME so you can hibernate on lid-shut without eating a significant fraction of your disk on swap.
- p_l 6y agoThe requirement for certification with S1 aka Modern Standby btw requires that proper S1 implementation draws same or less power than S3, iirc. But that requires pretty heavy power saving code
- maxerickson 6y ago16 GB of RAM seems fine even on a 256 GB disk. (It's plenty at that point, but hardly seems to be the yes/no on the whole deal)
- greggyb 6y agoNote for this laptop, specifically, it maxes out at 16GB RAM, and it's soldered, so that is a hard cap. That'd take a 256GB SSD down to 240GB after swap. I don't think it's a big concern for this machine, though certainly could be for some mobile workstation with much more RAM.
- neurobashing 6y agokidding aside, I'm opinionated: if it doesn't suspend/resume, it's not a laptop.
- lifeisstillgood 6y agoWaaaaay back when, I had a plan to turn my months long tweaking FreeBSD (6?) on my laptop into becoming a reseller of laptops with BSD pre-installed (this was back when Dell did not ship anything with linux on, and laptops still had some kind of margin). Like most of my ideas it withered on the vine of bills and rent but every time I look at an Apple Mac there is still a twinge that says "Lenovo makes 100,000 laptops with exactly same components for huge corporate A and B, so there is room to tack on 1,000 more to keep the hardware base stable and release a run of perfectly stable machines, that just work. Or ... frankly my dell refurbished laptop runs three flavours of linux quite fine thank you. maybe I just cannot go back to BSD ... which is a shame.
- blhack 6y agoOpenBSD is just so good. There's no BS. Everything just either works, or it isn't supported.
- dbtc 6y agoI see some similarity, in terms of ruthlessly good design, to the Jobsian Apple era
- thomashabets2 6y agoWell, I wouldn't go that far. Last time I tried OpenBSD I ran into several bugs. One reproducible freeze, one sloppy coding (ksh), and some leftover cruft in the kernel. Previous times I've used OpenBSD I've encountered bugs in what feels like any place I've looked. MPLS, time parsing in libc, … But it's definitely more "if it exists, it works" than the Lennartware that's been taking over Linux for the last several years. Some thoughts from 2019: https://blog.habets.se/2019/10/OpenBSD-in-2019.html https://blog.habets.se/2019/10/OpenBSD-in-2019.html
- LeoPanthera 6y agoI know that OpenBSD is "opinionated" but I can't really accept that their opinion on bluetooth is "we don't support bluetooth", which otherwise seems essential, at least to me, for any mobile device.
- bluedays 6y agoIt seems like it does though? https://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD-5.5/bluetooth.4 https://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD-5.5/bluetooth.4 I'm not sure why the article says it doesn't support bluetooth.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y agoNotice that that's for OpenBSD 5.5; it was removed.
- spijdar 6y agoThat's the man page for OpenBSD 5.5. Bump 5.5 up to any higher number and you'll get "not found". Bluetooth was removed around ~2014 in OpenBSD.
- dddddaviddddd 6y agoOpenBSD 5.5 was released in May 2014. The Bluetooth stack was removed later that year: http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20140729070721 http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20140729070721
- liveranga 6y agoIt's not really philosophical, they just weren't happy with the Bluetooth stack they had (originally from netbsd I think) and no-one has written a new one yet. https://github.com/openbsd/src/commit/b8042ed98e3e7a691133b4fd8e91f61ba15a83ba https://github.com/openbsd/src/commit/b8042ed98e3e7a691133b4...
- LeoPanthera 6y agoIt was removed in 2014! At this point, "not yet" surely must mean "we don't want it".
- asveikau 6y agoI have an x1 6th gen running freebsd. I am a little disappointed with how it's been falling apart. SSD failed early last year. Lost contact with a usb c port a few months after that. LCD has a vertical gray line. Some paint started chipping off around the trackpad. I will probably replace it with another X1 because I am a masochist. But I do wish it were a bit more sturdy. Other than that, I like the size and hardware support.
- pulse7 6y agoAll this is very unlikely for a ThinkPad which can be bought with a 5 year warranty and is military-grade tested. Before buying one I have spoken with a licensed service partner in Frankfurt, Germany and he told me, they rarely get any ThinkPads to repair but they constantly get other Lenovo brands to repair. And this is Frankfurt, where you will see only ThinkPads as business laptops in banks...
- asveikau 6y agoI googled some of these issues as I faced them and I often found others hitting the same. It seems like the particular model of SSD I got had a lot of issues for many users. The USB C port coming loose is also something I found other people facing. Maybe X1 Carbon is more shoddy or fragile than other lines.
- ngngngng 6y agoThe display on my 6th gen has developed flickering issues after only a year and half of light usage. I think the quality on these has gone down a lot recently.
- Jkvngt 6y agoI bought a T25 specifically for the keyboard, the rubberized coating is already wearing off on the palm rest, the screen has this whitish spot that’s brighter than any other part of the screen now, and I found out the stupid thing is held together by clips. I feel like a complete moron.
- GekkePrutser 6y agoThat really long bendy heatpipe looks so weird. Not clean.. Irksome :P. Might consider this machine anyway though.
- webmobdev 6y agoAnother laptop with soldered RAM = built-in planned obsolescence. More consumers need to be made aware of this and everyone should boycott such products. Especially for the price they are paying ($1000+ for this model). If we just give in without protesting about it we are just giving up our rights to repair our devices.
- 0x737368 6y agoShame that you're getting downvoted on HN for such views - most consumers don't care about devices designed to be long-lasting and if the technical population doesn't too then it's totally a lost cause. I've recently purchased a used T530, which was the last model to feature a removable battery, removable CPU, unsoldered RAM, etc etc(for the pedants - yes, later models still had some of these features, but none of them had all of them). It's a fantastic machine that runs everyday tasks without a hitch and with having the option to easily repair it I hope it will last at least another 10 years. The only disadvantage I have compared to the newer T490 model that I use is that it's about 1kg heavier. I think it's reasonable that some consumers would prefer a lighter and thinner machine, even if that includes sacrificing modularity/repairibility, but I doubt those make up the majority and most are just apathetic and willing to go the way of disposable consumerism that corporations are pushing to drive profits further.
- spijdar 6y agoI think you and GP are conflating "repairability" with "upgradability". The only two components in a laptop that are essentially guaranteed to fail in a short-ish timeframe are flash storage and the batteries. As long as these two are replaceable, I think a device is reasonably "repairable". While there's a definite chance of the CPU and memory etc. failing, I think for most people the trade-off in size and weight to accommodate sockets aren't worth it from a repairability perspective. That's where I draw my line, anyway. Flash storage and batteries are essentially guaranteed to fail in 5-10 years of use, and absolutely need to be replaceable. As long as the build quality is decent, the rest can be integrated.
- 6y ago
- jamiesonbecker 6y ago> The firmware does not support ACPI S3 suspend. ... I am so over modern Thinkpads.
- adultSwim 6y agoI wish this had an Apple-style non-moveable trackpad
- jzer0cool 6y agoIt's been a very long time since I owned a Thinkpad, 2001-ish. To give a time frame around this time there were companies like Circuit City was busted with the rise of Fry's Electronics. I'm unsure if Best Buy's was a thing at the time. The look of the Thinkpads are still very similar to ones today, but of course very modernized to times then. I would very much appreciate who might be able to weigh in their experience who has used both a Thinkpad and a Macbook book as primary machines. It's been a while since I last purchased a pc-based laptop and would like to explore options again. Another I was interested in the past include Alienware.
- llampx 6y agoI used a MacBook, first Air and then Pro until 2018. Then I switched to ThinkPad because I had sold my MacBook pro 2015 and needed a new laptop. And the new MacBooks were not to my taste. The Thinkpad was fantastic. T470s, took care of all my needs, lots of ports, upgradeable RAM und SSD. Recently I upgraded to a Ryzen-based Dell but it is hot and loud. I am considering going back to MacBook depending on what they release next.
- jzer0cool 6y agoWanting to upgrade to the newer Mac M Processor. Wait. Or a pc notebook. Decisions, decisions, decisions, ...