FreeBSD on the Lenovo Thinkpad | Hacker News Reader

FreeBSD on the Lenovo Thinkpad

davidschlachter.com

170 pointsdddddaviddddd150 comments

Please stop cargo culting all the loader tunables and sysctls you've seen :) You need approximately zero i915 related ones because they're enabled by default just like on Linux. You especially don't need both drm.i915 and compat.linuxkpi copies. (The former is for older drivers, the latter is for new ones)

Also moused is not a great way to use a touchpad. At least on 12-stable (idk if it made it into a 12.x-release) EVDEV_SUPPORT is enabled out of the box, so you can just set kern.evdev.rcpt_mask=12 and get proper evdev events, separately for the trackpoint and touchpad, with full gesture support on the touchpad.

And since you like i3, might want to try Sway – HiDPI is much better supported on Wayland ;)

This is why I won't use open source for a desktop anymore. It's so convoluted and changes so often that I have to constantly keep track of multiple kernel and userland systems in order to know what tweaks I don't need to make.

"Don't use the faffle-fille.123456 tweak, that's for the 2016 driver; the 2019 driver inherits the booble-babble hack from the nzudzu core. Also, the 611-double-decker-dev release added FOO_MANCHU support so you just need the abcdefghijk=999 argument to set up all the things you would expect to work by default."

I just want to pay someone to make my computer work the way it's designed to.

If you are hinting to proprietary systems in your last sentence, you can go ahead and pay someone to lock you into their ecosystem. This is how Free Software works and I wouldn't have it any other way. People work on their own and bring it together into one whole system, and that can cause incompatibilities. However lock-step design is also one of the key ways to destroy innovation. If you lack the desire to learn how to configure your system, then you will probably not want to use a Free system. That's just how it is.

I hope this doesn't sound rude, but that is exactly why desktop Linux and friends are a piss-poor experience compared to their proprietary counterparts.

There is a negative feedback look here. With enough of that kind of "customization freaks only, casuals need not apply, enjoy your non-innovative proprietary shitware" talk, user bases stay small and niche, people get alienated, and don't contribute to or use free OSes.

It's perfectly reasonable to want to trade customizability for usability. Chasing people who think that away from free software helps nobody.

There's plenty of free polished out-of-the-box experiences, from Ubuntu/Mint/elementary/whatever to hardware from Purism and system76.

There's definitely some "customization freaks only" assholes on the internet too, but…

very very often, it seems like some people perceive that when a non-out-of-the-box OS just exists and people like using it just personally for themselves.

There is definitely progress here since the early '00s. However, there's a very long way to go until even the most polished home-user Linux distros approach the level of usability (and supportability, even more critical) of proprietary OSes for non-power-users.

And I wasn't trying to paint everyone who wants to tinker with the same "gatekeeping" brush, sorry if I came off that way. GP equated proprietary software with "pay[ing] someone to lock you into their ecosystem" and "destroy[ing] innovation", and ended with

> If you lack the desire to learn how to configure your system, then you will probably not want to use a Free system. That's just how it is.

That's the sentiment I had trouble with. Not the existence of knobs (which should continue existing! Just with better tuning experience for casual users, and saner defaults).

I just want software that works well. In some ways, Free Software is that, and in some ways, it isn't.

I reject the idea that this is how it has to be. There is no reason Free Software has to be user-unfriendly.

You can use Ubuntu/Mint/elementary/etc. and it's very user-friendly. You can pay Purism or system76 to deliver you a literal physical out-of-the-box experience.

But, like, let tinkerers tinker. Nobody said that this should be the way to go for everyone or that user-friendly unix does not exist. You brought the assumption that all Free Software is like that into a thread about a specific less-popular explicitly-not-desktop-oriented OS ;)

But you are replying to a comment that says you don't need the tweaks.

I think the situation is a little bit made worse by the fact that historically, FreeBSD had some poor or out of date defaults, so it is prone to putting something in a config file and forgetting about it as it meanwhile becomes obsolete. This is not really an "open source desktop" problem so much as a FreeBSD problem.

Yeah, I think it really comes down to the fact that the only way to have every detail on your system exactly the way you want it would take more time than you'll have in your life, so we make compromises. Commercial software & community-driven open source software offer different sets of compromises

I think you have misinterpreted the parent comment.

The point is precisely that manual tweaks to drivers selection, kernel settings, and Xorg/wayland, survive in modern desktop Linux mostly as an example of cargo cult. They aren't necessary, or even advisable in most cases.

> And since you like i3, might want to try Sway – HiDPI is much better supported on Wayland ;)

I don't understand why people say that ; I had my first hidpi screen in 2014 and it worked fine from day 1 on X - to the extent apps & toolkits themselves supported it; the only two that took their time were chrome and firefox but even today they work fine ; the last remaining bastion is TCL/Tk but this does not even work natively on wayland anyways.

here's how it looks for me today on X11 : https://i.imgur.com/VfWisJ7.png

I would gladly make a comparative sway screenshot but it is unbearably slow on my machine (maybe due to nvidia drivers), the keymap is incorrect, and half the programs I want to use don't even launch

Now try having a HiDPI and a LoDPI monitor connected at the same time :)

Wayland fractional scaling doesn't work for Chromium and Electron apps, with X11 it's at least possible to make it work.

> At least on 12-stable (idk if it made it into a 12.x-release) EVDEV_SUPPORT is enabled out of the box

The GENERIC kernel configuration for FreeBSD-12.x-release does not support EVDEV out of the box. It is there however for both 12 stable and of course head.

Yeah, not in 12.0. it will in 12.1, I just didn't know if it might be out already. I don't follow releases, CURRENT all the things :)

> And since you like i3, might want to try Sway – HiDPI is much better supported on Wayland ;)

Seconding this.

Long time Windows, Linux AND i3 user.

When I (for the Nth time) tried Sway recently, I was blown away by the multi-display support and how well it handled DPI-differences between those.

It was without a doubt the best HiDPI experience I’ve had on any OS so far.

If you’ve tried Sway in the past and given up on it (like I did), for lack of maturity or whatever, do give it a spin now.

IMO it’s finally ready. It’s finally here.

I've gone from i3 -> sway -> i3. Maybe it has gotten better since I last used it; but generally I disliked it.

There are 3 distinct issues I've had (one of which I believe was a Wayland-related problem).

(1) I dislike how you can resize a window horizontal & vertical at the same time. Grab a corner, and adjust. I distinctly think that this is a feature and not a bug, I just don't like it. I vastly prefer i3's method of 'Adjust vertical' OR 'Adjust Horizontal' depending on where your mouse is.

(2) Window-title bar. The size of the font/title bar dynamically changing. Lets say I have firefox open with 3 xterm windows in a even 2x2 matrix. I might have 10 Tabs in Firefox open. As I cycle through the firefox tabs the height of the title-bar changes to reflect the website name. With some sites the font size and/or style changes (from default) too. This causes the titlebar size to change by 1-2 pixels. That causes a screen refresh/redraw and my 2x2 window matrix is no longer 'aligned'. The lack of alignment doesn't bother me, but the 'flicker' it causes does.

(3) Wayland specific: screenshots. I need to be able to take screenshots for parts of my job. I've worked around most of these issues (FireFox has a screenshot tool built-in,etc..) but once in a while I'll need to grab an xterm or something else. [ok this has just devolved into a rant.]

I only have one 4k screen, and had some issues with scaling, but I'd be willing to take another stab at Sway.

I take screenshots All. The. Time. Multiple per day, usually just a part of a screen for pasting into an email or IM. Windows win+shift+s works great for this. I couldn’t live without an analogous feature.

screenshots work, grim can do screenshots and chained with slurp you can select a region as well

  bindsym Print exec grim -g "$(slurp)" "$HOME/screenshot-$(date).png"

I could have sworn I tried this. Thanks for posting. I'll bookmark it if/when I go back to Wayland.

It'd be nice to diff a gist of an updated sysctl/rc.conf for this / whatever you use updated to 12.x.

I took a better look at some man pages and updated the article to remove unnecessary tunables.

Would this be considered the standard amount of things someone would need to work out to get a bsd laptop up and useable?(or are there more preconfigured images?) Are Thinkpads best for support?

Can't say anything about support, but the x11 settings for hidpi and all that are all because of his choice of window manager. i3 is a very hands off, only manages windows kind of thing. Using a full desktop environment will make forgoing all the editing of files.

The rest seems to be normal bsd setup stuff, but I know little of that beyond setting up a few virtual machines to test things

Ah thanks. I’ve been reading around, but most posts I see are from 2017 or earlier. I’ve been thinking of giving it a go on my xps, but wasn’t sure about driver support. Looks like support is there.

There was this post recently about OpenBSD on the Lenovo X1 Carbon https://jcs.org/2019/08/14/x1c7 .

From what I read OpenBSD can be better supported than FreeBSD on laptops, especially the Thinkpads as that's what a lot of OpenBSD devs used.

OpenBSD tends to have nicer defaults. On laptops the volume and brightness keys work everywhere out of the box, including on the console, without needing to be configured, unlike on FreeBSD, NetBSD, (and Linux, where they only work on X11)

FreeBSD has a couple more drivers for wireless cards than OpenBSD, and has some GPL drivers that you can optionally compile in for even wider support (bwn has optional GPL components for example). But for most hardware, the support will be very similar (aside from bluetooth, which OpenBSD got rid of because their code was poor and unmaintained—nobody's gotten around to writing another bluetooth stack yet)

I prefer OpenBSD, but FreeBSD has a lot going for it too with Jails, ZFS, support for NVIDIA cards, Wayland.

> (and Linux, where they only work on X11

Volume and Brightness keys have always worked fine on my fedora even after they defaulted to wayland.

I think he was referring to the TTYs, without wayland in mind.

Yep. I need to get out of the habit of referring to any graphical environment on a Unix as X11.

You're right, I should have said "on X11/Wayland DEs".

On ThinkPads specifically, brightness on FreeBSD works in the virtual console just fine. ThinkPads handle it via the EC I think.

I've been using FreeBSD since version 4.3 on and off. Most of the time I've used it with variants of ThinkPads, recent ones were T530i and E480. The longest period I've spent as my main OS was long time ago on Sony Vaio VGN-FS550. In a sense it has improved a lot, but also managed to remain complicated for someone who just want to test things without prior knowledge. But yes, this is typical amount of things you need to undergo when starting with FreeBSD. And it remained pretty much the same for the past 19 years. I've switched to Linux as my main OS, just because I wanted things to work out of the box.

> I've switched to Linux as my main OS, just because I wanted things to work out of the box.

As an old geek, statements like this still feel weird, in a very good way. Remember winmodems and XFree86? Eh.

Hasn't it always been the case that Linux is more likely to work out of the box than FreeBSD is on a laptop not specifically chosen for FreeBSD support?

Sure, but "more likely" still meant "unlikely" not too long ago. Unless on a laptop specifically chosen for Linux support.

Laziness kicks in with years ;)

I used new thinkpad x220 back in the day, the only annoying thing was that lan required some driver download from vendor(realtek, if remember correctly), did not work out of the box. Don't think I've messed much with other things, so they worked ok for me out of the box(but my requirements might be different). Been user since 6.0

Not really. At least not in the way that blog post has been presented. Normally you’ll be told as you install things if there is any manual amendments to configure files required. So it’s all quite discoverable.

That said, if you’re used to Linux and Windows where you can just start services then daemons on FreeBSD might catch you out because you need to (or rather, get “told” to) manually edit the rc.conf file for any services you want. It only takes a few seconds to do but I can see why some people might find it an annoyance if they’re not used to manually editing system files (personally I don’t mind but I’ve been using UNIX for decades).

As someone who's just (last week) started to get Arch Linux up and running on a T490 I would assume that: Yes, this is _at least_ the amount of things you need to do but if my experience is any indication this is only like 10% of it.

Most of the things in Thinkpads work but not all (notably the latest WWAN LTE Modems don't have support).

I could write up my experience if there's interest.

You've started with Arch and are judging the entire ecosystem based on that? That's ridiculous.

Start with Ubuntu, Fedora, elementary OS, or any of the myriads of actually complete operating systems that let you get some work done less than half an hour since you start an installation.

I started with Fedora (because basically all my day to day work involves RHEL/CentOS), moved to Manjaro and ended up on Arch for various reasons.

Also: I'm not judging an ecosystem, I'm judging the Laptop support of Linux and I know that some of it is not even the fault of Linux itself.

Things like:

- Windows has 7h battery lifetime, Linux gets 3h on my Laptop (that is with Fedora)

- Which driver do I need to disable the NVidia card? Modesetting, xf86-video-intel, nouveau, etc.. .what do these even mean? (that is with Fedora)

- Why does the modem not work? (That is with Fedora)

- Does my Laptop have a light sensor?

- How to disable the "Hot Corner" in Gnome (Fedora) and many more things.

Almost everything I'm facing has nothing to do with the distro and I switched to Arch because its documentation is by far the best out there.

Pretty much everything what you're facing is distro specific.

The battery life is solved on Ubuntu by TLP which is installed by default (at least it was on Ubuntu Mate)

Ubuntu is now shipping with free and proprietary Nvidia drivers and you can choose during the installation which ones you want to use.

Gnome hot corners are disabled by default on Ubuntu. Of course if you prefer vanilla Gnome experience you can always use it, it's just a matter of selecting item from dropdown on login screen.

As for the light sensors and modem, I'm not sure but I imagine that it's not a big deal under Ubuntu or Pop!_OS. For me Fedora was always ALMOST there. Most of the times it was working but there was many little tweaks that had to be done in order to make everything working. On Ubuntu even things like fingerprint reader login was dead easy to setup (Thinkpad X230).

I disagree.

I tried Ubuntu us well. I installed TLP on Arch & Fedora. I didn't even test without and the battery life is still abysmal compared to Windows.

Light sensor: I eventually figured that out, thanks.

Modem: There's just no driver for linux, the distro doesn't matter.

My point is: It shouldn't be this hard. I shouldn't have to know what TLP is or what kind of drivers I need etc.

Well, you only have to because your laptop OEM didn't.

Almost any time you find something that doesn't work on your laptop, it's because the manufacturer used chipsets that didn't follow spec and/or only worked with Microsoft to produce drivers.

So it's unfortunate that your laptop didn't work immediately, but it's also impossible for kernel devs to produce perfect drivers if no one shares hardware specs with them. That's just unreasonable.

If you want a laptop made for Linux like the one you own was made for Windows, you can either buy from one of the many vendors that advertise Linux support or you can shop by chipset to make sure they're all supported. Personally, I appreciate the choice, but I know not everyone wants to know how the clock works, just what time it is.

I wonder why there is no major hardware manufacturer producing perfectly tuned Linux laptops in the way Apple sells OS X laptops. That sounds like a really obvious business case to me and it's what I would be doing if I were in that business: not merely having linux pre-installed, but a Linux-based OS that's perfectly tuned to your hardware and provides a pleasant no-fuss Mac-like user experience.

There's much lower hanging fruit to be plucked. A few examples:

Why don't the mainstream distros automatically apply laptop (especially powersaving) specific settings if they detect an internal battery?

Why don't the main distros automatically apply a 'small speakers' equalization to any detected built-in speakers? Running Ubuntu on my MacBook Pro makes it sound like ass but doing a very generic equalization via PulseEffects makes it sound almost the same as on macOS

Why doesn't increasing or lowering brightness fade up or down instead of doing big jumps up or down?

Just doing those three things would make Linux feel tremendously more polished on any laptop it's installed on, no 'blessing' of certain brands or laptop series needed.

Dell XPS developer edition?

Purism?

> battery

You can do a bunch of things around under-volting, governor changes, powertop tuning, profile settings, tlp, etc. to improve battery on arch. Helped me, at least.

> disable the NVidia card

You shouldn't need a driver to disable it. I switched to arch specifically because gpu switching on manjaro was a nightmare; the arch wiki did it for me: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dell_XPS_15_9570#NVIDIA...

It's for a different machine, but it should still provide a decent starting point.

> modem not work

Drivers, probably? Not many laptops have them.

> light sensor

Try this to check: `find /proc /sys | grep -ie brightness -e light -e lux -e lumin`. If that doesn't work, `sudo modprobe -a tsl2550 isl29003 isl29020 apds9802als apds990x bh1770glc bh1780gli` and run the find command again, or try `sensors-detect`/`i2cdetect`. Never configured personally, but these two packages look promising:

* https://github.com/mikhail-m1/illuminanced

* https://cgit.chrisoft.org/lightsd.git/

If you feel like re-implementing, gnome also made one: https://github.com/hadess/iio-sensor-proxy

> How to disable the "Hot Corner" in Gnome

Not what you want to hear, but... don't use gnome. It's not built for tweaking as much as other things are. Something like KDE is orders of magnitude more tweakable, or something simpler like budgie might fit your use case. Personally I like i3-gaps, but that's definitely more advanced.

Any way, if you want to disable it, you actually have to install an extension to do it. More info here: https://michigantechit.teamdynamix.com/TDClient/KB/ArticleDe...

As you said, documentation is awesome. Arch wiki is great.

You shouldn't have to undervolt to get normal battery life, though. The OS should be running only the services you actually need. I always thought Linux was much better at this than Windows. Have the tables turned?

Linux is indeed better about this, I'm more mentioning it as a general power-saving technique. Windows has something equivalent to schedulers with its "power plan" options, and comes on "balanced" by default; some performance cost for better battery. Linux is better at fewer services, but takes more work to optimize for particular hardware (especially as many drivers don't have first-party linux support, and some times don't use all power-saving features). Often it takes some tweaking to get this working at the same level. It has gotten better with the hard work of lots of people (in that it's actually possible with tweaking now where it wasn't at all before), but there's still some room to improve. Of course, more mfgs could also support linux; that would make it much easier. Or better yet, open-source the driver so it can get better.

Thank you for your hints. I didn't actually mean this as a request for support but rather as a list of things I was facing that were/are hard to solve and I've been using Linux for 10 or so years.

(I'm using bspwm, the Gnome Hot Corner thing was just another example, it shouldn't require an addon to disable that)

"- How to disable the "Hot Corner" in Gnome (Fedora) and many more things." — uh, this here. Why that's a default is beyond me. Simple enough to disable, but shouldn't need to.

But we're judging FreeBSD, not "Ubuntu, Fedora, elementary OS". Everyone knows the latter will be easy to set up

The comment I've responded to mentions Arch, not FreeBSD. I've replied to them about Arch, not FreeBSD.

Well, not if doing some work is somehow related to hardware video decoding or taking advantage of latest GPGPU features.

I don't know about your specific situation, but I think we'll both agree that the majority of HN readers need a browser, a terminal, a text editor, and an operating system that gets out of their way.

I don't agree and would gladly get some numbers confirming that assessment.

Ubuntu comes with hardware video decoding support out of the box, just install it on a machine with an Intel or AMD gpu, and tick the "Install third-party software" box during installation.

If you're lucky with the card.

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2016/03/ubuntu-drops-amd-catalys...

All that article says is that if you use a newer OS version, you have to use a newer driver (amdgpu or radeon instead of the deprecated fglrx), not that you'd lose hardware-accelerated video.

Except that newer driver happens to lack features from the old one.

Yet hardware-accelerated video still worked fine out of the box.

Surely not on my Radeon.

I just set up a new laptop with fedora because I figured Arch would be too much effort. Is it really that easy to get running? I figured with arch when you run into an issue it must be much harder to fix than fedora or ubuntu. I just want to open up an ide, terminal, and a browser but arch seems to be a whole hobby in itself.

I've been a Linux user since 1999 and recently got Arch up and running on a spare laptop just to see what it was all about. Not sure if my experience is typical but compared to my day-to-day Ubuntu system it was like going back in time 20 years. I'm sure some people enjoy the challenge (and the learning opportunity) but I've been spoilt now and already have too many hobbies as it is.

if you want to learn about linux then distros like arch and gentoo are a great learning experience but for the average end user the potential issues far outweigh the benefits

It's not too hard, if you know what you're doing. It's trite, but read the stinkin' wiki; it's very good. Some people are intimidated by the cli; it's a matter of personal preference, but it's marginally faster if you know what you're doing. It's not really hard to fix (compared to other distros), and I've had a stable system which I don't touch much for quite a while. It took a while to configure (back up your dotfiles!), but these days I just leave it alone. You can tinker, but you can also just use your system. I think arch gets the "constantly-needs-tinkering" reputation because many of its users like tinkering, not because your system dies every time you `pacman -Syu`.

As pointed out by others, pacman is that good. Much faster than others, better dependency resolution, and AUR. From a productivity stand-point, AUR allows me to avoid the significant tedium of cloning, fiddling with, and cajoling a git package to build.

Stick with ubuntu. Arch has benefits, but most new users will do just fine without it, and arch can be a big pain to get running.

Until you figure that Ubuntu is full of shit. Snap packages are a piece of shit, and, whenever you need any kind of unmastobatory software packages you'll need to add PPAs. Ubuntu has gone to hell since the Snap ordeal. Arch is the only way to go.

I use arch exactly for that reason, but I could not imagine getting started with arch as my first linux experience. You should at least learn the basics on ubuntu first. I think there's a good natural progression with linux, and that you can and should switch to arch once you outgrow ubuntu.

It certainly can be a hobby, but so can any other Linux distribution. I've been using Arch for years, and the amount of tinkering I do is pretty close to none.

The most difficult part is the install, which really isn't that bad if you read the installation guide. My first install took about 2 hours, and now it takes ~20 minutes. When you install, you basically do the following:

1. Configure internet access (netctl is pretty simple) 2. Set up mirrors (if you're lazy, just enable the kernel.org ones, they're the most consistent) 3. Mount partition(s) - need to create them manually too; cfdisk is great 4. Install base packages 5. chroot - basic configuration (hostname, locale, etc) 6. Install/configure grub 7. Reboot 8. Install everything else, may take a few reboots to make sure everything comes up as expected

In my recent installs, I install the desktop environment (and drivers) and enable it before rebooting, so when it comes up, it's ready to go. The important thing to remember when coming from something like Ubuntu is that you need to enable services through systemd manually.

What I really appreciate about Arch is that I really haven't had to touch it since I got it configured. I run updates every week or so and check archlinux.org first to make sure there are no weird steps required to do an update (usually deleting a file on the filesystem or upgrading a dependency first or something due to a package change). I haven't had any significant breakage, though I have had to roll back the kernel once or twice in the last couple years (Arch keeps one backup kernel by default). Make sure to always reboot when the kernel gets upgraded and you'll be fine. Also, the issues I've had are because the nvidia driver didn't get updated with the kernel, so if you have AMD or Intel graphics, this likely won't happen to you.

I've tried a few different distributions (Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE), and honestly Arch has been the least finicky once installed. I hate release-based distributions since doing a release upgrade tends to break things.

I have installed Arch Linux on a Lenovo Ideapad 700 last year and everything worked out of the box. Didn’t have to configure a thing. I haven’t noticed that I haven’t installed Nvidia drivers for four months because vanilla 4K support was so good.

Yes, a hobby is a good description. If you enjoy it it's great, and you can learn a lot. I certainly used to, but nowadays prefer to just use fedora or mac OS and have more time for other hobbies

If you like to tinker for hours, Arch. Otherwise Manjaro, which works out of the box and still gives you the benefits of Arch.

You really don’t need to tinker with Arch much at all. Linux and systemd have sane defaults for everything these days. An Arch install takes me about 15 minutes, I install Gnome, NetworkManager, GDM and am done. The Arch package manager is so much better than the debian/ubuntu/red hat ecosystem that it is totally worth it for a developer. Almost every esoteric package is managed by someone on AUR so you get self updating packages installed with a single command for almost any software you need. All software is kept in sync with upstream so no need to hack in stuff for times when you need the latest package.

Of course you’ll need to know basic Linux fundamentals and understand systemd at a basic level to get through the install process - but these are not hard, I think.

I've done it countless times. There's always tinkering. It does not work out of the box. You might think so because you've memorized all the steps, but there's so much that needs to be thought of in the first place and then configured.

Manjaro is strictly worse when it comes to the quality of software.

I wouldn't agree that installing Arch is that big of a hassle - yes, you don't a nice menu based installer, but really, after setting up all of your partitions, installing the root filesystem, adding a user, and installing some packages, and installing hte bootloader, what else is there to do? To be fair, the install process has become easier over the years, as things like timezones and locales are becoming easier to configure due to systemd. But I must concede, if you've never partitioned a drive manually, or added a user, you'll want to take your time. And I always read the wiki's install instructions anyway. And whilst this does mean that there's a bit more complexity associated with setting up Arch, if you're using installing a non-standard OS on your hardware, the knowledge you gain will by doing so will almost always turn out to be useful in some way. As far as tinkering with it, I've never had to explicitly tinker with exotic configs to get my hardware to work as good or better than it would on Ubuntu, and to get my exotic config requirements to work is far easier on Arch than it is on Debian, Ubuntu or Fedora. Manjaro is so broken that I can't even boot the gnome installer on a VM. Besides, it's far easier to manage my machine if there's no auto-updater grabbing a lock on my package manager on for the first 15 minutes of a boot, every boot (looking at you Fedora), or having an update process that may leave you with a severely outdated kernel even though you jumped through the hoops to get a recent kernel (Looking at you Ubuntu 16.04 LTS).

> Manjaro is strictly worse when it comes to the quality of software.

I haven't made this experience with Manjaro on several systems.

Setting up Arch isn't just about partitioning and adding a user. That's trivial stuff that I'm simply not talking about. Though somehow Arch's documentation has become significantly worse for complete newbies ever since they got rid of the new user's guide and you end up having to read a bunch of utterly irrelevant stuff in order to find the magic incantation that actually works (and no, it doesn't actually explain anywhere why it works the way it does).

I've had to do tons of messing around with settings just to get Arch working properly on different systems. I had problems with resume working properly on my Thinkpad for forever, and less decently supported systems had more issues. I'm just not that kind of user anymore and I don't want to be my own tech support. I have enough to juggle in userland pertaining to my actual job that I simply do. not. want. anything going wrong that I'll have to dig into some obscure config file somewhere to fix.

Manjaro gives me most of the benefits of Arch without having to waste my time with setting up an Arch system just perfectly so it simply works. I have access to the AUR and I have reasonably up-to-date packages (and I do run unstable on my laptop, which usually works fine).

Some people just want to use Linux, not live and breath Linux, and this constant resistance against users who don't want to wade knee-deep in config bullshit is completely infuriating.

You run Arch. Successfully. Congratulations. You're better than everybody else.

I never tried to imply that running one distribution implies any kind of supremacy, so I do apologize if I came across like that. My opinion that Manjaro provides bad software stems from two things - my short experiences trying to set it up to test userland things that did not work correctly on Manjaro and a significant amount of bug reports coming in from Manjaro when compared to other distros. But this being Linux, it's feasible that you've had a much better experience with Manjaro, and since I don't have any good statistical data about the bug reports I am aware of, I'll concede that is is just a fluke. However, the packages do seem to lag behind by quite a bit. I'll have to disagree that the current installation wiki is worse than the beginner's guide - it might containt irrelevant things, but that is only because there isn't one correct way to install Arch, and most of the duplication stems from different filesystem setups and different bootloaders. It's not meant to be read as prose, but the original beginners guide wasn't either, since it too had a lot of duplication of steps to deal with the multiplicity of installation options.

For me the bootloader is always the biggest pain. I rarely remember how to do it... and end up using refind. But otherwise, yeah. Just pacman or yay all the stuff as I need it.

And who says Linux isn't ready for the Desktop?

Seriously, though, you folks put up with _a lot_ of crap like this (the jokes and the endless system configuration tweaking)

That's funny, I only feel like I'm putting up with "_a lot_ of crap" when I'm working on a system where I'm not able to tweak the configuration.

I'm currently working on Mac OS, and the limitations when rebinding keyboard shortcuts for example are absolutely infuriating. Getting to log in on my home Arch Linux desktop is so relaxing every day after work - if something doesn't work the way I want it to work, I can just fix it myself.

Likewise here. OS X user at work. I don't mind OS X but it's one of those platforms where you just have to learn to love many of the decisions made on your behalf. Whereas when I switching to Arch everything works how chose it to.

The thing with Arch is it is a bit of a pain to install compared to basically every other OS. Needlessly painful in my personal opinion but I'm not going to argue against the hard work the maintainers put in. However the beauty of Arch is once it's running it will last for years with very little effort.

It's funny you mention keyboard bindings though, I've spent so much time trying to get keyboard bindings right on OS X and it's still not right. I wish OS X had an option to toggle between Mac and IBM bindings. I get the command key is useful on occasions but Apple really are the odd one out these days and it's a pain switching between Macs and PCs because of it.

There’s always a way, although the most convenient are third party. After all, it’s a 'nix! Recommend Karabiner for keyboard specifically, or BetterTouchTool for all of your inputs / Window management. “Contexts” to replace Spotlight, and Shortcat for mouse-less GUI control.

so keyboard binding vs spendings weeks trying to get drivers to work on your machine properly ?

Have you used Linux recently?

In the past 5+ years I've not had to install a single driver _except_ one nvidia driver on one of the machines I wanted to game on. And that was not necessary except for gaming.

Lately, it's just pretty much "install Debian from .ISO" -> done.

I've been using Arch with Nvidia, and it took ~2hrs my first time installing Arch and ~30min my most recent time (different machines), and once it's installed, I only mess with it if I need some software package, and that's usually just pacman -S package.

By the time I've installed everything I want, I bet I've spent less time getting Arch set up than the Windows install that comes with my computer (tracking down software on Windows sucks, on Arch pacman gets it done quickly).

If you're using Nvidia, most distributions (except Free Software zealots like Debian and Fedora) include their proprietary driver in the repositories, and honestly nouveau is quite good for most things. If you have the choice, go for AMD cards and they'll work much better out of the box.

I haven't had any real driver issues in years and I run linux on all my machines. The closest is installing (via package manager) nvidia drivers for some machines, which takes all of about 30 seconds and a reboot.

It's really luck of the draw, you may get a machine that has a device without good driver support, but it seems increasingly rare. Some ThinkPads now officially support Linux and Dell has been producing the XPS 13 Developer Edition for years which ships with linux and is supported by Dell.

Arch folks certainly do, but I presume they know what they're getting into and enjoy working out how things work. It hasn't been like this for the vast majority of Ubuntu and Fedora folks for a long time now.

There really isn't much to put up with/configure on Arch. Once you've done the install a couple of times, it'll take 20-30 minutes to go from live CD to graphical boot with hardware acceleration, provided internet is decent. If you use a bigger desktop environment, things should work just the same as on the bigger distributions.

Arch really isn't that complicated, and the documentation is fantastic.

I've been trying to switch to openSUSE (want one distribution everywhere), and I've had more trouble than in Arch, and not much trouble at that. Linux in general is pretty trouble-free these days if you have decent hardware.

Most of the people who have trouble on Linux are trying to use some crappy laptop with really low quality WiFi or something. The nicer your hardware is, the better Linux will work on it. That being said, even crappy laptops seem to run Linux reasonably well these days.

Eh... no, we really don't. At least I really don't. For me Manjaro runs out of the box flawlessly with no config wizardry - except font changing (because I like Lato more than Noto Sans) and scaling down the resolution from 3000 to 1920x1080. The rest is fine as it is. I used to do bumblebee shenanigans but nowadays I don't do gaming on the mobile.

But these are personal tweaks, the machines run happy as they are post-install without any meddling. Steam runs happy, proton is running a lot of games without any problem. So it _is_ ready for the Desktop for some of us.

eh, it's kind of a set-it-up-and-forget-about it type of thing. i've used both Arch and FreeBSD on laptops and while I'm sure setting it up was a pain I haven't had to touch system configuration stuff for a while.

though really i think for many people part of the appeal of Arch, FreeBSD, etc, IS the endless system configuration tweaking.

Things like these are still the reason I am not switching away from Mac OS

I think the target audience here are the FreeBSD users, not the all Unix users. Mind you, installing Linux on Thinkpads is usually hassel-free, but again it's only useful for someone who wants Linux.

Side note: FreeBSD, i3 and X11 aren't the easiest pieces of software to use if you don't want to spend time dealing with configuration files. There are better macOS alternatives for your use-case!

I bring you jolly tidings. You can put an image of, say, Manjaro Linux on a stick, boot it up, answer a few questions about language and keyboard, and have a fully working install on your ThinkPad inside of ten minutes.

Am writing this from such a setup on my TP.

Congrats, now you literally can't switch away from macOS! Thanks for the new T2 chip you can't use native Linux/BSD (anything other than Windows and macOS.)

UEFI is fine booting a third party OS when SecureBoot is disabled BUT the T2 chip blocks accessing the internal storage from those OSs [1][2]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/a4thsc/the_actual_fu...

[2] https://twitter.com/LinusTech/status/1067232394934083584

T2 chip doesn't block access, Linux just didn't have a suitable driver ("It's not NVMe compliant, hence it won't work with the in-kernel NVMe driver" https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=202567). There's a kernel patch to make it work: https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux/issues/71#issuecom...

It used to be that Mac had better hardware support but after going through all the shit I did with Vega 20 MBP and my USBC LG 5k monitor - forcing me to switch to a beta branch to get support. And the keyboard issues. Mac OS is far from panacea.

No, that's not the reason you're not switching away. That's an _excuse_ not to switch away from a commercial OS by a fat-cat tax-evading patent-bullying contrator-employee-suicide-inducing corporation.

I am trying to think of valid reasons why someone would use FreeBSD in this day and age as a desktop. I'm not being snarky, I'm genuinely curious.

I used FreeBSD a TON from around 1998-2004 or so. I did it because I could configure an environment to develop in that ran fast on the hardware.

At some point the type of development I do (Web) really took off on Linux and OSX so I drifted that way.

I'm going to spin up a VM of FreeBSD just to check it out, but why are folks using it as a Desktop these days?

I think the reason to use it over desktop Linux is pretty similar to the time range you talk about. It has a different feel and some people are more comfortable with the *BSD way.

The difference in personality has widened a bit as Linux comes up with things like systemd. If you just want a light Unix workstation that isn't trying to imitate Windows or Mac, the BSDs will get in your way less. That or a very conservative Linux distro.

I'm an Arch user right now, for the last 8 or 9 years. I've gotten very comfortable in that ecosystem. I don't imagine things would be much different doing what I do now in BSD I would just need a good reason to switch. In the past, much of it was based on performance and being able to script everything, which I still get with Arch.

In my limited use of arch it does seem to be one of the distros that someone with *BSD type aesthetics wouldn't mind.

I switched to desktop Linux in 1999, and then to FreeBSD around 2014. For me it's about culture. When you use software you're interacting with hundreds of decisions that the devs made, and the more they think like you the more they will have made the same calls that you would have.

Linux's success ended up bringing in a distinctly different crowd than it had when I first started using it, and when the software decisions started to reflect that evolving culture I just found myself going against the grain for a lot of common tasks.

Switching to FreeBSD was like coming back to your home country after being abroad - there were definitely nice things about the place you were travelling in, but it's still a relief to be back in your own culture. When you travel there's lots of random surprises because everything's built on a different set of values and assumptions - that's part of the charm of being abroad - but eventually you want to get things done and it's great to be back home where you can devote your whole brain to the task at hand.

That's an interesting viewpoint. I did enjoy the "culture" of BSD as you describe it. After a couple of years using it as a daily driver, there were things I came to expect from the system and seemed very intuitive. I may go back to it and find it just like riding a bike. A seat with my butt print already embedded in it.

Speculating, I think the reasons are the same as 20 years ago when people were installing Linux instead of Windows.

Namely?

Not GP but in my experience - Curiosity and to gain a certain techy reputation among nerdy circles. About 15-20 years ago when I was in engineering school, my seniors used to ask me to install Linux on their PCs back when installing it was a bit more hairy than today (text based installer that asked you lots of questions) so they could pretend to themselves they were keeping up with the cutting edge if tech :-)

Kind of a simplistic view in my opinion. I installed Linux and BSD out of pure curiosity and enjoyed the configurability and newness of it all. I was in a rural area, wasn't in college yet and didn't have anyone to brag to about it at the time. I used it because I wanted to. I know there are many like me.

I personally run freebsd as a desktop just for the experience of something different. I run have machines running Ubuntu, freebsd, and macOS and use all of them daily

First-class ZFS, the ports system, jails, and general simplicity and quality of documentation.

may have a crack at this, ive been meaning to look into desktop freeBSD for a while and i suspect these tweaks should be similar for the X1C6

So I could put this on my X1 Extreme? I wonder if it would improve battery life.

Only if you are willing to invest lots of time to get it somewhat usable, and if you don't use too many peripherals.

I can't even get Ubuntu to run properly on my X1E, the 4K display completely breaks grub and the dual GPU situation causes loads of problems when connecting an external display though thunderbolt. Battery life is worse compared to Windows (3h vs 5h).

FWIW, I installed Ubuntu 19.04 on my X1E-4k using this [0] guide and it has been working flawlessly (with an external display via thunderbolt).

The battery life is much worse than on Windows, can't deny that.

0: https://bauklimatik-dresden.de/privat/nicolai/index.html?htt...

Thanks for the link, looks like there are some good tips on there! I'll try it out tonight.

One of the problems I've ran into is that my external 4k monitor (40") runs at 100% scaling and my laptop 4k monitor at 200%, which causes all sorts of rendering bugs. After some searching I found that this has nothing to do with the X1E or Ubuntu for that matter. It's a X11/Wayland issue that just isn't properly implemented yet.

Edit: it looks like this guide also instructs to switch to 'discrete graphics' in the BIOS. This is a hack and not what you want. This causes the nVidia graphics chip to be always on (instead of letting the OS choose). This causes terrible battery life. Don't do that.

For the X1 Extreme, you may want to look at Pop!_OS. For the initial install you'll need to force enable the dGPU, but after that, you can switch back to hybrid. I realize it's not quite Ubuntu, but it is Ubuntu-based, so that might be good enough for you. I have no particular insight into the battery life though, I'm afraid. However, most of my battery life seems to go to the antimalware scanner, so Linux could be better by virtue of not running that.

:( thanks for the info. Guess I’ll stick to windows.

> I wonder if it would improve battery life.

Compared to what? If Windows, then absolutely. Any Linux- or FreeBSD-based operating system will make your laptop seem like it's brand new in comparison.

In my experience with recent thinkpads, my battery life never really beats the w10 install it comes with. Not sure if there are some very clever windows-only optimizations or what, but that's what I've noticed.

When my X270 was new I could get about >20 hours of battery life out of it on Linux with programming and light web browsing (e.g. Hacker News, etc.) It's a bit less now that the batteries have worn a bit, but the other day I accidentaly forgot to turn on the power socket while working all day and I didn't even notice until the next day.

I never tried Windows 10 (although I'm kind of curious now), but I think this is pretty impressive, and at these kind of levels a bit extra battery life is still nice, but hardly critical.

The comments about using macOS instead of Linux or {Free,Open}BSD are getting downvoted in somewhat obscure reasons.

It's not that Linux isn't usable with minimal tweaking, I'm pretty sure macOS users also do a fair amount of tweaking (with, e.g. mapping keys with Karabiner (swapping Control & Caps Lock doesn't need third-party apps BTW), making the TouchBar useful again with HapticKey, etc...).

The problem is that Linux doesn't get fundamental things (in a user-perspective) right. It's a few months ago, so I'm not sure if the bug still remains, but the latest version of Ubuntu still has HiDPI problems (at least in VMware Fusion - and VMs are pretty standard to test OSes, right?) related to mouse pointer size, sleep doesn't work without configuring with systemd for a few hours about one-third of all of my Linux laptops, WPA2 Enterprise Wi-Fi connecting is an hassle, configuring input-systems for CJK languages require making a systemd service manually(!), installing packages are needed to use exFAT USB (I've heard that the Linux Kernel has now gained exFAT support by Microsoft, but it's still months later for the user), adding apt repository hangs when done with aptitude so the user has to touch /etc/, and the list goes on...

Are these issues really 'configurable' issues? They aren't, but everyone kinda says, 'Fiddle with {systemd and you will get manageable {battery life,Wi-Fi connection,HiDPI support, etc...}' And that's the reason why people just use macOS instead.

I don't go around macOS stories with "macOS sucks, this is why I use Linux". It's off-topic noise at best, and just pointless caring about what systems other people run at worst.

So yeah, -1 from me to all of those posts, and also the Arch Linux one (I'm typing this from an Arch machine). I don't think the reasons are that obscure: it's off-topic and doesn't contribute. Your post at least has some depth to it, but on the other hand, it's the same discussion ... every time.

If someone posted a story called "Driving on Water", and it was all about how you could modify your car to get it to drive on a lake... sure, it's interesting... but it would certainly be worth pointing out that boats exist, and that boats are perhaps much easier at doing what you're trying to do, which is transportation on water. Maybe there's some reason the original posters aren't using boats, and they can share that information. We don't know until we start communicating about it.

Everyone here is already familiar with all the major operating systems, including macOS. There is no value in rehashing this debate all over again here – which isn't even what most comments are doing, they're just digs at FreeBSD/Linux.

I don't think we're trying to debate as much as point out problems unique to some OSes, and how we wish it were different. I would very much like to use Linux as a desktop, if setting it up weren't a garbage fire. It doesn't have to be this way.

Why are you bringing up MacOS vs. Linux in a thread about FreeBSD on a Thinkpad?

Comparing macOS and FreeBSD (for practical reasons) is a bit of a stretch (despite sharing the Unix base). I assume that's what the downvotes are for.

Isn't one of macOS's main selling features its sleek UX? If you're all about the command line and don't care much about the UI, you probably wouldn't be using it in the first place.

And in terms of Linux, I think it's more of a personal preference to be honest. Personally I go the other way. People who love macOS will continue using it regardless of what Linux (or even FreeBSD) is like.

I work most of the time from the terminal. But I love macOS as my primary OS. I just want a system that works. MacOS is amazing even if someone works the whole day in a terminal. I don't want to deal with unsupported hardware.

Can you please not make these ridiculous comments? The laptops that you need to manually tweak things on to get your Ubuntu or FreeBSD setup to work won't even run macOS. In fact, it's illegal to install that operating system on anything besides the ~10 pieces of hardware that Apple supports. I would offer to fix your issues with VMware Fusion, but couldn't even patch it to support HiDPI even if I wanted to because it's a proprietary closed-source application.

> I would offer to fix your issues with VMware Fusion, but couldn't even patch it to support HiDPI even if I wanted to because it's a proprietary closed-source application.

FYI: not only VMware Fusion but also two of my laptops also has the same problem. It's the desktop DE that has to be patched, not VMware Fusion.

The bug is about mouse pointer's size are displayed differently in GTK/non-GTK apps, if you're interested. There's lots of different 'solutions' in the web, but it's a hassle to find out what works. :-(

It's such a risk you take by getting a WQHD screen on Linux. I've had trouble to get things to scale, setting for the workable (albeit far from perfect) option to scale fonts. I wonder how well this setup works with different UIs, system icons, etc.

Lots of things are not quite right (e.g. save dialogs never seem to be sized logically), most things are okay though. What I use most (terminal, browser) are great.

Arch Linux is the only Linux. It's so easy to learn and use. Arch Linux is the only operating system. It takes 20 minutes to learn arch if you know Linux and Unix.

I mean, we wouldn't have this without arch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ngwv_r-zzI0

(George Hotz livestreaming himself installing arch, just for the sake of it)

Watched it while having half a bottle of merlot, _easily_ the best content I've seen to date.

arch feels to me like an over-engineered mess. For a truer unix experience I'd rather suggest void or slack.

It's not perfect, but I find it's in a good intersection between "simple" but still "fairly mainstream", which has its advantages.

I used to run Slackware, and the user experience is pretty terrible compared to Arch or OpenBSD. The absence of a package manager that tracks dependencies is not a “truer” Unix experience. All the BSDs provide a more Unixy experience than Linux and they all track dependencies.

If Slackware was updated more often, the system would work better. The dynamic libs are always way out of date, and god help you if you want to install a newer version.

this depends on your point of view. For me, being able to install a package even when some dependences are not met is a fundamental feature.

Regarding the versions, slackware-current is a very up-to-date rolling distro (e.g. much more so than ubuntu).

I mean, you can install packages without deps with Arch as well. Also, why is that important to you?

Same for Debian and its forks (dpkg --ignore-depends) and I'm pretty sure rpm/yum has a similar option.

And this is why I still use a mac

Haha, right? I understand if someone genuinely enjoys configuration.

But gosh I just need my machine to get up and going so I can make some money and then go back to living.

FreeBSD is for people that like to thinker with OS. Same as Arch on Linux side. I'm using Ubuntu for pretty much everything for over 10 years now and everything is just easy and fast. My current installation of Ubuntu Mate has been done 3.5 years ago as 16.04. Since then I went trough 4 distro upgrades, 16.04 > 16.10 > 17.04 > 17.10 > 18.04LTS and since in 18.04 they introduced snaps I decided to stick to LTS releases with my apps like JetBrains apps installed via snaps for latest updates. Somewhere in that update cycle I upgraded my machine and just pulled SSD from old machine and plugged it in into the new one and it just worked. The system is also being backed up into Synology NAS so when in meantime I bought small laptop for travel I basically "restored" my main PC into that laptop so I didn't have to manually setup everything. It's pretty simple. Unfortunately it doesn't move applications like TimeMachine does, only the settings so I had to install apps like SublimeText myself but settings was already in there.

If your workflow can be moved outside of MacOS ecosystem then it's worth to checkout Linux especially Ubuntu (and all it flavors) as an alternative.

I actually do use Ubuntu every day for development. I also use macOS every day. They both get the job done relatively painlessly. I enjoy macOS more in general, but I like using Ubuntu in a VM because I can snapshot and restore.

I’ve found the long-term productivity gains far outpace the short-term cost of using Linux/BSD. For example, I’ve found focus-follows-mouse WMs a huge boon to my productivity, a feature that OSX absolutely refuses to implement. The ability for a window to grab input without being raised is highly underrated.

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