> 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.
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.
Binary drivers executing on the CPU are a no-go for me. OTOH, I consider device firmware blobs user(OS)-loaded on power-on to be strictly safer than a stored blob, though less convenient in some ways.
Devices these days have firmware, usually on flash-able storage, as they don't make it right the first time. Would you rather have a wifi chipset, that can be permanently infected after an exploit / evil-maid / malware on PC, or one that can equally be exploited, but is as clean as ever after a power cycle, because the OS needs to load firmware every time?
http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1808.0/04276.html
I know, because I've immediately bought an usb wifi dongle for my desktop with this chipset. (and it is working perfectly OOB with every linux kernel for me since then).
Boots up immediatley, no annoying MacOS updates or having to install XCode while having multiple versions of core unix packages, because it pre-installs a bunch of out-of-date ones you replace immediately with brew. This causes problems, especially for newbies new to working with terminals, as it falls back onto the old ones when stuff isn't linked or set up properly.
Nothing beats having a clean minimal /usr directory with only the stuff you decide to install and extremely fast startups with good battery use.
I get Macbooks for work but use a Linux one on the side (which I used for 5+ yrs when I was working freelance) and I plan to convince my boss to let me get a thinkpad or dell for the next laptop update.
Incidentally I ran all of those distros on a T430... which still works fine when I boot it up. Thinkpads are great linux machines, and just great easily repairable machines in general.
The way I see it, a system is a stack: that is you put a number of layers on top of each other.
The kernel is a layer at the very bottom, on top of which you stack a distribution. This distribution is managed through a package manager. On top of this distribution you could stack a user package manager.
In this view, you cannot compare apt or yum to home brew, they don’t belong to the same layer.
If you think about it, that makes sense. User package managers have to rely on the underlying layer to provide tools for e.g. compiling user packages.
Now I agree that in real life, the limit between layers can be more blurry:
- system package managers distribute end users softwares. Because most desktops are single user so having an extra layer is often not necessary.
- some system package managers are re-purposed to be stacked as user package managers. E.g. you can use gentoo prefix.
Still, to have a clear picture in mind the layers should be considered.
That being said, there are a bunch of user package managers you can also use on Linux. Have a look at spack for instance. I think the nix package manager can be used like that also.
Not all. Nix and guix allow you to install packages into your own profile as an unprivileged user. Best of all, packages that are installed by multiple users are shared in the Nix store.
The sole case that leaves are cases in which your company doesn't allow you the necessary privileges to install software which is an organizational challenge not a technical one.
That said something like nix can allow you to install software per user.
Our wifi support isn't 100% and this is a weakness. I believe that desktop usability is a large part of why Linux is as successful as it is today, and the modern laptop is so similar to the modern server that it's a bit of a moot distinction.
I have FreeBSD running on my home desktop workstation and everything is working fine, but I wouldn't try to install it on my laptop. Laptop hardware is just too variable and non-standard. Touchscreens, esoteric Wi-Fi chipsets, fingerprint readers, brightness controls, bluetooth, power management, suspend on lid close... I'd be quite surprised if FreeBSD supported all of this out of the box, so I stick with Ubuntu.
As far as laptops, it all tends to be a bit specific to the model. There aren't too many different wifi chipsets these days; bluetooth is pretty simple from the software side of things. Power management and lid suspend work on most systems (as they say, resume is the hard part). Brightness controls should also work well. I don't know about fingerprint readers. Recently we landed Thinkpad PrivacyGuard support from software, for example. It's not particularly significant in isolation, just as an example of random modern laptop features that might exist in only a handful of models, which we still try to support in FreeBSD.
I do. I think you misread the comment you replied to in an uncharitable way if you arrived at the conclusion that your subsequent reply was responsive.
> Nobody can give 100% of the context needed to satisfy everyone that might be reading it.
That was never the criticism. Your response is a non sequitur.
Our resume support is hit or miss, to be completely fair. I don't even try to use it myself due to bad experiences in the early days with Linux in 2000's and lack of need. Shutdown and startup is fast enough for my travel laptop that I don't care; and my workstation I never turn off. But I recognize a lot of people do really care about suspend/resume, and it works for some people but not everyone.
https://wiki.freebsd.org/Laptops#T-Z
And for the T470s in particular (yes, it's somewhat sparse, and the links suggest a non-ideal amount of effort required, but purportedly it seems to work at the end): https://wiki.freebsd.org/Laptops/Thinkpad_T470s
I've recently tried NixOS and I'm impressed. Have you considered adopting Nix into FreeBSD?
I don't know anything about Nix. So the short but perhaps unsatisfying answer is that I have not considered adopting Nix.