FreeBSD 13.2 on ThinkPad T14 (GEN1) | Hacker News Reader

FreeBSD 13.2 on ThinkPad T14 (GEN1)

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The OpenBox desktop environment looks pretty sharp, is that what it looks like by default? I tried XFCE in OpenSuse and it was really barebones and much more... opinionated than I ever remember it being in Ubuntu or Fedora... maybe I'm just getting more impatient with configuring DEs and just want to get to doing things...

Also: >As the ThinkPad T490 was released Lenovo needed to rethink their naming convention as the next one could have been ThinkPad T4100 (like 100 is after 90) or something different as T500 was already taken by older model … their new naming scheme is not bad – definitely better then their idea of newer keyboard layout after ditching the 7-row keyboard from 2011 and earlier models.

I've been wondering what Nvidia is going to when As the ThinkPad T490 was released Lenovo needed to rethink their naming convention as the next one could have been ThinkPad T4100 (like 100 is after 90) or something different as T500 was already taken by older model … their new naming scheme is not bad – definitely better then their idea of newer keyboard layout after ditching the 7-row keyboard from 2011 and earlier models.they either debut the generation after the presumable 90 series or increase their models by a magnitude of 10 with the presumable Path Tracing (PTX?) series... will the midtier card be the 10700 or the 10070?

Nvidia has a rich history of doing a bit of everything when "wrapping".

Recall the Geforce 8 and 9 series (8800 GT...). Then wrapping over to GT2XX, going up to GT10XX series, then going straight to GT20XX.

I like to believe that they will wrap around the exact same way, but the prefix/suffix reversed. After the RTX9900 or whatever, we'll get the 2XXRTX.

I like the chassis and keyboard of the ThinkPad T14 a lot.

I would gladly pay the OEM $4,000 for the same product if firmware chips were detachable, there were no binary blobs, and firmware couldn't interfere with the OS like Intel ME does. The AMD flavor of ThinkPad T14 is great it's a shame that it has PSP (AMD equivalent to ME).

What’s the advantage of running BSD on desktop? Even, is it usable?

> What’s the advantage of running BSD on desktop?

If you like it and prefer it to Linux.

> is it usable?

Yes.

I'm ultra curious about this because I'm pretty much fully transitioned to Linux, and youtube serves me FreeBSD gaming videos now :). What are we linux users missing out on not using BSD?

Also, my understanding is BSD's philosophy even prevents the development of wifi drivers (I could be totally wrong, feel free to correct me, especially since the article says the author had... wifi drivers?). Meanwhile the only the pretty much cutting edge Linux Kernel supports realtek wifi devices.

It's basically a "Why would you choose Arch over Ubuntu?"-type of question. Is there a long list of objective reasons why someone might prefer one or the other? Not really. They just do things in a different way.

That said, better hardware and software support is definitely an advantage of Linux; but if your hardware supports FreeBSD and you don't want any Linux-specific software that FreeBSD's Linux emulation can't run then most of the time it's just a matter of preference; the platforms have converged quite a lot over the last 20 years – the differences were more substantial in the past.

I'm not sure what you mean with "BSD's philosophy even prevents the development of wifi drivers"; WiFi has been supported for a very long time, and back in the day when WiFi sucked on any non-Windows platform OpenBSD was the trailblazer in this area.

> BSD's philosophy even prevents the development of wifi drivers

If anything, BSD generally seems more centralized and batteries included than Linux, so it would be the first to have Wi-Fi drivers, going by philosophical stereotype.

Not necessarily; certainly traditionally Linux tended to merge things when it's "good enough" whereas BSD tended to merge things when it was "rock solid". There's something to be said for both approaches and both have their own advantages and disadvantages.

These days Linux tends to be a bit conservative though, and it's not the same project it was 20 years ago.

Theodore Ts'o posted something interesting on this a few years ago:

P.S. There is yet another example of "Worse is Better" in how Linux had PCMCIA support several years before FreeBSD/NetBSD. However, if you ejected a PCMCiA card in a Linux system, there was a chance (in practice it worked out to be about in 1 in 5 times for a WiFI card, in my experience) that the system would crash. The BSD's took a good 2-3 years longer to get PCMCIA support, but when they did, it was rock solid. Of course, if you are a laptop user, and are happy to keep your 802.11 PCMCIA card permanently installed, guess which OS you were likely to prefer --- "sloppy but works, mostly", or "it'll get there eventually, and will be rock solid when it does, but zip, nada, right now"?*

https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2017-May/011552.html

Any idea how the Linux implementation fared 2-3 years after that initial release? Did those rough edges get cleaned up?

I don't know; I never used it myself. I always assumed it did, but PCMCIA Wi-Fi was around for a relatively short period and saw relatively little usage so maybe not.

BSD is to Linux what Linux is to Windows.

I think it's for when living on Linux full time has gotten too easy to satisfy your masochistic autism. (Mine, thankfully, has only taken me as far as Arch.)

> FreeBSD gaming

That's a thing? Wow. :'D

>> FreeBSD gaming

> That's a thing? Wow. :'D

It has been for a long time. Where do you think bsdgames came from? But really I ran the smacx demo from ports [1] on a lark when I was at Yahoo and it worked. I think that was maybe sometime in 2010, but I can't say for sure; the port was marked expired in 2005, but Yahoo's process to run packages from ports was manualish --- you would ask and someone would build it and then it would stick around installable forever more or less... so it probably had been built while the port was alive.

[1] https://www.freshports.org/games/smacx/

I haven't run FreeBSD on my desktop since about 2016, but I spent a lot of time playing games on FreeBSD. Many of the Linux-native games (mostly from Loki) worked quite well on FreeBSD with FreeBSD's Linux emulation, and Wine worked just as well (or just as bad, depending on the game) on FreeBSD as it does on Linux.

I don't really know what the current status is, but you can run Steam on FreeBSD, so I guess at least some things work: https://www.freshports.org/games/linux-steam-utils/

Oh really?

And what is the stability and usability of docker on FreeBSD?

PS3,PS4 and PS5 system software is based on FreeBSD. So it's actually one of the most popular OSes that are used for gaming.

| > FreeBSD gaming

| That's a thing? Wow. :'D

For some oldschool gaming its more then capable :p

- https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2020/10/14/oldschool-gaming-o...

> Also, my understanding is BSD's philosophy even prevents the development of wifi drivers.

There's no philisophical opposition to wifi that I'm aware of in BSDs. Afaik, they all have some wifi drivers. It's just a lot of effort to support wifi, hardware is complex and not generally super well documented, and vendors aren't building drivers for any of the BSDs. That means a lot of work and there's not a lot of people working on it. It's definitely an area where you need to understand the limitations and carefully choose your hardware if you want to run a BSD with wifi. At least for FreeBSD, there's a lot of users that have no intention to run wifi, so it's a real limitation, but those users aren't affected. Laptop users understandably would like wifi support though, clearly.

Painless ZFS on root.

... and magic ZFS Boot Environments :)

Moar here: https://is.gd/BECTL

Mine reasons here:

- https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2020/09/07/quare-freebsd/

this is my go to reply to people on different forums when they ask "why Freebsd"

Thank You.

Do You think I should add anything more there?

No, not besides keeping it up to date if/when things change. I think you do a good job of explaining the technical and philosophical differences between FBSD and linux

It’s 2023, who still uses Wi-Fi?

I like FreeBSD because I enjoy tinkering, and the entire operating is small and self-contained. You can go to /usr/src and look at the inner workings of anything you want, very easily. Whereas with e.g. Ubuntu you have to figure out what package the thing you’re interested in is part of, how to get its source and build it, etc.

If you are a FreeBSD developer, it’s a natural dev environment.

The BSDs are largely not caught up in the battle for becoming a widely used consumer desktop which makes them remarkably consistent from the user/admin standpoint. I have played with FreeBSD on and off for the past 20 years or so and install it every couple years to see where it is, installation, setup, and administration has not changed much in those 20 years. I can not recall a single major change to install, setup or administration in all those years, I never installed it and discovered something like system-d popping up or OSS suddenly being replaced.

The only real problem with BSD as a desktop is it tends to be a couple years behind Linux for drivers and the like but is only really an issue if you are the sort who must always have the latest and greatest hardware. It is much like running Linux 20 years ago in that regard, if you want to run BSD you need to buy your hardware accordingly. Most of the Linux software ecosystem has been ported to the BSDs so it is perfectly usable as a desktop system.

> I can not recall a single major change to install,

In 2011, bsdinstall(8) [1] was merged into HEAD as a replacement for sysinstall(8) [2] and allowed, among others, easy setup of ZFS on Root. It was a CLI-based process with sysinstall.

Granted, both installers look fairly similar and the change may not have been that visible to someone installing FreeBSD once every few years.

[1] https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?bsdinstall(8)

[2] https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=sysinstall&apropos...

>the change may not have been that visible to someone installing FreeBSD once every few years.

Which was my point that the rest of that sentence was meant to highlight. What I learned about installing, setting up and using a FreeBSD all those years ago when I first installed it has remained largely applicable over all these years.

If you would read the article - you would found this link [1] inside - that explains these reasons :)

[1] https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2020/09/07/quare-freebsd/

Usable? I've used FreeBSD as my only desktop for 20 years. I've built my own machines using all new, latest hardware. I've put it on Dell machines, Gateway, Compaq, Thinkpads and so on without issue.

People will go online and try and pick and choose their hardware for best performance for Linux and Windows. You do the same for FreeBSD and, in almost all cases, can pick the same hardware using the latest drivers.

Broadcom, for example, does not supply drivers for some of their wifi or networking parts so that's an issue but there are workarounds with other just as good hardware.

There are claims, here, that FreeBSD is "years behind" with software and drivers but that's mostly a false claim. Almost all software and drivers are up-to-date. A few may be a few days/weeks/months behind because FreeBSD maintains its own and doesn't rely on outside parties to do so.

Why does this question or statement have to be an every other day posting somewhere on the internet?

I disagree. FreeBSD desktop user here since 2018, mostly Thinkpads (T400, T410, X1 1st gen, now P14s).

TBH, you have to be extremely careful with new hardware. My P14s barely runs 13.2. Wi-Fi is causing constant kernel panics and Alder Lake GPU is not supported at all, so have to use frame buffer driver. Ethernet NIC works only with jumbo frames. FreeBSD is significantly behind Linux in terms of hardware support. But it's awesome. :-)

I recently installed FreeBSD on an older HP Pavillon. The WiFi didn't work, but the bigger issue was lack of control over fans and cooling. It was meant to be always on and connected with a cable to a router, but it wasn't meant to always have fans on, even with load ~0.01 and the CPU temp ~40°C. Without WiFi, relocating it somewhere it wouldn't disturb my sleep proved challenging.

> People will go online and try and pick and choose their hardware for best performance for Linux

I don't do this - I just buy hardware I like and blindly assume Linux will work.

Appears to have two active ttyv04 lines in /etc/ttys one for a getty one for xdm which I found confusing.

Also: no native wifi so he used a dongle. That's just sad. Bad lenovo, very bad.

It's not Lenovo.

FreeBSD's unstable as of yet iwlwifi[1] driver can use T14-built-in intel AX200/201/210 card but there's still no 5GHz speeds achievable. Personally, I'm waiting for LinuxKPI[2] emulation to allow using Linux drivers for WiFi adapters, like it allows me to use Linux drm-kmod[3] driver for graphics acceleration in Xorg.

For now, there's only 802.11n and some very limited support for establishing 802.11ac connections but still not speeds higher than 2.4GHz.

[1] https://wiki.freebsd.org/WiFi/Iwlwifi

[2] https://wiki.freebsd.org/LinuxKPI

[3] https://github.com/freebsd/drm-kmod

Isn't this because blobs?

Edit: More about GPL. Fair enough.

The DRM/KPI might mean I can try FB again on my e series thinkpad which died in X unless I used vesa mode.

5GHz and 2.4GHz are not "speeds" except in the most general sense. They are frequency bands. Speeds vary based on the band in use.

5GHz offers higher speeds than 2.4GHz. FreeBSD can establish a 5GHz connection but not use speeds over those offered by 2.4GHz.

5 and 2.4 are not the speeds, they are the frequency bands. If you're referring to speeds, then refer to Mbps. On WiFi, MHz is not a "speed".

Irrespective that 5 and 2.4 are labels, in a service offered over 5 you can achieve higher bandwidth because of the increased channel count and baud rate.

The point appears to be that FreeBSD has a model in e.g. TCP which tracks the end-to-end data rate (eg as BBR does) and it has boundary constraints which right now limit it to the horizons acheiveable in 2.4 -Presumably because saturating a wifi link with unrealistic packetrate causes congestion problems and so it paces to share fairly. The model doesn't yet know that 2.4/5/5+ exists: it's modelling 2.4 as what a wifi "IS"

I really don't know why FB is constraining achievable data speeds to the 2.4 model but I don't believe the person you are responding to beleives the 5 in 5ghz is what its data rate is.

or the alternative, I posit: because it can't drive at 5 yet, it only ever bonds at the 2.4 rates on a 5 system which subsumes the slower datarates in the coding model and uses channels to model 2.4 inside a 5 framework. It's driving at 40 in a 100kph lane, because thats all it knows how to do.

There is also wifi box if you want to use a slightly cursed solution that seems to work well enough.

https://github.com/pgj/freebsd-wifibox

You expect Lenovo to test with FreeBSD?

And then we have X11 in the middle of everything. It's not getting younger, there are no volunteers to make releases but 'fortunately' there is not much development going on to make it a problem.

Maybe FreeBSD(and other *BSD) should take more active role in X development or switch to Wayland if there is no will for the first.

Not sure what "switch to wayland" means in the context of FreeBSD, since AFAIK it has no default desktop, but wayland compositors have been working fine for me for about as long as they have on Linux. FreeBSD uses mesa and Linux graphics drivers with its own thin shim layer and everything works more or less the same.

https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/wayland

I own a X250 and failed with 13.2 for now but want to retry[1]. FreeBSD appeared refreshingly unbloatet and to the point. However, hardware driver support seems peculiar. So this is really interesting, thanks!

[1] https://blog.mro.name/2023/04/thinkpad-x250-freebsd-xfce/

>> [ ] display brightness & keys

    backlight -f /dev/backlight/backlight0 50

works with no additional configuration on T14s gen2 AMD

For keys, see xmodmap[1]

>> [ ] microphone

    > mixer mic
    mic.volume=0.67:0.67
    mic.mute=0
    mic.recsrc=+

works with no additional configuration on T14s gen2 AMD

>> [ ] webcam, chromium

For webcam, multimedia/webcamd[2] works well. T14-integrated device here, working on FreeBSD 14 and tested on 13 as well. Worked in Firefox; I don't use chromium.

    > webcamd | grep -i camera
    webcamd [-d ugen1.2] -N Azurewave-Integrated-Camera -S 0000 -M 0
    > webcamd -d ugen1.2
    webcamd 39611 - - Attached to ugen1.2[0]
    webcamd 39611 - - Creating /dev/video0
    webcamd 39611 - - Creating /dev/video1

>> [ ] lid close sleep/resume

    > sysctl -d hw.acpi.lid_switch_state
    hw.acpi.lid_switch_state: Lid ACPI sleep state. Set to S3 if you want to suspend your laptop when close the Lid.

>> [ ] finger scanner unlock

T14s' biometric sensor is not being detected on FreeBSD 14.

[1] https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=xmodmap&sektion=1

[2] https://www.freshports.org/multimedia/webcamd/

awesome, bookmarked, many thanks!

Isn't that a tiny font size for a 14" laptop? It's roughly the same as what I use on my 32" monitor.

Most people that see my laptop often say that I use too tiny font sized.

I can see/read them - I do that to have more screen space of other things ... but that is me - feel free to use larger font sizes if that suits you better.

Regards.

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