Ask HN: Laptop Recommendations (FreeBSD / OpenBSD) | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Laptop Recommendations (FreeBSD / OpenBSD)

3 pointsrootnod33 comments

I went down a long road: for a while I used NixOS on my machines, still used it for my servers and at some point down the road, I switched to the M-series MacBooks for the battery life.

But, I want to customize and have more control over my personal machines again.

As much as I love Framework, they are not available in Japan yet. So for now, I might be looking at Thinkpads again. The goal is to run FreeBSD or OpenBSD (no full preference on either at the moment).

Are there any community recommendations on what to get for that in 2025? Workload is gonna be some SSHing/server management, some Lisp hacking, browsing, light coding.

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It would be helpful if you have a budget in mind and expected usable lifespan for the device. If you need to make an immediate purchase, I would personally recommend Thinkpad P14s Gen 5 (Intel) with maxed specs in everything but RAM (which remains unsoldered). It even has a dedicated GPU option (Nvidia), albeit with a paltry 4GB of VRAM. If you can wait, the Intel Gen 6 should come out in the next month or so. Alternatively, the AMD Gen 6 is currently available as well as equivalent T-series versions (that is the T14 without the "s") that are cheaper but somewhat lower-specced and given a polycarbonate build.

These days laptops and customization don't walk well together - a lot of them are coming with memory soldered in the name of being thin and cheap.

Not running BSD, but Linux, but I guess the same applies - I try to get the most boring laptop possible, from either Dell or Lenovo. My advice is to go for laptops designed for corporate use - they won't get creative with GPUs and other usual sources of pain and distress. Going for new-ish but not bleeding edge CPUs is also wise, as it is going with integrated GPUs (those have a lot more exposure to developers). While some new chips (such as AMD's Strix Halo) have good support, YMMV).

You'd be surprised how much expansion is possible with a single open M.2 slot. Socketed memory was never going to last, but bonus PCIe lanes for a WWAN card or extra high-speed storage works just as well as it does on desktop.

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