Top laptops to use with FreeBSD
freebsdfoundation.github.io
freebsdfoundation.github.io
I like it for several reasons. It's a holistic system which means it's much easier to understand, not a collection of random parts thrown together. There is only really one (big) distro so documentation is easy to come by and consistent. I love the way the updates of the system are uncoupled from the userland software so you can have rolling packages but a stable OS.
Also the ports collection is great (being able to manually compile every package with different flags where needed). And jails. And ZFS first-class citizen. Also I like the attitude. Less involvement from big tech, less strive to change for change's sake. It feels a lot more stable, every new version there's only a few things changed. It's not that with every major update I have to learn everything anew again because someone wanted to include their new init system (like systemd), configuration tools (like ifconfig -> ip), packaging system (like snap) etc. Things that work fine are just left alone.
It has some really good ideas also, like boot environments. But it's not linux. It's not meant to be.
But yeah if you want everything all figured out for you, don't use FreeBSD. Just take a commercial linux like ubuntu. You'll need to tinker a bit, which I like because it helps me understand my system. FreeBSD is a bit like Linux was in the early 2000s, it mostly works but you often have to dive into a shell for some magic. The good thing is having ZFS snapshots as a safety net though. Never really get caught out that way.
Which, ironically, is what Linux users have been saying for ages with respect to Windows, but the market share speaks for itself.
And I have found the WiFi to be incompatible with some networks.
You say "works perfectly". I do not think it means what you think it means.
To be fair, Linux also has trouble with the Broadcom chip, the driver needs to be installed as a separate step on most distros.
Here's the real problem.
It's sad how a company that spawned the raspberry pi in earlier times got so evil so quickly.
Copying some files from a different machine is not that burdensome. The point is, it works.
| Works Perfectly | Mostly Works | Has Lots Of Bugs
-------------------+-----------------+--------------+-----------------
Default Install | | |
-------------------+-----------------+--------------+-----------------
With Add-Ons | X | |
-------------------+-----------------+--------------+-----------------
Major Config Work | | |
ThinkPads:
- W520/W530/T520/T530/X220/X230/T420s
- T480
- T14 GEN1 (Intel)
- T14 GEN1 (AMD)
I needed to replace MediaTek WiFi card on T14 (AMD) into some Intel WiFi one.
Hope that helps.
Regards,
vermaden
> X220/X230
These are pretty solid with dual batteries. Also popular for OpenBSD and 9front, the latter of which I run on an x230 (it stopped charging the removable battery :-/) You can get about 2 hours off the internal and 6~8 with a big fat removable battery, maybe more if the OS and drivers can properly throttle hardware power settings.
I have an X1 carbon 5th gen and it's quite light but not useful for 9front without some Ethernet driver tweaking (likely some phy bits need twiddling.) Instead I tossed Debian on it and run 9front in a VM if I need a local CPU. So far it just seems to work including Ethernet (via a dongle) and WiFi.
But I couldn't get it to see the external monitor. I fought this for hours. I finally reached my patience threshold and tore the fucking LCD off the case. It hurt the hands a bit but was cathartic. Amazingly, it booted and saw the monitor, magically. I was astonished. With or without the broken screen, it wouldn't boot. But going psycho on it fixed it. Proof in the wholesomeness of violence, maybe not. But...
it's not running BSD. It's now my mom's desktop, and it's running Void. Works great, and I love the Ryzen 4700, with 16gb ram and atheros wifi chip. Delicate, but capable of some extremes :)
The best resource to check support is https://dmesgd.nycbug.org/dmesgd
> half of networking doesnt work, and it's the more important one for laptop(wifi)
I think they need to revise the scoring
It's just how things work these days. If you'd say "I run my VPN client in a docker container" it would raise a lot less eyebrows. Yet it's not very different, really.
Though conceptually I'd frown at having to run Linux. I'd prefer upgrading the hardware to a supported chip.
One such example security solution is memory integrity, which protects and hardens Windows by running kernel mode code integrity within the isolated virtual environment of VBS. Kernel mode code integrity is the Windows process that checks all kernel mode drivers and binaries before they're started, and prevents unsigned or untrusted drivers or system files from being loaded into system memory.
Link: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/de...
I'm not sure how good it is as I don't use wifi but it's supposed to be much better.
Is this just an artifact of FreeBSD primarily focusing on server hardware rather than consumer/end-user stuff?
FWIW, I’ve done both, FreeBSD with a virtualised OpenBSD for WiFi, and currently I run Arch so I can do gaming, with FreeBSD virtualised for development. I’m kind of looking to go back to my previous setup.
In the old days I kept a couple Realtek USB adapters around that would almost always work out of the box or with ndiswrapper
See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47704816
And that setup part can be largely automated: https://github.com/pgj/freebsd-wifibox
(The computer itself doesn't care much about the complexity. It's a computer.)
Some years ago, I was workig with FreeBSD on an old laptop. The laptop had a wireless adapter that ostensible should be supported, but was not.
After some digging, I realized the driver was just missing some PCIe device identifiers. I added them to driver and bam my WiFi is working without issue.
I tried to submit a bug report and patch, and it got positive feedback at first any changes even got committed. But then I learned why it’s better to not even try.
Apparently this was a known issue, but only in the heads of the FreeBSD wireless developers. They had their reasons for not adding the device, but the reasons did not appear to be documented in mailing lists or docs until my thread. At that point I realized it’s not worth it to try and contribute to such large projects as I just lack the decades of institutional knowledge of the system.
Anyway, I’m not sure it ever got released. I believe there’s an umbrella bug somewhere left after the version my patch supported went out of support.
I use FBSD on an old-ish Lenovo W540 without too many hiccups. No, it’s not for everyone and never was. I wouldn’t suggest to anyone to run a BSD as a daily driver, or at all, unless they have a good reason to. Once you cross that line you need to know what and why.
This is counterbalanced by the fact there is often one straightforward solution to every problem you run into, and those have been abundantly discussed online. Written as someone who just gave it a try.
One of the guys on the FreeBSD forums said, "FreeBSD is for professionals and serious computer enthusiasts." and I don't see anything wrong with that.
No, you don’t need linux to run your python webapp that you actually tested on your macbook.
I've been using jails/etc and the pattern with way I setup and configure my FreeBSD servers hasn't significantly changed in 20 years.
Maybe one day! One of the things that has changed in the past 20 years with FreeBSD is the addition of bhyve. Virtualization on FreeBSD was not great prior to bhyve. Because FreeBSD waited to implement it, they ended up with an arguably more modern hypervisor versus what Linux had at the time. Maybe history will repeat when it comes to application containers / docker images. Podman came 5 years after Docker and the result was better. It could happen with FreeBSD too.
Release Year/CPU gen
Display Options
What I'm missing in the list is the
LG Gram lineup and the
Dell 5530
2011:
- W520/T520 (maximum resolution: 1920x1080)
- T420s (maximum resolution: 1600x900)
- X220 (maximum resolution: 1366x768)
2012:
- W530/T530 (maximum resolution: 1920x1080)
- T430s (maximum resolution: 1600x900)
- X230 (maximum resolution: 1366x768)
2018:
- T480 (maximum resolution: 1920x1080 or more)
2020:
- T14 GEN1 (Intel) (maximum resolution: 1920x1080 or more)
- T14 GEN1 (AMD) (maximum resolution: 1920x1080 or more)
Newer models also work like the light ThinkPad X1 Carbon GEN5/GEN6/GEN7/GEN8/... for example.
As someone who liked FreeBSD in the past and curious to check it out again, I'm glad to have this handy list.
I think it's because this chart continues a trend I've noticed with BSD zealots. Namely, there's some sort of reality distortion effect at play.
Consider that there are obvious bullshit scores on TFA, like giving a laptop 9/10 when the fucking wifi doesn't work. In reality, this should be 5/10 or arguably 0/10. After all, what use is a laptop without wifi? If my laptop's wifi didn't work I wouldn't just buy a usb-ethernet adapter and never bring it anywhere; I would get a new laptop because a laptop without WiFi is useless.
On top of that there was a while here where every BSD thread had:
- a comment about how BSD powers the PlayStation, Netflix, and other FAANGs, except those corps don't contribute enough back because of the license so won't you please subsidize these giant corps by donating to BSD?
- people who argue BSD is superior because it's "more cohesive" and "feels cleaner" or similar
- OpenBSD zealots claiming it's 110% secure because trust me bro
Mostly I'm just tired of people claiming BSD is this amazing new thing with no flaws, when reality is that it has got some niche use cases, I suspect lots of its developers don't even dogfood it, and is otherwise superceded by Linux in nearly every meaningful way.
I have no problem with BSD, and I have two boxes in my basement running freeBSD right now, but I'm not delusional about BSD's limitations.
I don't think I've heard anybody claim BSD is new.
> Netflix, and other FAANGs, except those corps don't contribute enough back because of the license
I believe Netflix has upstreamed a lot to FreeBSD. They don't do it because the license compels them, they do it because upstreaming your changes makes maintenance easier.
> If my laptop's wifi didn't work I wouldn't just buy a usb-ethernet adapter and never bring it anywhere
I'm going to guess with this rant that you weren't using Linux in the olden days, because that's what it was like. The workaround isn't using wired ethernet by the way..you can get a USB wifi adapter or you can buy an m.2 wifi card. On on one of my machines I got a cheap m.2 Intel ax200 (just checked, about $15 on eBay) because it runs faster on FreeBSD than the one that shipped with my laptop.
I've been using Linux and BSD in one form or another since 2003, and I definitely used wpa_supplicant on the command line to connect my Thinkpad to WiFi. And you're right, it did suck. It was not a 9/10 experience by a long shot.
FreeBSD actually has a similar thing, you can run Linux wifi drivers inside a VM and pass through the adapter. There's a port called wifibox that does this.
You can even forward the Unix domain socket for wpa-supplicant from the guest to host, so all the normal tools that talk to wifi cards via that socket work transparently.
Also I wouldn’t make hardware support an OS quality metric. Linux get by with NDA and with direct contributions from the vendors. Which is something the BSDs don’t want/don’t benefit from.
Yes this is my opinion also. BSD seems more suited to people for whom fiddling with the OS itself is the point, rather than the OS being a tool to get other things done.
I fall firmly into the latter camp. I'd rather chew glass than manually set flags in rc.conf
A lot of current GNU/Linux complexity have no benefits for most users and may be an hindrance when they want to slightly alter their use cases.
sudo -> doas
systemd -> rcctl
nftable -> pf
iproute2|netplan -> ifconfig|route
alsa|pulseaudio|pipewire -> sndiod
cgroups|podman|lxc -> jails(freebsd)*
* Openbsd does not like containers or being a vm host
Why would you not just replace the wifi card or use a USB one? You're greatly overemphasizing how much this matters.
The post made me actually take out the laptop again and maybe use it as a server or something like that in the future and for that I'd use ethernet anyway.
WiFi on a laptop is table stakes. I'd rather use an operating system that works without dongulation.
I remember doing those kind of things nearly two decades ago now, I don't expect to have to do that in 2026. If people want to, that's fine, but the parent comment is right here: giving it 9/10 without working wifi is ridiculous.
Look your complaint is valid, but I maintain that you're greatly overemphasizing its actual meaning.
You can run Linux in a VM and PCI passthrough your WiFi Adapter. Linux drivers will be able to connect to your wifi card and you can then supply internet to FreeBSD.
Doing this manually is complicated but the whole process has been automated on FreeBSD by "Wifibox"
https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-work/journal/browser-based...
I tried it myself and it worked pretty well for a wifi card not supported by FreeBSD.
So, no need to get a new laptop :-)
Or possibly because it has a good track record. If you'd like to point at actual vulnerabilities go ahead.
"Only two remote code execution vulns in the default install" isn't saying much, because the default install has essentially no functionality. Similarly, RCE is not the only kind of vuln.
Let's just say it is not the mainstream consensus that OpenBSD is meaningfully more secure than an up-to-date linux. This may have been true in 1995, but it's generally acknowledged by people who know what they're talking about that OpenBSD's reputation for security is overstated.
I dunno, it's got a built in HTTP/S web server and everything needed to be VPN or router.
> Let's just say it is not the mainstream consensus that OpenBSD is meaningfully more secure than an up-to-date linux. This may have been true in 1995, but it's generally acknowledged by people who know what they're talking about that OpenBSD's reputation for security is overstated.
Yes, I've read plenty of vague aspersions that it's totally not as secure as claimed. Since those claims never come with evidence, I'm going with the traditional response: PoC||GTFO.
It's not as polished as linux obviously, especially for desktop usage but the maintainers are very much on the ball (and they do a lot of work to get things to compile and work, there's a lot of linuxisms they have to work around).
FWIW I use them both, FreeBSD and Arch , but let’s not pretend the layers of crap tacked onto the Linux kernel is some pinnacle of computing.
I doubt anything can get the scale of Linux and not have some mess.
Not entirely. A rather large amount of Linux's mess stems from the fact that it was a hobbyist project in its foundational years. It was never clean or well designed, at any point in its life. Go look at Linux 1.2.0 vs FreeBSD 2.0
Even when Linux began to get traction, it had already developed an ingrained culture that didn't particularly care about "nice" code or architectural solutions. The BSDs inherited their culture where such things were prioritized. You're right that things get messier as they get larger, but the gap between the two is much, much larger than can possibly be accounted for. Things like Linux not respecting NICE values have very little to do with surface-level problems like stylistic inconsistencies in the source code.
Even on PCs, latest generation AMD graphics cards (already >1yr old) are not supported in _anything_ other than Linux (and Windows). This is just sad.
And it looks like they're adding 802.11ac support to some realtek drivers too: https://www.freebsd.org/status/report-2025-10-2025-12/#_linu...
That's my problem with FreeBSD on non-servers - eventually it's supported, usually via Linux shim, but it's too late. By the time FreeBSD started to support (on CURRENT) GPU that forced me to switch, I already upgraded twice.
Glad it's getting better.
The one exception I can think of would be video content creators since they end up with large amounts of raw video that would benefit from transferring at much-faster-than-streaming speeds.
And I guess steam downloads if you don't plan ahead at all, but if I'm planning to play a game later, I'll tell steam to install it hours or days in advance.
I have the same setup for a framework main board next to the AP, and it's reliably faster than using their usb-c ethernet extension card.
[X] doubt.
All these devices work out of the box on linux, more or less.
And they do not run Linux out of the box.
Installing a fully-fledged FOSS OS on low-end general-purpose computing hardware is getting harder. Certainly for the non-techies who have to be part of FOSS if it is to survive.
> PostmarketOS is a bit simpler (or at least better documented) but it is not a full Linux distro.
By what definition is PMOS not a "full" distro? It's Alpine plus some extra stuff, including device tweaks and out-of-the-box desktop environments.
Can it run Sway window manager? Honest question.
Netbooks were originally Linux. MSFT created a special licensing class just to try to undercut it. It wasn't great, but because Windows and Microsoft licensing, it quickly took off. People realized Windows on netbooks sucks, thought that meant that netbooks sucked, and eventually netbooks died. Until, arguably, ChromeOS arrived.
RIP, Linux netbooks of yore. I do miss you so.
Whether this is any helpful to us is another story.
Now it can be better or worse, and right now it's never been better. There was a time when your language, your shell and your operating system were specific to the exact model of computer (not just a patched kernel, everything was fully bespoke) and you have a very limited set of peripherals. That we suffer from more esoteric operating systems lagging behind the bleeding edge of extremely complicated peripherals is a very good place to be in. That there's always room for improvement shouldn't be cause for sadness.
No, it is not. There was a small period of time between the 90s and the 2010s where you could grab almost every 386 OS and have your hardware mostly decently run for it, and if not, drivers would be easily written from manufacturer specifications. That time was definitely better then than what we have today, or what we had before then. I am writing this as someone who was written serial port controller drivers for the BeOS.
> That we suffer from more esoteric operating systems lagging behind the bleeding edge of extremely complicated peripherals is a very good place to be in.
This is the wrong logic, because operating systems become esoteric since they can't support the hardware, and hardware becomes complicated and under-specified because there's basically only one operating system to take care of. You may _think_ you have no reason to be sad if you're a user of Windows or Linux, but you have plenty anyway.
And prior to that, you could grab every OS running on IBM clones and not have to worry about graphics drivers at all, because graphics acceleration wasn't a thing. The era you refer to had already introduced software contingency on hardware within x86. This disparity was further compounded in the mid-2010s as GPUs exploded in complexity and their drivers screamed into tens of millions of lines of code, eclipsing kernels themselves. This is not distinguishable from the introduction of graphics drivers in any generalized manner. They were driven by the same process.
An important thing I want to point out as well; you're doing a lot of heavy lifting by limiting the pool to x86 computers, which is already giving up and admitting to a very strong restriction of hardware choice. Don't take that as pedantry, it's a very well hidden assumption that you've accidentally overlooked, or in the case that you think it's irrelevant, I'm letting you know that I don't consider it irrelevant in the slightest. When I think of computers, I'm not just thinking of x86 PCs. In the 90s I'm thinking of SGI workstations, Acorns, Amiga, Macs. I'm thinking of mainframes and supercomputers and everything else.
> This is the wrong logic, because operating systems become esoteric since they can't support the hardware
On the contrary, I assure you that this logic rests on faulty premises. As a general principle it's clearly false since most operating systems (which are long forgotten) predate it by decades, and in the specific context of Linux winning over FreeBSD, it's still not applicable as that happened smack dab in this era you describe.
> You may _think_ you have no reason to be sad if you're a user of Windows or Linux, but you have plenty anyway.
I'm a user of Linux, FreeBSD and 9Front. I just don't (and never have) bought hardware at random. You can reason your way into sadness any which way, but rationalization isn't always meaningfully justified. I just don't find it sad that my second desktop can't have an RX 9000 whatever in it. Where's the cut off line for that? Why not be sad that I can't jam a Fujitsu ARM processor into a PCIE slot as another type of satellite processor? The incompatibility is of the same effect, but I don't see you lamenting or even considering the latter, as though mounting a processor to a PCB is somehow fundamentally less possible than writing a modern graphics driver.
Not at all; I excluded this early era because you could _not_ be sure to find an OS that would support your graphics card at all, other than maybe what the BIOS supported. I am talking about the 90s because GPUs already had plenty of non-BIOS-supported features, like multiple CRTCs, weird fixed acceleration pipelines, weird coprocessors with random ISAs, and yet you could still find operating systems with 3rd party drivers supporting them.
It is a _perfectly_ distinguishable era. See how many OSes support 3D cards from the era like i9xx. Heck, FreeBSD itself qualifies, but also BeOS and many others.
In addition, I am talking about the _kernel_ part, which by any logic should be ridiculously simple. E.g. this is not a compiler to a random ISA or anything like that. It is what in Linux you would call a DRM driver, and the only reason they are complex and millions of LoCs is that they are under-specified, by AMD and the rest. Most of lines of AMD driver code in Linux are the register indices for each and every card submodel (yes, really, header files!), when it is clearly that before they would just have standarized on one set and abstracted from it. Compare AtomBIOS support in cards from a decade ago and cards from today. It is literally easier today for a 3rd party to implement support for the more complicated parts of the GPU (e.g. running compute code!), which AMD more or less documents, than it is to support basic modesetting support as it was in the 00s. This has happened!
Hardware may be more complicated, but interfaces needn't be more complicated. This, I believe, is a symptom, not the cause.
> I just don't find it sad that my second desktop can't have an RX 9000 whatever in it. Where's the cut off line for that? Why not be sad that I can't jam a Fujitsu ARM processor into a PCIE slot as another type of satellite processor?
You do not find it sad that there is no longer any operating system other than Linux supporting any amount of hardware, simple or not ?
Also, you call every non-Linux OS as "esoteric" as a counter-argument to my point , yet you try to use support for definitely esoteric hardware (which would be even hard to acquire!) as an argument for your point, whatever it is ? When I'm complaining that I can no longer rely on FreeBSD, literally the 2nd open OS with most hardware support, on supporting basic hardware (!) from this decade, when on the past I could more or less rely on _all_ BSDs supporting it, as well as a myriad other OSes , the argument that "oh well it never supported hardware that it is impossible to find in stores anyway, so I don't care" sounds pretty hollow.
Certainly even slightly deviating from the popular hardware has always resulted in diminishing returns, but today it is much worse, _except_ for Linux.
It is an old-school UNIX experience, not great for desktops but excellent for long-lived “pet servers” where long-term stability over decades of service is valued. I treasure it for running small Web servers and shell hosts, instead of Debian/Ubuntu.
1. I subjectively just like it better. Things like dtrace, jails, the init system, just click for me.
2. I think it's good to not support a Linux mono-culture. Yes, there is Windows and macOS, but in terms of open source OS's, I think it's good to have more than one choice and so for any rough edges in FreeBSD, I'm willing to deal with them to support that goal.
3. I don't think you'll find any actual, hard, technical reason to want to prefer FreeBSD over Linux on a desktop. Anything you can do in FreeBSD you can do in Linux. Heck, FreeBSD is probably even running the Linux version (for example video drivers).
But really, which Linux do you mean? Nix? Gentoo? Red Hat?
But the comment you're replying to said there weren't many good technical reasons to prefer freebsd over linux. I think that's broadly true.
I still really like freebsd though. Unlike linux, one community is responsible for the kernel and userspace. That makes the whole OS feel much more cohesive. You don't have to worry about supporting 18 different distributions, which all do their own thing.
How about Ubuntu and snaps? License needed for certain security updates, etc.
For developers, it is interesting to think of as a self contained toolkit. If you are building firmware, platform images for bare metal or cloud, it creates a much better demarcation than any attempts Linux can put forth. This is related to why you might like OPNSense. But if you are just a consumer it only indirectly matters to you.. consistency of build and product, quality of subset of network drivers and subsystems like pf to support your mission, ability go in and quickly and correctly fix the right problem at the right level etc.
You might have to use an Ethernet connection though, as the Wi-Fi may not be supported.
It's a pretty rock-solid system, from my memory of the 2000s.
BSDs in general are tightly integrated between kernel and userland tools. FreeBSD has a lot of modern concepts built in that Linux also has, such as Jails and bhyve VM hosting.
FreeBSD has ZFS has a first-class citizen and in my sysadmin opinion, ZFS is one of the best filesystems ever created. While others dunk on BSD for "catching up to Linux" on certain features, BSD equivalents seem to be really well architected. ZFS is one place where Linux (btrfs) is only beginning to catch up. I just learned about bectl (Boot Environment Ctl) that makes snapshotting and rolling back the system partition of installs really easy, and ZFS-on-root is critical to that tool.
For many, having the simple RC init system is a boon over systemd. Services that need started up at boot are defined in /etc/rc.conf, as well as networking and other core services. Editing rc.conf can be done manually or with the sysrc tool.
The more accessible software becomes the more infra is required to support it, and the more complex and convoluted the software will be
Of course I love FreeBSD and want it to be supported on my desktop or laptop but at what cost?
Here is the question I have always wanted to ask: Why not make the ultimate compromise and say: you will be able to run FreeBSD on almost all laptops but it is gonna be through let say an Alpine Linux hypervisor and we are gonna ship it with all the glue you need to have a great experience.
About every CPU has great visualization capabilities nowadays and the perf are amazing.
Now some might start screaming at the idea but you already run your favorite operating system through a stack of software you do not trust or control: UEFI, CPU microcode, etc.
I believe we need OS diversity and if so much of the energy of project is spent on working on an infinite hardware support, how much is left for the real innovation?
Now to be fair, in a few ways I think it is ahead. Now if you said "catch up to Linux in hardware support" I would fully agree.
Last I heard, its VM (swap/memory) processes is still better, but seems many Linux people avoid swap space these days. FWIW, I always have swap on any system that allows it.
And Jails, IMO nothing on Linux comes close to how good FreeBSD Jails is.
Years ago, there was a project combining Debian with the kernel from FreeBSD. That never made sense to me and the project seems to have died meanwhile. More sensible, IMHO, might be to bolt the FreeBSD user space unto the Linux kernel. That way one would get fairly broad and current hardware support and could still enjoy a classic Unix look&feel and stable ABI.
A lot of BSD utilities that are not POSIX has really close interaction with the kernel. OpenBSD’s *ctl binaries are often the user-facing part of some OS subsystem. Linux subsystem often expose a very complex internal that you need to use some other project to tame down
Chimera Linux is doing something like this, although without aiming for the full BSD experience, just utilising its core userland [1]. The project is in an alpha stage.