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Does anyone have a good recommendation for a lightweight laptop (ideally 11", but 13" is OK I guess) that would run a BSD system out of the box (as much as possible)?

Trying to slowly start a switch from OS X for basic stuff (internet, writing LaTeX, writing some elementary code, etc.), something to replace my Macbook Air would be awesome.

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BSD is great, but if you're on a laptop, I have to say I can't recommend anything other than GNU+Linux. That is the only Unix-like system besides OS X I've run on my MacBook Air that has good power management. Everything works out of the box. Xubuntu is an excellent choice; the 13.04 release works flawlessly with all hardware and I easily get about 6+ hours of battery life out of a 1.5-year old Air.

I've tried OpenBSD on the same machine, and got decent power management with it. It's not as ubiquitous nor as supported in terms of a software perspective as FreeBSD (e.g., can't run some Linux binaries, etc.) but it's still a good choice if you want to stay away from GNU and the GPL.

Personally, I can't live without the GNU tools, so I've never switched.

FreeBSD works fine on my laptops, m610 and studio 1555. The 1555 is a win 7 dual boot. I did have to replace the crappy wifi nic in it though to something better and something FBSD would recognize.

> Personally, I can't live without the GNU tools, so I've never switched.

Do you mean a GNU userland or toolchain? FreeBSD definitely has GNU toolchain although the ones in base are being deprecated. Still available in ports though. And I'd take the BSD userland over the clusterF GNU's is any day.

I meant both userland and toolchain. I like the BSD userland for its simplicity, but the GNU userland has a lot of features that BSD doesn't have. It's bigger, and some may say more bloated, but it works well and is fully-featured.

> GNU userland has a lot of features that BSD doesn't have.

Do you have an example of this or a lot of them?

> some may say more bloated

I'm not worried about "bloat". What I am worried about it lack of functionality. If BSD is lacking in that area, it should be easy to identify.

I've had good luck with FreeBSD on Lenovos. Its run on every one I've had since my T42 (so T42, R60, T500, T510, T520). Power management works "fine", I usually get 5-6 hours of battery life out of my battery, but I never bothered to monkey with suspend/resume since my laptop boots so fast anyways.

Frankly the Air is one of the best laptop formfactors I've seen in a while, just load a virtualization system on it (VBox is free) and run FreeBSD in that.

FreeBSD works well enough for me on my Thinkpad X220, with the notable current exception of suspend and resume. If you can live with that for now I believe it will serve you well for your use case.

There have been reports that removing VESA from the kernel allowed suspend/resume to work fully for the KMS stuff. Not sure if that's applicable to your setup.

Not sure if FreeBSD has power management worth a rectal excretion, you probably wouldn't want to run it on a laptop.

Try GNU/Linux, really.

Or OpenBSD. That runs really well on most laptops.

As long as they're connected to a wall socket. Otherwise, citation needed. Power Management in hard. Who does the myriad of hardware quirks for OpenBSD?

If you are referring to suspend/resume, then OpenBSD has great support[1]. Its one of the very few ACPI stacks not derived from Intel's ACPICA reference code.

[1] http://www.openbsd.org/papers/zzz.pdf (older, 2011)

Suspend and resume are basic features, by power management I mean idle and active power management, optimizing the race to zero, reclocking...

Working suspend and resume is not a basic feature as far as linuxen go.

Would you like to explain that, and maybe cite some references? Suspend and resume have been stable for me as long as I've had a computer capable of supporting them. And I'm not aware of any way to make them fail without doing something obviously intended to disable them.

Reference: Every time I've tried Linux on a laptop, Suspend, Resume, or Both has been broken in whatever $FLAVOR_OF_THE_MONTH distro/package/kernel the community insists is the next big thing.

The BSDs tend to implement these things later but far more reliably.

Never been broken on Arch, Fedora, Debian... or any of the upstream distributions I've used, when I've used them.

Your personal exacerbation of whatever imaginary and nonspecific issues you're talking about is not relevant to a conversation about people other than you.

The world doesn't need your BSD FUD. "The BSDs" is also absolutely silly as ideas go, there are BSDs which have never supported suspend/resume.

What the world doesn't need is this continuing holy war from a particularly small but sadly vocal minority of the Linux community. You really don't help the cause. I find it particularly irononic of you to accuse someone of spreading "BSD FUD" on a thread about FreeBSD. I'll 'cite' you an example of real 'FUD'; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5839565

I had to install Debian on a laptop last week actually, suspend/resume absolutely did not work on it...

> The world doesn't need your BSD FUD.

You have just doomed yourself to the "I have no idea what I'm talking about" club.

My Thinkpad X220 usually has a wall socket nearby, but I have been able to work on a flight from Toronto to San Francisco (a bit over 5 hours) without running out of battery.

"acpiconf -i0" tells me my battery has a design capacity of just over 93Wh, and it's using just over 14W while idle.

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