If you want to run FreeBSD on a laptop, you’re often yanked back to the Linux world of 20 years ago, with many components and parts not working and other issues such as sleep and wake problems. FreeBSD has been hard at work improving the experience of using FreeBSD on laptops, and now this has resulted in a list of laptops which work effortlessly with the venerable operating system.
There’s only about 10 laptops on the list so far, but they do span a range of affordability and age, with some of them surely being quite decent bargains on eBay or whatever other used stuff marketplace you use. If you want to use FreeBSD on a laptop, but don’t want to face any surprises or do any difficult setup, get one of the laptops on this list – a list which will surely expand over time.
I notice there are no Dell laptops on the list…
That makes sense. WiFi has been an issue on both of my Dell laptops with FreeBSD. One is an older Dell XPS L502x from 2011, the other is a 2-in-1 Dell Inspiron from about 3 or 4 years ago.
When configured correctly, the XPS keeps attempting to connect to the wrong WiFi network. I’ve got Comcast, and it seems to get confused between my WiFi AP that I configure it to use, and the Xfinity Public Wifi that piggy backs on it. It seems to ignore the SSID and just attempts to connect to whatever network has the same hardware address or soemthing. I don’t know, but it keeps trying to connect to the wrong SSID.
With the newer AMD-based laptop, the wifi just seems to stop working after a few minutes, and requires restarting the network to get it working again.
I would love to use FreeBSD, especially since KDE+Wayland works so well now. But, without wifi, it’s a non-starter.
There are, the last one on the breakdown is a Latitude 7490 and it scores 8/8, I don’t know why it’s not included in the short list at the top (actually I see why now; in the comments it mentions issues with Bluetooth but I never had issues like that with mine in Linux. Might be a BSD thing?). My experience with that model is that, apart from Dell’s usual EFI issues when secure boot is disabled, it’s a solid Linux/OpenBSD machine.
There’s also an Inspiron 7348 on the breakdown that scores 8/8 as well, but personally I don’t like that model. We had a couple of them at work years ago and the displays are horrible, and battery life isn’t great either (and that was with Windows 10).
The Latitude E4300 on the breakdown is a perfectly serviceable, if old, laptop, and swapping out the Wi-Fi card would probably net it an 8/8 like its younger siblings.
Now I feel dumb. I just did a search for “Dell” and didn’t realize that every other manufacturer is labeled while Dell laptops are only named by product line.
Yeah I thought that was odd too. Bias by the authors? An innocent oversight? Who knows.