Hi,
Stuart Longland wrote:
The IBM Thinkpads… sure, they worked well. The Lenovo ones? Looking at
the ones around the office, they've been a bit hit-and-miss, on both
Linux and their out-of-the-box Windows installs.
that is true... the latest IBM heritage you can get is the T43, although
already manufactured by Lenovo.
Wonderful chassis, incredible hinges... and I have one running Ubuntu,
une NetBSD.
I run OpenBSD on a T60 with the hi-res screen and while it works very
well as far as hardware supports, the chassis quality is already lesser.
The bigger cousin, the T61 I have, already has nvidia and that is a
nightmare: I couldn't get it useful on neither OpenBSD nor NetBSD so it
is my FreeBSD tinker machine now, where I have to use the proprietary
drivers (the opensources ones are available, but not up to it)
then from there it goes up and down...
I can't comment on their reliability on OpenBSD however as I think I'm
the only one in my office that uses it at all, and I tend to reserve it
for servers and routers which is an area which OpenBSD excels at.
I try to use my BSD boxen for every day use, although I always have a
Windows machine at hand for the "stupid" work.
I use X11 program on it and browse and use mail.
One thing I never tried on any BSD since a long time is the use of a
webcam: the only thing I use is Skype and it is quite hopeless.
The OP asked for a MacBook Pro replacement: since the value of a Mac for
me is now mostly MacOS (oh, sorry macOS....)
With OpenBSD many alterantives are interesting: besides the cited ThinkPads
I have tried OpenBSD on a discarded hp ProBook 4530s... I need to use
intel graphics instead of the Radeon, but it works very well. It used
not too, but 6.2 and 6.3 brought an incredible improvement: sleep works,
wireless, correct display brightness: quick and responsive! The machine
has a very decent keyboard too and the i5 is fine also for development
and browsing (except the classic browser issues on FOSS). If you can get
one for cheap, recommended: but it is a big beast.
Riccardo
