Re: AMD64 modern laptop recommendation

[Christian Weisgerber]

On 2017-07-18, Radoslav_Mirza  wrote:

> To congratulate myself for 2 years of not smoking I want to buy a new medium 
> to high end laptop and install only OpenBSD on it.
>
> Does anyone run OpenBSD on a brand new laptop with good support?

I recently treated myself to a current (5th gen) Thinkpad X1 Carbon.

The principal limitation at the moment, shared by all current laptops
with a Kaby Lake CPU, is that there is no inteldrm(4) support yet:
* You need to run X11 with wsfb(4).  Non-accelerated, but perfectly
  fine for my use: window manager, xterms, web browser.
* No backlight control.
* No suspend/resume.  Well, suspend works, and resume mostly works,
  except that there is no video.

Beyond that, it just works.  In particular, these work:
* UEFI boot
* nvme(4) for the SSD
* em(4), Intel I219-V
* iwm(4), 8265; the driver spews various warnings/errors but seems
  to work in practice
* audio, keyboard, trackpoint, trackpad

There is so much hardware, I haven't used or tested it all.  I don't
know about the status of these:
* HDMI output
* camera, uvideo(4) attaches
* LTE modem, umb(4) attaches
* fingerprint reader

The poorly accessible SD card reader isn't supported.

The UEFI BIOS comes with two sets of default settings.  The normal
ones and "OS Optimized Defaults" for Windows 10.  My machine came
configured with the latter, so I switched it back to the standard
defaults.  If you want to disable hyperthreading, you're out of
luck: there is no such option.

-- 
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber  na...@mips.inka.de

Re: AMD64 modern laptop recommendation

[Peter N. M. Hansteen]

I only now realized that a message belonging to this thread was to me
only, so the response only went to the originator of that message, not
to the list. The meat of that message was

-- B< --
> [ ... ]

Hm. Could be their market segment isn't properly represented  in .au
then - the machines are apparently from .tw, not the mainland as I think
I said in an earlier comment.

> [ ... ]

No official wiki for that purpose exists, the main info source would be
the platform page for amd64 and the man pages. Then again, it's possible
http://dmesgd.nycbug.org/index.cgi could turn up some useful
information. I need to submit my new one there.

> [ ... ]

The main tip is that quite a few developers, possibly even a majority,
like ThinkPads a lot. My personal recommendtation would be to stay away
from late 2014 to early 2015 ThinkPad models because the units produced
during roughly that period came with the mouse buttons integrated in the
trackpad, so clicking with anything even approaching precision is simply
not possible. Other than that, they're fine machines but I would
recommend demanding a close up photograph of the trackpad. And I hear
recent models can be had lightly used at attractive prices via ebay and
similar.

For UEFI and such, for my latest I simply did not change the BIOS
defaults away from "Secure Boot" and things just worked.

-- B< --

- Peter
-- 
Peter N. M. Hansteen, member of the first RFC 1149 implementation team
http://bsdly.blogspot.com/ http://www.bsdly.net/ http://www.nuug.no/
"Remember to set the evil bit on all malicious network traffic"
delilah spamd[29949]: 85.152.224.147: disconnected after 42673 seconds.

Re: AMD64 modern laptop recommendation

[Peter N. M. Hansteen]

On Mon, Jul 17, 2017 at 08:37:56PM -0400, Radoslav_Mirza wrote:

> To congratulate myself for 2 years of not smoking I want to buy a new medium 
> to high end laptop and install only OpenBSD on it.
> 
> Does anyone run OpenBSD on a brand new laptop with good support?
> 
> Any recommendations.

I took delivery of a nice lightweight (1.5kg or approx 3 pounds in Imperial 
measure) 
Clevo just over a week ago, the TL;DR of the writeup[1] is smooth sailing 
except 
that I did have to cook up an xorg.conf file (the newest Kaby Lake grapics 
features 
are not fully supported by our X yet) but that was essentially cut and paste 
from 
a Gist by Reyk Floeter (referenced in the blogpost). 

I can certainly recommend that machine. The only snag in daily use is that if 
you 
like me also use ThinkPads, you may miss the trackpoint aka clitmouse when 
going 
to machines without that device.

[1] http://bsdly.blogspot.com/2017/07/openbsd-and-modern-laptop.html

- Peter

-- 
Peter N. M. Hansteen, member of the first RFC 1149 implementation team
http://bsdly.blogspot.com/ http://www.bsdly.net/ http://www.nuug.no/
"Remember to set the evil bit on all malicious network traffic"
delilah spamd[29949]: 85.152.224.147: disconnected after 42673 seconds.

Re: AMD64 modern laptop recommendation

[Allan Streib]

Radoslav_Mirza  writes:

> To congratulate myself for 2 years of not smoking I want to buy a new
> medium to high end laptop and install only OpenBSD on it.
>
> Does anyone run OpenBSD on a brand new laptop with good support?

This was posted recently: https://jcs.org/2017/07/14/matebook

I think with any "brand new" laptop you're going to find various things
that are not (yet) supported.

Allan

AMD64 modern laptop recommendation

[Radoslav_Mirza]

Dear Group,
To congratulate myself for 2 years of not smoking I want to buy a new medium to 
high end laptop and install only OpenBSD on it.

Does anyone run OpenBSD on a brand new laptop with good support?

Any recommendations.

Cheers!

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