[talk] Biannual BSD on Laptops Thread

[Pete Wright]

On 04/24/2017 10:01, Isaac (.ike) Levy wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> Now that I finally have both FreeBSD and OpenBSD happily
> sleeping/resuming on my lenovo X230, I'm using it pretty heavily and
> HATE the display.  Terrible for graphics work and frustrating for me to
> use in dim light.  Really great display in a lit room, if you wish
> others not to shoulder surf...   Anyhow, I can't take it any more.
>
> Next thing, it's 2017, and USBC.  Holy cow, evil all around.
> I'm *sortof* barely learning to live with the lack of Ethernet on
> laptops, but they mostly all seem to be USBC for POWER.
> Whomever thought a DMA wire protocol would be acceptable for POWERING
> your rig, should be taken out and beaten in the public square.  (Can't
> wait until we see USBC/Thunderbolt data-blocking cables hit the street.)
>
> So, on to the laptops, I've narrowed it down to two (three really),
> choices, and wanted to see if anyone here had words on them:
>
> - Dell XPS 13, and XPS 15
> I can't believe I'm considering a Dell laptop, but wow these look nice.
> Breaking with the entire industry, they appear to have deep
> repair/service documentation, with full tear-down instructions for every
> component.
> RAM is soldered on board, (as with most things now), but the HDD is M.2
> standard- which I can totally live with.
> Big negative: USBC is the power port, just like new toy Mac hardware.
> At least it *has* regular USB ports. :)

man i ran into the same conundrum a few weeks ago - IT forced McAfee on 
my macbook which was the final straw.  I was really close to picking up 
a xps 15 despite my *massive* reservations of ever giving money to dell 
again.  i actually ended up purchasing a Inspiron 15 2in1 from best-buy 
(yikes double sketchy!).

the tl;dr version is i'm actually really happy with this laptop 
considering i got it for $1k.  i've been running the freebsd drm-next 
branch on it and pretty much everything just works:

- accelerated GPU using i915 from drm-next + latest xorg and GL packages
- wifi just works
- suspend/resume just works when closing lid
- good battery life
- audio works after doing some sysctl tweaking

display is also 1920x1080 which is better than my old macbook.

the downsides are pretty much down to it only having a single HDMI port 
for external display, and the touchpad isn't the greatest.

so...to summarize pretty happy with this Dell laptop and the soon to be 
incorporated updated DRM :^)

-pete

-- 
Pete Wright
pete at nomadlogic.org
@nomadlogicLA