I’ve been running FreeBSD 12.1 on a Thinkpad T450 from ebay for the past ten months, and I’ve been very happy with it. This was my first time running FreeBSD on actual hardware as opposed to in a Virtual Machine, so there was a bit of a learning curve getting everything set up and working.

The Thinkpad T450 was released in 2015. I paid $180 for one on eBay with the following specs:

  • Intel Processor i5-5300U @ 2.30Ghz
  • 8 Gigs RAM
  • 14” screen @ 1600x900 resolution (Intel i915)
  • 256 Gig SSD
  • Build in SmartCard Reader

I bought this computer as a lightweight portable system to complement my much larger and heavier Toshiba which runs Windows and had been serving as my ‘Desktop Replacement’ at the time. (I’ve since upgraded to an actual Desktop running GhostBSD). I was a bit concerned because the T450 has half the performance and half the RAM as my larger system, but in practice, I’ve never thrown more at this laptop than it can handle. I’ve patched and recompiled my kernel, recompiled bhyve, I’m always running a couple of VMs and probably a few too many tabs in Chromium, but I’ve never had a performance problem. FreeBSD runs smoother on this laptop, than Windows 10 does on my twice as powerful system.

What Works

  • Built in ethernet and Wifi (Though Wifi is slow on FreeBSD regardless of hardware)
  • Screen Backlight Adjustment
  • Touchpad / Trackpoint
  • Accelerated Graphics (I had to install drm-next from ports, the one from pkg caused a kernel panic)
  • Audio - Speakers and audio jack, including automaticly switching between the two)
  • SmartCard Reader
  • Fingerprint Reader (I only tested this as far as trying out the fprint-demo, but it was able to recognize my fingerprint)
  • Sleep / Resume, including the ability to Hibernate to Disk, thanks to the Intel Rapid Start Technology

The Problems

  • After Sleep -> Resume, sound works fine, but after Sleep -> Hibernate -> Resume, the speakers work fine but audio jack doesn’t. The work around is after waking up the laptop, put it back to sleep and resume immediately. This restores the audiojack.
  • Monitor Hotplug and XOrg. If I plug in a monitor, I have to restart XOrg for xrandr won’t see the change. I opened This Support Forum Thread but haven’t been able to resolve it. This was a bigger problem for me when I was trying to use the laptop as my main desktop system as well, ever since I got a dedicated desktop, this no longer bothers me.
  • Battery life is generally 2-4 hours, which isn’t great, but then again this is a used laptop from 2015, so that might just be the condition of the battery.
  • I’ve had the entire system hang 3 or 4 times on my in the ten months I’ve had it. Everything just locks up hard and I have to reboot
  • My experience with trying to use the laptop with a docking station has been mixed, I’ll write a separate post about that.

Overall FreeBSD on this laptop has been a great experience. There was a steep learning curve and a lot of troubleshooting for the first few weeks, but now that its set up, I really like it. When I first bought the laptop I was concerned about getting everything working well, and figured that if nothing else I could just install Linux, but my results so far have made me a fan, and I’ve since brought a second BSD system (My desktop which dual boots GhostBSD/NetBSD) into my life.