Lenovo X1 Carbon or T460s

[Mark Heily]

On Fri, Nov 11, 2016 at 6:25 AM, Jeremie Le Hen <jlh at freebsd.org> wrote:

> Hi guys,
>
> I'm about to purchase a new laptop, one of the two mentioned in the
> subject.
>
> I'm looking for reports of hardware support for both of them under FreeBSD.
> What are the goods and bads?
>
>
I just purchased a brand new Gen 4 X1 Carbon last week and tried a recent
TrueOS build on it.  I'm triple booting it with Windows and Linux for
comparison purposes. Here's what I have seen so far regarding FreeBSD:

- Wifi and the touchpad work fine.

- The latest gen HiDPI screens (aka Retina display) have extremely high
resolution relative to the size of the screen, which makes the console
fonts extremely tiny. Even the TrueOS graphical installer was barely usable
due to small fonts.  If you want a graphical desktop environment, you'll
have to figure out how to scale applications to look right under HiDPI.
Lumina and the TrueOS display manager did a decent job of it, but didn't
give me enough control over the scaling factor. With the latest Gnome on
Linux, it gives you a lot of control over how applications are scaled. I've
heard KDE5 also has support for HiDPI.

- Skylake integrated video isn't accelerated. and feels a little slow.
Video playback is choppy and disappointing.

- Suspend/resume is reported not to work (I have not confirmed this)

At this point, FreeBSD is still unusable due to display issues (IMHO) and I
spend most of my time booting into Linux :(

The hardware itself is great, other than the black finish seems to attract
smudges and fingerprints. It's super lightweight, quiet, fast, and the
keyboard and trackpad feel very comfortable.