Laptop recommendation

[Sergei Akhmatdinov]

> When I bought my laptop back in 2007, I blew it -- it has a wireless
> networking card with a Broadcom chipset that is not FOSS-friendly. Debian
> has a work-around using proprietary firmware, but I would prefer a laptop
> with 100% FOSS-supported hardware.

Perhaps I am going off on a tangent, but most of the time you can buy
an Aetheros card online and replace it.

I currently use 11-STABLE on an Acer Inspire V3-571. It comes with
some Broadcom card preinstalled, but I swapped it out for an
Aetheros AR9285.

Once the wireless networking card is replaced, everything else works
out of the box in STABLE. RELEASE currently lacks full Elantech
touchpad support. Suspend to RAM works too, suspend to disk doesn't,
but I hardly ever use suspend anyway.

> Probably the best strategy is to boot a live CD of your FOSS of choice on
> whatever computer you are considering buying, and then take a look at dmesg,
> etc.. Typically, this limits your purchasing options to the local geographic
> market.  But, you might be able to find a savvy eBay seller who will send
> you dmesg output.

With FreeBSD, suspend support is still one of the big questions,
so I would check that when doing a live CD test.

> This is not a new question.  Over the years, people have tried starting
> businesses dealing in hardware for FOSS and/or existing businesses have
> offered products with FOSS.  They never seem to last.  STFW and see what you
> can find currently.

Why, the businesses that do that still exist. Minifree and System76
come to mind. The problem is that you will be severely overpaying
for what they offer.

Cheers,
-- 
Sergei Akhmatdinov

My GPG public key:
gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys AD800D99
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 833 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/attachments/20170218/bea2ca6c/attachment.sig>