Moving my FreeBSD laptop to a Thinkpad X1 Carbon G6
Context
I've been using a Lenovo Thinkpad T440p as daily driver, running FreeBSD, for
almost 2 years now.
While it works really great, it is bulky and heavy, so not really travel
friendly - not to mention the battery life.
I had an eye on options for a while, but I wanted to make sure the upgrade was worth it.
The choice
I decided for a Thinkpad X1 Carbon G6 - granted, it was released 5-6 years ago, but compared to the T440p, it's night and day (the T440p being from 2013).
The good
- Weight: it's super light! Specs say 1.13kg, compared to T440p's 2.2kg
- Thin: it looks and feels like a modern laptop!
- USB-C charging: no need to carry around a bulky charger, any USB-C one will do
- Display: 16:9, 1920 x 1080 - compared to the T440p's lower resolution
- Working trackpad: I know it's not related to the hardware itself, but rather FreeBSD, but I never managed to have the T440p's trackpad to work, so I'm relieved that it works on the X1
Left: x1 Carbon - Right: T440p
The less good
So far, the only annoying thing is Wifi: with the embedded card, I can barely get 15 Mbps out of it (on both fast.com and speed.cloudflare.com).
With the T440p, I could easily get 90 Mbps, and the limit was the hardware itself - I'm on a 1 Gbps fiber connection at home, and from my work MacBook Pro laptop, I am getting at least 300 Mbps.
I will look at Wifi dongle options, as it looks like the X1 embedded Wifi card is not really great.
Pointers
Some interesting pages I used:
- Jeremey Chen's article about FreeBSD 14 + Lenovo X1 Carbon
- Michael Hyppel's Github page on how to setup FreeBSD on the X1 Carbon
- John Grafton's page on FreeBSD + X1 Carbon
- FreeBSD's Wiki page about the X1 Carbon laptops
Wrap Up
I'm super happy about this upgrade - every single thing I wanted to improve has been fixed, and I can now use my FreeBSD laptop from my couch or on the go, even without shutting it down as the Suspend function also works fine!
Tags: FreeBSD