Buying a thinkpad means using a device made by Lenovo, a company which has repeatedly shipped devices infected with malware and backdoors (sometimes for profit) see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenovo#Security_and_privacy_in...

I hope it pays well, those Windows users are subsidizing some great hardware.

He apparently wipes all of that when installing FreeBSD though.

I wouldn't trust their firmware/hardware anymore than I would their software. I wouldn't encourage them as a company either.

Trust is undef unless assessed within a context. We have zero reasons to trust more or less any vendor's firmware/hardware because they are unauditable. But from experience we can say it works most of the time and there's no discernible difference between Lenovo, Dell, or Apple

I just went through T14 Gen 1 hell. I tried to replace a broken LCD and the system just wouldn't boot. I fussed with it so much, the flimsy case cracked and broke in several places. I gave up and decided to use it as a clamshell, but had to keep the broken screen connected to boot.

But I couldn't get it to see the external monitor. I fought this for hours. I finally reached my patience threshold and tore the fucking LCD off the case. It hurt the hands a bit but was cathartic. Amazingly, it booted and saw the monitor, magically. I was astonished. With or without the broken screen, it wouldn't boot. But going psycho on it fixed it. Proof in the wholesomeness of violence, maybe not. But...

it's not running BSD. It's now my mom's desktop, and it's running Void. Works great, and I love the Ryzen 4700, with 16gb ram and atheros wifi chip. Delicate, but capable of some extremes :)

Love the Thinkpad line. It's kinda the hackers laptop of choice.

> X220/X230

These are pretty solid with dual batteries. Also popular for OpenBSD and 9front, the latter of which I run on an x230 (it stopped charging the removable battery :-/) You can get about 2 hours off the internal and 6~8 with a big fat removable battery, maybe more if the OS and drivers can properly throttle hardware power settings.

I have an X1 carbon 5th gen and it's quite light but not useful for 9front without some Ethernet driver tweaking (likely some phy bits need twiddling.) Instead I tossed Debian on it and run 9front in a VM if I need a local CPU. So far it just seems to work including Ethernet (via a dongle) and WiFi.

That's quite helpful. I'm potentially switching my x220t and t530 to a BSD this year, might also get a gen 1 t14.

The good thing about T530 (and T520) is that You can put there the same Quad Core CPU that W520/W530 has :)

Update the matrix on the source site?