That is cool in ways, but many manufactures change the internals without changing the model number and so I'm not sure how much I can trust it. There is a recycled computers place near me that will sell me some of those cheap, but how can I be sure the one I'm buying is the same as the one tested (if indeed I can find any of those model numbers at all - which is a factor of what companies near me are recycling this month)

In my opinion pre alder lake intel is the sweet spot for FreeBSD. Not sure about AMD but anything before 2020 should work just fine. Just avoid CPUs with heterogenous core configurations for now.

I'd say Juana Manso laptops are usable with FreeBSD. sure, you lose brightness control, you can't see how much battery remains, (I didn't try wifi but the 9650AC chip seems to be supported), but it is usable. audio works, USB works, video works when you load the Intel drivers.

There's an axiom here which is that the better your overall user experience is, the less hardware support you are going to have.

The more accessible software becomes the more infra is required to support it, and the more complex and convoluted the software will be

I have the latitude 7490 and it worked great with Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. The only issue is some hardware design issue where lifting it with one hand will cause it to freeze (possibly some stress causing a shock or a displacement).

The best resource to check support is https://dmesgd.nycbug.org/dmesgd

That's a very small list.

I personally feel like the race to support a vast array of hardware is very costly for such a small team and might be a waste of their precious resources.

Of course I love FreeBSD and want it to be supported on my desktop or laptop but at what cost?

Here is the question I have always wanted to ask: Why not make the ultimate compromise and say: you will be able to run FreeBSD on almost all laptops but it is gonna be through let say an Alpine Linux hypervisor and we are gonna ship it with all the glue you need to have a great experience.

About every CPU has great visualization capabilities nowadays and the perf are amazing.

Now some might start screaming at the idea but you already run your favorite operating system through a stack of software you do not trust or control: UEFI, CPU microcode, etc.

I believe we need OS diversity and if so much of the energy of project is spent on working on an infinite hardware support, how much is left for the real innovation?

Good old FreeBSD - always trying to catch up to Linux.

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