Running FreeBSD on a Lenovo Thinkbook 16 G7 ARP that was bought brand new less than a year ago. Everything except the wifi works flawlessly (daily driver for working).
And the wifi is easily fixable either buying a non expensive dongle or waiting for the next release.
Also running bhyve as daily driver with Ubuntu for development purposes. Everything works without issues, perfectly.
That's valuable and good to know, but I meant a machine that's actually new (not one you just bought recently). That laptop is about 2.5 years old specs wise at this point. I use mine for anything from programming to video editing to AAA gaming on Linux. I don't think a machine like that could be my primary one, but looks like a decent secondary.
I don't know what you consider "actually new" hardware. The machine I use to work has 16 Gb of RAM. Ryzen 7 and an AMD GPU. For me that's a pretty decent and recent hardware.
If you meant the lastest of the latest GPU, processor, chipset and so you you might better off with Linux.
But the fact that the computer that was given to me was boxed from factory and bought after two weeks after started is a sign of recent hardware. I haven't tried it but two other person where I work have high end brand new ThinkPads and I'm confident FreeBSD can be run on those well too.
Ryzen 7 is a 9 year old, AMD GPU a 20 year old generic term.
If Notebookcheck is correct, the "Lenovo ThinkBook 16 G7 ARP" comes with a Zen3(+) CPU and a RDNA 2 GPU, both released 6 years ago.
If Zen3+ vs Zen3 is a significant architectural difference, than it would slightly miss the 5 year mark, since it was released 4.5 years ago.
By new hardware I mean CPU, GPU, WiFi etc. that was released by their manufacturer within the last 1 year or so, I don't even mean hardware that was just released.
The laptop mentioned is fine. But it is hardware that is just at that mark where I'd normally replace it.
As I said, I think it's still OK if my goal is to run FreeBSD. But if my goal is to get the best hardware now that will last me the next 3-5 years then it's dated and I'll have to compromise just to be able to use FreeBSD with it. I don't have to do that with Linux.
I think if I am going to compromise on hardware because I want a particular OS on it, it'll probably be Haiku over one of the BSDs because I don't get the sense BSD offers enough of a difference vs Linux to justify that compromise.
Perhaps, but the BSD developers do not fully invite themselves into your home and network through use of their operating system. I do appreciate however that macOS is BSD somewhere under the hood and switched to zsh as default shell (even if it was supposedly only for licensing reasons, but I believe it's the correct decision practically or legally)
