Since the last thread specifically on this topic is from 2010, I think it’s probably OK to start a new one.
I had lost track of Haiku, and only recently found out that the “only run it un a VM” recommendation had been dropped, so I really, really need to get a laptop to run it on.
From reading through the available material, and looking through eBay, it looks like the ThinkPad Carbon X1 is a good candidate, but I’m unsure about how recent a generation of the X1 would be fully compatible.
There’s a thread here from this summer that mentions a gen9 doing well, but no details. The gen7 is extremely reasonably priced on eBay, so that seems like a good bet.
Does that seem reasonable? Can anyone speak directly to what the latest fully-compatible generation of the X1 would be?
(I am really psyched to try Haiku on hardware; I was really sad when I finally had to move off BeOS.)
I’m thinking “supports every piece of hardware that is in the laptop and has support in the OS” is the ultimate goal, though I guess (as you point out) I’m not really interested in all of it?
I actually don’t know to what degree Haiku supports things like multi-touch on trackpads at all, so it’s hard to say in advance. I certainly don’t care about anything on the trackpad other than moving the cursor and tap-to-click; I don’t care about built-in cameras either.
None of the entries are dated, so I’m not certain how current the comments are; comments saying stuff doesn’t work could be from any time and may have been fixed long ago. I’m guessing that “Hrev” means “Haiku version” and refers to the nightly build numbers? (In which case they’re mostly from several thousand builds before current.)
It seems that site’s best used to verify that at least no problems I care about were reported for a specific machine before I try it.
It’s hard to really nail this down in advance. For example, looking at a complaint about a T460, the wifi card is idualwifi7260 - like mine. But listdev shows a different revision number (?) than mine, and I have firmware files and he doesn’t. Typical ebay ad isn’t going to drill down to this level, and in general it wouldn’t do you any good anyway.
Buy virtually any old Thinkpad (T, W, P, or X preferably) made in the past 13 years and Haiku will run well. There is no need to spend a lot of money because even a T61 from 18 years ago is as snappy running Haiku as a modern laptop running Win 11. Of course it won’t run HD video very well.
I was happy with the perfomance of my T430 (2012), but you might prefer something slightly more recent, like a T480 or T580 (former has 14 inch screen, latter has 15 inch).
The point about Thinkpads is that they almost all had and have great support for Linux, and tend to support Haiku well too. Bear in mind that “well” doesn’t necessarily mean perfect.
OK, the 6th gen Thinkpad X1 Carbon definitely works with Haiku!
The mouse-nub thingy and the trackpad work at the same time, though trackpad tap-to-click and click-n-drag are spotty. I’ll experiment with whether the settings and maybe disabling the nub if possible can improve that.
2.4ghz wifi works fine.
EFI dual-boot with Windows 11 is working fine.
(This is running the current x86_64 daily build.)
Nice work folks. Time to go look into porting BitWarden and the android-tools package.
OK, for anyone else with a Lenovo laptop: the mouse buttons are associated with the trackpoint, so if you turn that off in the BIOS they stop working. So I think maybe don’t do that.
I did get the mouse tracking working pretty well just by fiddling with the speed and acceleration settings, though I’m still getting some twitchy behavior when trying to drag things using just the trackpad and the cursor blips off to the bottom left of the screen at some inconvenient moments.
Side note: the BitWarden plugin works in LibreWolf, so that is really useful.
