I did not realize it has been so long since my last update here. The last year I switched my previous daily driver to a newer model of ThinkPad Gen 15i from eBay. The old Ideapad was just too old and keyboard was starting to work on and off randomly, which was annoying. I thought it was Gen 15 but when I got it it was actually 15i. The main system is still Debian sid with Xfce4 as desktop enviroment. I also started to use the SoftMaker Office NX under an annual subscription. The office suit user experience appears much better compared with LibreOffice for me. The tab view for multiple files is a great feature.
Other than that, I also got a ThinkPad T470s from eBay for home use and hobbyist tinkering. It is good to have Windows 10 installed there so that some times when I really have to use a software native to Windows which will not work in virtual machines, I will have a backup solution. The Windows system resides in a ~120G partition. For exploring purpose, I installed FreeBSD as the main system, with ZFS of course. Since there was still plenty of spare space left on the hard disk, I also installed OpenBSD and NetBSD there. Now four system on one single hard disk, managed by UEFI boot menu if I would like to switch booting. It took me some time to figure it out but I found the EFI/ESP had to be mounted at /boot/efi for FreeBSD to keep it work. For OpenBSD I has to add a partition with openbsd-data type in FreeBSD using gpart so that the OpenBSD installer would pick it up automatically.While for NetBSD the installer refused to do so even there is a netbsd-ffs partition. As a solution I simply booted up NetBSD ins
tall media and went into the utility shell session, prepare the partitions, mount them and install the system by manually extracting file sets to the mount points. Since all systems are working in UEFI mode with GPT scheme, coping boot loaders to /{ESP}/EFI/{system} would just work. To change boot orders, I can either go to BIOS setttings, or use efibootmgr in FreeBSD.
FreeBSD and OpenBSD worked really well on the laptop, but suspend/wakeup is not working for NetBSD. It suspends just fine but keyboard touchpad stops working after waking up. WiFi works so I can ssh login and reboot/shutdown. I filed a PR a few weeks ago to NetBSD but no response received. I am just keeping it for now but rarely use it.
2026 is coming. I am expecting changes I suppose. Hope all will be fine in the end though.
