FreeBSD on Dell Latitude 7280

I am trying so hard to not acquire more computers, but the need to test a ton of stuff and have a good reference platform forced my hand. Rather than do any research I took trasz@'s recommended Dell laptop as test target and picked one up from eBay, a Dell Latitude 7280.

It was 65 quid with about a fiver in postage and there are a ton of them. So many that I wasn't super discerning when reading the listing.

The Dell Latitude 7280 is ~12 inch Intel laptop with a 1366x768 display, it has USB ports, will take USB-C power (vital considering how few come with power supplies), HDMI out, Ethernet and a nice surprise a USB smart card reader builtin (I even have some java card smart cards somewhere I could try, I won't, but I could).

I let it boot windows to verify it came up and then started about installing. I couldn't break into the bios with a key press and used the windows "reboot to firmware" hidden menu to get into Dell's firmware.

Out of the box all of the hardware works:

The bios doesn't lock which WiFI cards you can use - the main reason for getting this machine was that trasz@ said suspend/resume worked until he used iwx and I needed a platform to debug iwx suspend on.

I had no issue swapping out the builtin WiFI for an iwx card and now I'm portable for testing I could get pretty close to my attic AP and pull/push ~400 Mbit with iwx.

This computer is really well supported, but its a bit of a dog. I didn't read the eBay listing well, it doesn't have the rubber feet, but that's fine I put it on a silicon matt on my desk. The battery is absolutely goosed, the bios lists battery health as 9%, this was in the listing I just, well didn't really care.

apciconf says it should get an hour on battery, but I haven't let it run to nothing. I got a replacement battery so I can use this thing as a test platform for an upcoming GSoC power management project and it being a Dell part meant getting replacement was quite easy.

I wouldn't recommend this exact laptop, maybe a Latitude 7280 with a working battery and feet would be okay. It is slow as hell, building a kernel took 1838 seconds, 30 minutes is a long time for real development work.

The screen resolution is quite low compared to modern 2k displays, but its probably fine for programming tasks and writing. I wouldn't want to do builds on it.

The hardware seems quite nice apart from the rubber surface which seems to be degrading. I don't think I got a representative laptop, if you want a test FreeBSD machine this might be a great choice at well under 100 quid even if you have to replace the battery.

--

Update

Working on the Latitude 7280 is a really nice experience. I have replaced the WiFi and just after publishing this post a new battery arrived. There are 8 captive screws on the bottom which give access to quite a well laid out board. In mine there is space for a wwan modem.

The battery replacement was excellent, a replacement was 25GBP. The battery is held in with 2 extra screws (1 case screw also secures it), the cable has a pull chord from the motherboard connector. The battery side for the cable is a little harder to remove, but no challenge compared to a glued down thing. Sure it is a plastic laptop, but it is light and thin enough. I don't really get Apples excuse for their stuff not being this maintainable.

I have had thinkpads before and they've never been great while they have been expensive. This 2018 computer is much nicer than any thinkpad I had.

You can find a full dmesg here.