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Comment by aclave1 | Hacker News Reader

I planned to buy this laptop some time this year. Has lenovo stopped supporting linux as well as they used to? I've owned two lenovo laptops and loved them and planned to buy another. I'm also looking at dell laptops since their linux support is reportedly excellent.

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My current laptop, the T450s, has full support for linux. My coworker uses a X270, which also seems to run Arch fine. I think it's just the X1 series with these issues.

Get a T or a W, they are fine, old-school corporate machines.

Carbon is the new, fashionable, Macbook-like device with soldered-on RAM, etc; likely from a different design culture. Its biggest upside is likely the hi-res screen.

There are high-res models in the T-series. I.e., available in both 1080p and 1440p, the latter just at the point where you can use it without High-DPI tech if you have normal 20/20 vision, if you have worse, you want less resolution (as you can't use the higher resolution anyway).

My vision is far from 20/20, and I have trouble discerning road signs at a distance, but I can see how pixels are square on most 24" FHD displays.

For development, a lot depends on the quality of font antialiasing and hinting, though; Linux used to provide superb font rendering in this regard.

I too don't have too good vision, but the 1080p 15" and the 2160p 39.5" at slighly higher distance are just at the point where I don't need High-DPI technology. Seeing pixels at 24" is not that hard. There are screens with significantly higher linear resolution.

I second going with the T line and would go as far to say that the T480 has a very modern feel to it. It is only slightly thicker than my old MBP 2013 retina 15 inch. (the thickness of the screen) I was expecting it to be much thicker and the fact that you can get 32 GB of RAM makes it feel like a very fast/responsive machine even with many applications running. Far more important in my opinion for a developer machine than having the screen of the Carbon.

I just switched from an MBP 2013 to a ThinkPad T480 running Ubuntu 18.04. I'm loving it. Linux support has been really great and I didn't have to install a lot of special drivers. (e.g. trackpad support with multi-touch scrolling worked from the start) A lot of Dell's have that terrible bottom placement of the webcam.

Things to love about the T480:

- Fairly portable at around 3.5 lbs with a 14inch screen. It avoids the dedicated numeric keypad that some larger 15inch models have, while still having good screen real estate.

- Great keyboard as all Thinkpads have. (media keys are working great under linux)

- Very durable having undergone mil-spec testing.

- Camera placement at top with a mechanical shutter if you get the FHD screen.

- 32 GB of ram if you want/need it

- Hot-swappable batteries. No need to turn off the laptop. just flip it over and replace. (You can buy the extended 72Wh battery for extra battery time)

Bonus if you find one on eBay slightly used. You could save over a $1000 for a comparably specced machine.

I have to second how awesome Hot-swap batteries are. While I do need to find a socket for this, having 'just' a T540p (can recommend, nice device), being able to swap the battery in seconds instead of charging >30 min (depending on how large your charger is) is awesome. So if you can hot swap, get another non-protuding battery instead of one that sticks out from the laptop, as that makes it hard to hold it on your palm (works like a charm, and the robustness makes you worry less). In that sense it is easier to use on-the-go than a tablet, due to the ease of holding (just wrap your fingers around the battery, and it will take a couple weeks to get the strength in your arm to do it comfortably if you are not used to such loads).

I just made a similar swap from a 2013 MBP to the X1 and so far I love it. One great thing about the T480 over the X1 is you can push the CPU harder in the T480 due to better cooling. I like the size of the X1 so went with the smaller labtop, but so far its been great

I have both the X1 carbon 6th (2018) and 5th. The 5th supports the S3 sleep mode and everything works just fine. If you don't need the newer model, the 5th gen is a great Linux machine.

I was confused about the title because I have an X1 Carbon that I bought in 2018. Turns out it's 5th gen. And yes, it's one of the most blissful computing experiences I've ever had. Everything works out of the box with Debian stable. Not a hitch.

Any problems with the 6th despite the sleep mode? Do you have the higher resolution version?

I do (unfortunately) have the HiDPI model. I personally don't care at all about more pixels on this machine, but I understand why people want this.

HiDPI is kinda a mess in general on Linux, from my limited use cases. I run X11 with i3wm on Arch, and the application support is all over the place. `xrandr` seems unhappy with multiple monitors at different resolutions (as is my case at work, with external displays), it's a mess.

All that being said, with a combination of `xrandr --dpi` and ctrl-+/- in Firefox and my terminal, things can be made to look OKish.

TLDR: If you can get a computer without HiDPI, I personally recommend it.

I have zero issues with HiDPI on Ubuntu + xmonad set-ups. In particular, setting xrdb's Xft.dpi to a good value (e.g. 144, an "even" multiple of 96 for X1 Carbon) seems to work well. However, I mostly use my laptop for Chrome, emacs, and terminal, so YMMV. HiDPI screen is definitely worth it for your eyes.

Do you use external monitors that have different resolutions?

No. Unfortunately, I can't say good things about differing-display support in Linux. For example, even if DPI is matched but one of the monitors is rotated (my old setup), freetype anti-aliasing settings are still global and can't account for rotation :( This matters less with HiDPI, though.

Fortunately, Dell U2718Q's are relatively cheap and well-worth the upgrade :)

I completely agree. I went from an x1c 1080p to a t480s 1440p. It’s great stand alone. But I’m frequently hooking it up to external lodpi screens, and the amount of zooming and unzooming I have to do is making me slowly go crazy. A shame the dpi situation is such a mess.

It wouldn’t be so bad if Wayland was widely supported, as it can handle mixed DPI pretty well. Unfortunately I can’t swap to wayland until browsers and Java apps (aka IntelliJ) support it.

Sad. :/ I’m about to get an X1 Carbon or T480s and trying to decide if 1440p... On the one hand, really digging the idea of hidpi fonts in terminals and web; on the other hand this Linux support madness...

I think the main thing to ponder is whether I’ll be hooking it up to external displays a lot. Is the situation basically “no issues” if not using external displays?

Also when hooking up to external is it possible to make X switch to lodpi everywhere and “pretend” that the 1440p screen is 1080p (like tell applications it’s 1080p)?

Yeah it is only an issue if using mixed DPI. I set the font scaling in Gnome 3 to 1.5, and everything handles it fine - even IntelliJ scales its fonts accordingly.

If you can match your external DPI to the laptop that would also work (but it's sort of an awkward DPI).

The hiDPI is nice for your fonts, but for working day-to-day I don't really notice it much.

Have you tried setting `layout.css.devPixelsPerPx` to some multiplier like 1.5?

I find it's better to just zoom, FF seems to remember zoom levels by domain.

That's exactly the problem; I don't want to re-zoom every domain. I'd like consistent sizing everywhere, and devPixelsPerPx does that.

Same boat here. I'm running a T450s 1440p model with Arch and i3wm. Mostly it's docked at a 27" 1440p monitor at work, so I set the DPI such that it looks nice in this use case. When I undock it, things get smaaall.

I got used to it by now, as I don't normally work on the internal monitor for longer times. Nevertheless this really bugs me out.

I recently got an HP Envy 17t. It’s working perfectly for me, on Arch Linux + KDE/Plasma. I configured it for $20 more to have an Inte wireless card. The Intel wireless is working excellent on Linux. Sleep and wake-up works perfectly fine too. Secondary things like screen/LCD backlight control, keyboard backlight control, etc — all worked 100% out of the box with KDE/Plasma on Arch. I’d recommend it.

It’s an excellent machine. The Intel wireless chip in it is “Intel 7265” — it uses the open-source “iwlwifi” driver. The machine I got also had the i7-8550U, an 8th gen Intel chip with has four hyper-threaded cores that has a TDP of a mere 15 W. It also had a 512 GiB PCIe SSD from an obscure brand called “SK Hynix”, 16 GB DDR4 RAM, and an NVIDIA MX150 GPU (with 4 GB of graphics memory) in addition to the integrated Intel UHD graphics that comes with the i7-8550U.

I'd just get a Dell delevoper edition.

I have a full guide to install arch on a lenovo x1 carbon gen 6 (with notes on the patch this post is about), right here if you would like to get it done.

https://github.com/ejmg/an-idiots-guide-to-installing-arch-o...

The hardware is all supported from the get go, no tweaking or hacks to get it working (well, besides the bios + s3 hack). Besides the patch provided by the OP, everything else works without issue on Linux. It's kind of why this is so upsetting, in a way... the ability to make a linux machine doesn't require specialty companies, it just requires vendors not do dumb crap like completely dropping support for something without warning, etc.

Tell that to apple... grrr

I'm considering a Fujitsu lifebook U937 to replace my thinkpad.

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