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Comment by hactually | Hacker News Reader

Is there any in-depth dive into how well it runs Linux? I'm considering jumping off of MacOS with Mojave so something I can run fedora on comfortably with good battery life/stability would be great

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I can't speak to the X1 Extreme but I use the X1 Carbon 6th Generation and it runs Linux great.

Initially, there was an issue with S3 sleep but Lenovo addressed that with a firmware update. Lenovo also recently joined the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS). It is now extremely easy to update firmware in Linux by executing the fwupd command. The one remaining issue is some thermal throttling threshold issue. I've installed a service that is a work around but I'm hoping this gets addressed in a subsequent firmware update.

I was coming from a MBP as well and I've completely switched to Linux. I went back and forth between getting the Dell XPS or the X1. I finally settled on the X1 because I liked the keyboard more after using both at Microcenter, but it was a tough decision.

The Arch wiki entry[0] on the X1 is a good reference point regardless of what distro you use.

[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Lenovo_ThinkPad_X1_Carb...

How's the touchpad and trackpoint experience? Are you using libinput?

I'm using libinput. It seems fine to me. No trackpad has come close to my MBP trackpad. However, this one is fine for my purposes. I will say that I'm not a heavy trackpad user though. I use a tiling window manager and use vimium to scroll in Chromium.

The only modifications I made to the stock configuration was to enable the following flags in my Xorg config:

  Option "DisableWhileTyping" "0"
  Option "Tapping" 1
  Option "TappingDrag" 0

Enabling tapping makes it match my preferred tapping behavior I had on my MBP. I disabled TappingDrag to prevent spurious drag events. The first flag was to let me use the trackpad while typing so I could do some light gaming using the trackpad.

On the X1 gen 5 using synaptics it misses proper palm detection. Oftentimes I accidentally place the cursor at odd places when typing. truly annoying. Possibly there is a fix. any pointers appreciated.

I run a 1st gen Thinkpad Yoga X1 (16GB RAM, 1TB SSD, had a 2kEUR price tag in 2016). Linux runs nicely, even with the digitizer. The single frustrating thing is that on Linux, the Intel Sky Lake graphics chip can only control a single external drive (HDMI / Mini-DP or VGA via a Thinkpad docking adapter). In contrast, on Windows the notebook can control three external displays in parallel :-(

nVidia automatically means hassle w current gen laptop hardware.

WTF, no it doesn't. Nvidia releases Linux drivers and updates regularly now, they get pulled into all the major distro repositories, and they generally work well.

If you're doing any sort of gpu accelerated machine learning, you're basically expected to use Ubuntu with Nvidia hardware and drivers.

I think the assertion was that having an iGPU and a dGPU in a Linux laptop means problems, not that NVIDIA parts alone do.

You can run that just fine too.

Maybe the folks over at https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/1032482/linux/optim... could use your advice :)

Running a T480 with dedicated nvidia hardware. The GPU in mine is mostly off, as I use the intel onboard graphics for most day to day tasks. The occasional gaming session in windows is the only time the dedicated gpu actually gets some power fed to it.

I run linux on this without any nvidia drivers even. Just bbswitch that turns off the dedicated GPU.

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