Linux support on Lenovo personal systems
lenovo.com
lenovo.com
Why FreeDOS tho? Good question I never thought about it but I also never seen Linux on retail store laptops
If they actually wanted them to use an OS that's not Windows, they'd preinstall Linux on it. But that's not the point.
I have installed Ubuntu on my Thinkpad t460 and it worked great out of the box.
I don't think there's anything here that suggests Lenovo is now shipping with Linux installed.
Currently there only seems to be a reverse engineered prototype: https://github.com/nmikhailov/Validity90
All they promise is "most of the basic functions work".
Because I definitely have not found a driver that supports the reader on my ThinkPad X1 Extreme.
All in all people are pretty pleased with the experience.
My coworker is running Arch with Sway/Wayland and is pretty pleased :)
There are some problems with adding a second screens but I think it's related to i3/Sway and our monitors.
As far as the Linux experience goes, I’m not aware of any issues apart from the fingerprint reader. I have never attempted to use thunderbolt connectivity or charge anything over USB.
That's how it works with Dell anyway.
Dell Inspiron 17 3000 1Tb w/Ubuntu: £419+tax Dell Inspiron 17 3000 1Tb+128SSD w/Windows 10 Pro: £619+tax
[0]: https://pricespy.co.uk/computers-accessories/computer-compon...
The ease of day-to-day apps such as Microsoft Office, especially Word and Excel is unparalleled. If you are into DB and work in place that has MS SQL, MS SQL combined with SQL Studio is a very powerful feature. IDE selection is somewhat better because you have more options available -- things like Visual Studio (even for non Microsoft programming languages) are available.
If you go down Linux route and you need GUI, a portion of your time would be consumed by hunting for and finding analyzing options available for you on Linux -- for GUI stuff, Windows seem to be default.
In my opinion, if I am buying a non-Apple laptop, unless Microsoft rolls out a Linux distro with emphasis on GUI and which they will support and develop, I won't bother with Linux as my default OS on my machine.
O365/open source office products come nowhere close.
95% of my work has always been in the source tree (so git), some kind of ticket or project software (Jira, redmine, etc), and a wiki-like documentation system (Confluence, mediawiki). And of the remaining 5% most would be some kind of stuff with a Web interface on the network. I'm pretty sure I haven't edited a Word doc for 5 years. Is this really the exception I get to encounter because of avoiding "corporate" companies?
Project timelines, infrastructure descriptions/allocations, working on systems that allow users to deposit parts of their workflows via spreadsheets (financial related), some RFPs come and are returned in Excel form.
I can't speak to any exceptions but I personally use Word and Excel semi-daily.
I also believe there are a variety of people on HN beyond traditional strictly software devs. DevOps, Cloud-related (myself), Product Managers, Project Managers and the like.
99% of uses can be trivially replaced by plain text, Markdown, or Org. For the others you probably want a real typesetting system anyway, so Word would still not be appropriate.
> Excel
If you're at a point where it feels appropriate to use vendor-specific spreadsheet features then you have already outgrown by far spreadsheets. It's probably both simpler and more maintainable to decouple your data from your code by using a database (even SQLite, if you still want to pass files around) and/or a scripting language instead.
I guess if you're purely writing code all day then I could understand never needing productivity suites, but I assume most roles have either customer-facing or organizational interactions beyond consuming Jira tickets.
Using a database and scripting is overkill for 90% of things and is just over-engineering a problem that spreadsheets already solves well and are understood by the people who are meant to read them.
This might as well just be a PDF. The source format shouldn't matter if the recipient is just going to read it.
> architecture descriptions, requirement definitions
A hierarchical plain text document (biasing towards Org if you want internal links) would satisfy the same use case and play much better with source control.
> Using a database and scripting is overkill for 90% of things and is just over-engineering a problem that spreadsheets already solves well and are understood by the people who are meant to read them.
It's not a binary. I don't particularly like Python or SQLite, but I'd take a couple of quick and dirty Python+SQLite scripts over a bunch of unstructured spreadsheets any day.
Its a solved problem, I don't see why you would want to engineer so much around such simple tasks for the only reason seemingly to be not using Microsoft.
Indeed. So why on earth would you pay for tools that make all version control systems barf?
> Project managers aren't going to learn how to edit those documents. Sales guys aren't going to start including their bits with markdown and the marketing team isn't going to fiddle with images in markdown.
It's not that hard. Ask a random nine-year-old to come up with a formatting syntax and they'd likely come up with something with a canny resemblence Org.
> Its a solved problem, I don't see why you would want to engineer so much around such simple tasks for the only reason seemingly to be not using Microsoft.
Why would you use a overcomplicated WYSIWYG editor to make a few things bold and add a list? Why would you pay for that miserable experience?
For organizing content, yes. For communicating with others, no. For example, we are using Word documents on the edge, when communicating externally. We cannot expect them to access our internal wiki, and neither we want them to.
> If you're at a point where it feels appropriate to use vendor-specific spreadsheet features then you have already outgrown by far spreadsheets. It's probably both simpler and more maintainable to decouple your data from your code by using a database (even SQLite, if you still want to pass files around) and/or a scripting language instead.
Sure, if you have the budget to do it right. The excel-based solutions are often done so, because everyone has excel anyway, and the one coming with that has no budget or buy-in to procure the server-based solution.
You can't just copy the Markdown (or whatever format your wiki uses)? Most of them read fine as plain text.
> Sure, if you have the budget to do it right. The excel-based solutions are often done so, because everyone has excel anyway, and the one coming with that has no budget or buy-in to procure the server-based solution.
You don't need a server to use SQL (see: SQLite, H2, Derby, or even Access).
In the process you will lose links, images, etc. Additional complication is, if these are multiple wiki pages, you have to save each separately.
You are not going to explain that to normal users. (Ever explained to a user, why he cannot attach word documents into bug tracker, but he is supposed to put the content of the document right into the appropriate text fields? Not fun).
> You don't need a server to use SQL (see: SQLite, H2, Derby, or even Access).
The reason why Access is not being used is, that it is not a part of the most sold Office SKUs (neither SoHo nor Pro). In fact, I just tried to quickly find out, which are the the non-365 SKUs that do include Access, and I failed.
And again, normal users are not going to use sqlite, h2 or derby without having some kind of forms frontend. Access would be ok, but it is not accessible to everyone who has Excel anyway.
Err, no? They're preserved in the source just fine.
> images
Good riddance.
> Additional complication is, if these are multiple wiki pages, you have to save each separately.
Depends on your wiki system. For example, Gollum[0] (GitHub's wiki) stores everything in a Git repo, so it's trivial to get everything out using your regular file management tools.
> And again, normal users are not going to use sqlite, h2 or derby without having some kind of forms frontend.
DBeaver seems fine to me, and supports pretty much everything.
If you understand this, you will understand why Word and Excel are still a thing.
* all software I need can be installed with some CLI commands
* similar to the server envs I tend to
* no hassle with anti-virus/malware/trojans/etc (I merely install clam-av for some compliance thingy, that's all)
* basic tools are top quality (I hate the default terminal apps on both OSX and windows)
* I can use decade old scripts to do all kinds of helpful tasks for me (backups, music mgmt, etc.)
* no need to look for some pirated software because I created some file with some software that I now do not have the license for at hand
* I know really well how to fix problems and that knowledge stays relevant (the OS is not moving stuff around all the time)
* Less resource hungry (apart from the browser)
There are some things I'm not too happy with as well:
* Having to read reviews before I can buy some hardware
* Touchpad not as good as Apple's
* Not sure if some USB-C docking station actually will work for me (no review from Linux users found at this point)
* The Hi-PDI screen story is far from perfect (yet slowly progressing)
I'm sure I would've gone that route in 2001, when I needed a platform to support freelance LAMP work, if my Mac hadn't literally already had most everything installed already.
Even emacs. ;)