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Comment by revicon | Hacker News Reader

Is there any benefit to ordering a thinkpad pre-installed with Linux vs re-imaging it myself after purchasing (besides cost)? I’d have a few one-off cases where it’d be nice to boot into a windows environment but would otherwise love a dedicated Linux laptop. I’m wondering if there is any special configurations that Lenovo adds to their Linux installs that I would be missing if I just reimaged a windows one.

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I can see a benefit in companies that provide their employees with laptops. If a subset of their employees want to run Linux, I can imagine that they'd be more willing to provide them with a ThinkPad with Linux pre-installed than allow employees to re-image the company laptop.

Presumably any company that cares about this would have standard corporate images that they apply anyway?

Only incidentally, in that they would make sure that linux worked on them. I'd immediately blast whatever dist they shipped it with and put something else on anyway. I'd blast it and reinstall even if I were just going to replace it with the same dist.

Maybe that will give them a reason to publish an official linux driver for the fingerprint reader.

Currently there only seems to be a reverse engineered prototype: https://github.com/nmikhailov/Validity90

I can imagine two things. One is that if they're willing to ship with Linux it's an attestation to the fact that it definitely has good Linux support. Second is that you could examine the image they ship with it to solve any driver issues. Make a backup of it before reinstalling with your distro of choice.

This is exactly right. My company gave me a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 carbon for work that originally had windows on it, and the IT dept slapped Ubuntu on there. I have a fingerprint scanner on this device that I don't bother to fiddle with to get working, so basically its this really expensive laptop with a non functional part on it staring me in the face. If you buy the thing from lenovo with linux preinstalled, you know that the parts you are getting are going to work with that machine, and if they don't you can actually complain to someone and they are forced to deal with you.

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