Coming soon: Fedora on Lenovo laptops | Hacker News Reader

Coming soon: Fedora on Lenovo laptops

fedoramagazine.org

444 pointscaution233 comments

I don't believe it. They said the same thing more than a year ago, it is still announced in their website for the P models (the choice for ubuntu or fedora), but yet they are impossible to buy. I have harassed the lenovo sales people for months and I have given up in buying a P laptop with linux installed. I do not understand why do they play this kind of stupid games. The only thing that they offer is to buy the laptop with windows, then renounce the windows licence, then follow an online guide to install linux. Honestly, to buy a few laptops for 4000 EUR each, it is fairly insulting to be told that.

That's only because you're in a less valuable market. You can purchase pretty much every single option they have with Linux in America. It's still unfortunate, but it's not like they don't sell many devices with Linux pre-installed.

The thing is that the site in France, written in french, announces this option yet it is not available.

Sure. It's understandable that'd be frustrating. It's still probably more likely due to poorly-adapted copy than due to a genuine interest in selling Linux laptops in France, or incompetence.

Which is funny because I believe Linux marketshare is higher in Europe than US (well based on statcounter and other sources).

Market-share might be higher, but the market is much smaller, and it's still a minority. Selling to a minority in the US is much more profitable than selling to a minority in Europe, solely because of scale.

> the market is much smaller

How so? The population of Europe is about double the population of the USA. Even if you narrow it down to the european union, it is still larger than the USA. Why should the market for laptops be smaller in Europe? Are you sure?

Country-specific keyboards may be s factor.

Probably not. Most european keyboards are just differenr caps on the iso layout. Modern keyboards in the western world are usually ANSI or iso, and I believe there are one or two prominent layouts used in Asian countries.

I have never understood why the ANSI layout is popular. The compromises of the iso layout to cram the extra keys in are hardly noticeable apart from the right pinky if you touch type.

The key caps are different, of course, but that can't be very expensive.

I'm absolutely sure, yes, especially if we're talking about the EU alone (but I'd prefer to argue for Europe as a whole), that the market for high-end laptops is significantly smaller. Eastern Europe is an order of magnitude poorer, and is the reason Europe's population is higher than the USA's (that said, there is a reason I initiated with "America"; these customizations are also offered in Canada, and North America is conventionally considered a single market).

Especially when considering localizations that have to be made, and that the most valuable European countries require you get physical technical goods certified per-country (mainly looking at Germany here), and that they're getting taxed more, the margin that you can get from Europe is much smaller already than in America. It doesn't make sense to offer the same extent of customization (which, too, lessens margin) as in America.

Was curious so looked this up -- the North American market is bigger than the EU by ~50 million people.

It's even more apparent when you compare them by GDP.

Canada doesn't have Lenovo with Linux preinstalled (only Windows & Chrome OS) on their product list. I would assume Mexico and the other islands are also excluded. So it's really only US vs EU.

It seems like it's changed from about two years ago; really strange.

Then again the North American market is ~500 million, the European market is ~750 million. Also the current statistics (I linked to them in a comment below) suggest Linux usage in North America at ~1.5%, and in Europe at ~2%. This suggests higher usage in Europe.

US plus Canada is just 23% larger than EU by GDP [1]. Based on PPP it's 20% [2]. Considering we are talking about ~20 trillion in GDP and very similar PPP, that hardly seems to be a large enough difference to give your "absolute sure" statement merit.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(no... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PP...

Look at median household income to get a better picture of the market for high-end laptops; what your customers have to spend is a better way to figure out how big your market is than raw bodies or statistics that can be heavily-influenced by single entities. Buying a laptop that's 3% of your household's yearly income is a ridiculous financial decision, and given that most of Lenovo's business laptops start at near that range for your average person in significant amounts of countries in the EU, I'd wager that the market is smaller.

You make a good point though in that my mention of GDP elsewhere in this thread was mostly irrelevant, though; thanks for helping me refine this argument.

You're making a lot of assumptions based on arbitrarily chosen and only tangentially relevant criteria, and superficial analysis.

I'm absolutely sure you have no reason to be absolutely sure the second you implied the numbers I linked to must be wrong but your back of the napkin calculation must be correct.

One more data point: Apple has a 30% higher market share in NA than in Europe. ChromeOS has a ~5 times higher market share in NA. This goes out of everyone else's market share.

Most of your comments in this thread have been dull and poorly-conceived strawmanning with ad hominem interlaced. If you don't see how "income of population" relates to "What citizens will spend money on," you're surely joking.

I'm going to respond to you entirely here, because I dislike responding to the same person making variations of the same comment in multiple places. Here's the important bit of your other comment:

You brought up population, GDP, average income, etc. None of these explicitly support your claim, half of them actually work against it.

Here's the entire comment, just for fairness: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22970804

Note that one of these is a blatant lie; I was not the person who brought up population in this thread, and I've done nothing but point out reasons as to why it's not a perfect representation of the market.

I already admit that GDP was largely a mistake to bring up when I can make the point better and easier with average income.

Your accusation of using any "back of the napkin calculation" is similarly ridiculous. Every single number I've cited is trivially verifiable to anyone with an internet connection.

You've been repeating "Linux market share is higher in Europe!", and sure, you've given a source for that. Market-share, however, is not market-size, as I've repeatedly said in this thread. To demonstrate it in a simple fashion so you can't avoid what I'm saying anymore: 100% of a market of 10 is less than 1% of a market of 1,000,000,000. "X has a higher share of the market in Europe than it does the US!" means very little on its own.

If the market in Europe is smaller than the United States, which isn't particularly controversial (that the entirety of the PC market in the US is just slightly smaller than the entirety of it in EMEA is fairly strong evidence [1]), the US is the bigger market, regardless of how much you repeat the market-share claim.

Especially when comparing luxury markets like high-end computing gear, what the population can spend is a significant factor in how big the market is: the United States' median person & median household has more to spend than the median person & household in most countries of Europe. This is not controversial whatsoever, and is trivially verifiable. [2] [3]

[1] Gartner's quarterly reports on it for the past decade; linking ten years of them would make this comment too large, but if you search their site with the query "PC shipments", you'll get the data.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

[3] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

Your premise was that the European market is not valuable enough to receive the same attention.

>> yet they are impossible to buy

> That's only because you're in a less valuable market

Your assumptions based on very indirect evidence of household income did nothing to support that claim. The difference should be pretty sizable. This is akin to saying "Europe has socialized medical system and free studies". While entirely true, it might or might not support the idea that people have less worries and more money for things like computers.

You stopped short of actual numbers because it "would make this comment too large". Q3/Q4 2019 Gartner estimates [0][1]:

> In the U.S., PC shipments totaled 14.8 million units in the third quarter of 2019, a 0.3% decline from the third quarter of 2018

> The EMEA PC market grew 3% in the third quarter of 2019, with shipments totaling 19.4 million units

> PC shipments in EMEA increased 3.6% year over year to 21 million units, with the fourth quarter of 2019 marking the second consecutive quarter of shipment growth as regional demand improves.

Africa and Middle East cannot account for enough of those shipments to support your claim that the growing (even if severely held back by Brexit) European market is not valuable enough to warrant attention, especially when shipments are slowing down in other regions. By the looks of it the markets are similarly sized even including Apple shipments which are not really relevant for the discussion. There is simply no data to support your claim. If the European market is not getting enough attention, its value is definitely not the reason. Feel free to keep going.

[0] https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2019-10-1...

[1] https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2020-01-1...

Because Europeans don't buy the latest MacBook every year.

A laptop lasting 4 years is perfectly reasonable in Europe.

I agree with you about the population, but that is not the whole picture.

Is the consumption pattern different? Less disposable income? No prevalence of credit cards? Is this really a noticeable effect/difference?

Apple machines were never really that popular in Europe because they weren't marketed as intensively as in the US. Schools and companies were never equipped with them unless we're talking about video/graphics people. And half of Europe was not considering such expensive purchases until well into the '90s, perhaps even later. By then Windows was already skyrocketing, regular PCs were cheaper, and very few customers were invested in the Apple ecosystem enough (or at all) to push them towards Macs.

If anything I imagine Apple machines are taking their 5% market share in the US more from the Linux segment than Windows.

This doesn't make so much sense to me, at universities I've seen a ton of Apple laptops among students and professors. Clearly they broke through there.

> but the market is much smaller

How do you figure that? Statistics just say Linux has just over 2% market share in Europe [0], ~1.74% in the US [1], and ~1.5% in North America. Apple has a 30% higher market share in NA than in Europe. ChromeOS has a ~5 times higher market share in NA. This goes out of everyone else's market share.

The EU alone is ~450 million citizens, ~30% higher than the US. Europe has ~750 million citizens, ~50% more than North America.

Any reason to suspect that despite the higher population and the higher market share within that, there are still substantially fewer Linux users in Europe? And if so, what are the actual numbers of end users for each? You'd have to assume the "desktop market" is more than 3 times lower in Europe vs. NA to conclude that there are fewer Linux user in Europe.

[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/europe

[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/united-st...

[2] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/north-ame...

Linux users does not equal people able/willing to order overpriced high-end laptops. Most of the EU is significantly more poor than the US, and you have to consider spending power when thinking about market size.

To quote a previous comment on this topic in a recent thread, though with a country not presently in the EU (but still the country with the second-highest GDP in Europe):

One example: The UK is a reasonably wealthy country. Median household income in the UK is 29,400 GBP (36,000 USD). The poorest state in the US (Mississippi) has a median household income around 43,000 USD

You brought up population, GDP, average income, etc. None of these explicitly support your claim, half of them actually work against it.

I gave you actual numbers for Linux usage and they do not support your assertion. I would have appreciated the same from you given that you are absolutely sure.

I don't get what's so hard to understand about his point. There are more people and more Linux users in Europe, but each of those people has (way) less disposable income (money left over to spend on luxury goods) than Americans.

Thus, it makes financial sense to sell to Americans first and foremost, as opposed to the more numerous Europeans.

Meadian household income isn't great for this. I know here that I don't have to pay for healthcare or schooling and I'm sure many other things in America that are deducted after income.

I responded to this elsewhere in the thread to avoid having to make a dozen comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22971567

It's not about being poor. If I already have two desktops and a laptop, why should I buy another laptop every year?

Just compare European washing machines vs USA washing machines: European models use less water and clean better because of the hot water, USA models waste water, are noisy, and finish much faster.

Or oversized gas guzzling SUVs vs European cars.

It's about not being wasteful.

Do you think that household income is a reasonable measure for disposable income? Fixed costs for a person or household tend to vary a lot based on the country/state.

If you consider that one of the major reasons for them to provide linux is:

1. To "show" that you can nicely run Linux on their hardware.

2. Have a better position wrt. deals with Microsoft. As they always could start promoting Linux on their systems much more widely.

3. Good publicity.

Ironically all of this can be archived with "selling" the product officially but then not putting much work/care into the actual sells. ;=)

Just hope this gets better.

Good publicity?

Are there so many people buying laptops with Linux as a “requirement” that this is a thing?

Iirc, Sputh Korea dumped government use of Windows, so I could see a reason for a mfg to support Linux like that but in terms of just “publicity”?

Of course it is. Devs, sysadmins, etc using Linux and such don't like it when they have to fiddle around because they need to fiddle to get bluetooth working because some producer was an ass or whatnot. These are also the people that get turned to when the uncle or friend needs a recomendation for a new laptop, etc. It's uncommon enough among major vendors that it's good publicity (and it's uncommon because of shady anticompetitive Microsoft deals)

exactly, buying a PC and putting Linux on it is one thing, but laptops nowadays are very locked down and hard to modify. if you want a laptop with Linux, you better hope the hardware works out if the box because otherwise you are in for days of pain and suffering trying to fix it, at least in my experience as a non Linux expert. personally I look for laptops with Linux either preinstalled or commonly installed. if I'm looking at laptops and I see that they offer Fedora out of the box that's a major point even if I don't run Fedora because I know the support is there.

I bet any governments or large corporations install their-own-flavored distro, and won't accept a distro from a laptop vendor, just for reasons of unification.

Truth, but as someone else said it’s a least an indication on compatibility. Lenovo doesn’t need to use the Realtek audio that isn’t supported in Linux if they also have an option that is supported. It’s an implication not a guarantee.

>> Are there so many people buying laptops with Linux as a “requirement” that this is a thing?

That's an interesting question. Linux laptops are a small segment of the market. But if you openly support it, you stand to capture a lot of that segment. 1 to 2 percent of the entire laptop market is a big beal to a company that only has say 10 percent of the laptop market. Just example numbers I have no idea that the real numbers are.

For a car example I use the PT Cruiser from Chrysler. I didnt like it, not my thing. But I loved that they made it. It had some very retro design element that were nothing like any other vehicle on the market. I'm sure they grabbed 100 percent of the buyers who were into that look.

Ok, fair points! It’s a small market but they can grab more of it for basically very little work.

On the PT, I was at Chrysler before the launch of that thing (visiting). It was originally marketed to teens exclusively. It was supposed to replace Neon that was directed at teens but was moving to lower income adults. It failed specularly at teens. But became super popular with older drivers. A success, but completely wrong initial target. The Chevy HHR later looks nearly identical and in fact is designed by the same guy.

Scion had the same problems

https://www.autoevolution.com/news/scion-xb-built-for-teens-...

#1 is very important: if you actually want to run Linux on the laptop, quite likely the one you want and not the pre-installed one, you want to be sure that drivers for all hardware exist and are tested by the manufacturer.

#2 is pretty trivial without very good sales figures.

It's the company equivalent of calling your cable company annually and "threatening" to leave. Some small performative effort to keep getting the standard discount.

When buying a laptop to run Linux, it's nice to not have a Windows license (and the cost of that license) included.

Even though I would just reformat and install my preferred distro right away, it's nice to have something to boot into within a few seconds to double check my new laptop is functional.

This is likely something that you have to go through a distribution partner for. A lot of their products are specifically for enterprise customers - they may not bother stocking them for direct retail.

As you said, finding any laptop with linux is near impossible. Coincidentally I have become friends with a guy at a large reseller near me, so every time I want a new laptop, I call him up, tell him which ones I've set my eyes on, then I go with a live USB to see which one works out of the box.

Manufacturers are obsessed with shoving some half-baked proprietary hardware on their higher end laptops, rendering them unusable for anyone but Windows users.

What really rises my eyebrow is the "fedora" part here. I haven't used Fedora since 2015 and for the time being I don't intend to switch to anything new/old. I can't recall a single time I've seen a linux-out-of-the-box laptop that has anything other than Ubuntu(which I truly hate). It would be nice to see someone putting something else and shipping it like that for a change.

I switched over to Fedora in 2015 from Ubuntu. Very nice experience.

System76 is a well developed hardware supplier with Linux. Dell as well.

I use Fedora as my daily driver, since I primarily work with RHEL/CentOS at my job. The main problem I have with Fedora is their 6-month release cycle, without having periodic LTS versions. The support a version for 1 year, so that means once a year I have to go through the dance of upgrading, and seeing what is different. Fortunately the differences that cause a learning curve are getting fewer with each update.

Of course, since RHEL / CentOS is derived from a frozen version of a given release of Fedora, then CentOS can count as an "LTS" release -- it just goes too long between releases (but is great when a new one comes out).

I believe the lack of Fedora LTS is maily to increase the sales of RHEL Workstation

You can think that RHEL/CentOS is Fedora LTS

As a longtime Fedora user, I agree that upgrading every six months is more painful than it needs to be. It's generally a LOT of packages — in the thousands — and takes a VERY long time.

The option to upgrade once a year makes this more palatable, to be sure.

I haven't tried Silverblue yet, but that might make the upgrades faster and less painful.

If you can find Flatpacks for most of your software, or if you don't often install new packages, silverblue is truly awesome. If you are installing an RPM tho you have to reboot to use it. If you are like me and have long-lived tmux sessions that you hate starting over with, the reboot is super annoying.

That said I may switch to Silverblue anyway at some point, because it really is amazing in many ways.

I have a laptop with an encrypted LVM drive that has a separate /home partition with very little space left for user files. I installed some Flatpaks and got a disk-space warning.

I'm not surprised, but Flatpaks install everything in the user's home directory. So if you know you're going to be using Flatpak apps, make /home bigger.

The system upgrade download for 30->31 was around 5GB if I remember. Which wasn't too bad. I throttled to 300KB/s. And then the reboot/install took maybe an hour. I don't think that's too bad for such a smooth process.

I tend to do that when I'm going to sleep. It usually finishes well before I wake up.

The worse part is, what feels like the daily 30 or so packages that need updates. They should really separate the critical security ones out, and batch the normal updates on a two week schedule.

I've been using silverblue as my daily driver for the past few months, installing rpm's into the 'toolbox' is the recommended way, I have a few rpms related to power management that I layer onto the ostree, but other than that everything runs in a container. It's a wonderful OS.

No -- lack of Fedora LTS is because doing LTS with actual _S_ is a huge amount of work, and our volunteer community is not super-excited about doing that work.

I've done a lot of Fedora upgrades, and only a couple have failed.

I have been amazed by how stable Fedora manages to be. I think I had a problem maybe once every couple of releases that needed a fix, and the community is always there to help. The Fedora bug-reporting process is terrific. There's a lot of engagement with the users and a genuine desire to help.

> As you said, finding any laptop with linux is near impossible.

For you, maybe?

I can go on Dell's website and buy a laptop with Ubuntu on it right now. I'm looking at it in my cart as we speak.

System76 is a reputable company that _only_ ships systems (including laptops) with Linux on them. I don't own one but most reviews that I've read are quite positive. (Both regarding the hardware and the System76 Ubuntu-based OS.)

Here are at least a couple dozen more: https://linuxpreloaded.com/

System76 does exist and they're laptops are good (I'm using one as my personal/development machine). I used there tech support for a desktop and they're quite responsive.

They're at little pricey (they're oem laptops with linux) but I would buy another, because I know the OS will work with the hardware with no fiddling. (They sell ubuntu but I'm using their POP-OS. ubuntu variant).

One of the Reasons I got it was because it wouldn't have games, but Black Mesa runs well on this notebook as it has a nvidia graphics.

My work got me a system76 gazelle that was fully loaded and I love it. popOS is a great distro as well, plus they already think about problems that eat up devs time like managing tensorflow, cuda, and cudnn versions. They also provide a utility tool for using tensorflow docker images.

I've had very bad experiences with Dell's in the past so I'm staying away from them. My previous laptop was a Dell and it caused me more problems than all other laptops I've owned combined. And they are a tad... Overpriced imo. I mean an xps is around 25-30% more expensive than an equivalent zenbook for instance as a direct competitor. Currently I'm on a zenbook and it's been incredibly reliable. I intend to switch laptop soon and I'm between one of the newer zenbooks(yes, I'm aware of the bullcrap that is the screenpad, though apparently now it even works on linux out of the box) or an hp envy x360 which also apparently works out of the box.

I'm aware of System76 but I want to avoid buying a product that isn't that mainstream outside the US market. I can't recall even seeing one out in the wild anywhere. If something goes wrong with it, I'd need to ship it half way across the world to get it fixed. Not a very solid plan on my end.

I generally need a smaller form-factor laptop, otherwise I'd even consider something like cadnetwork because they too claim to have full linux support and even though they are a small manufacturer, in normal conditions(covid-19 aside), Cologne is a 3 hour, 40-50 euro flight away from me.

It sounds like our experiences and locations are very different.

In the US, it's very hard to beat Dell on price. The only ones who can are budget manufacturers and rebadged Chinese products, which usually gets you underwhelming design and longevity.

Dell's lower-end consumer line products can be just as bad. I bought a cheap Inspiron once that was the bane of my existence. But my last two business-class laptops (a Latitude and now a Precision) have been pretty much flawless despite heavy use and rough handling. I run Ubuntu on them both.

In the US, when you buy a business or enterprise product, my understanding is that Dell will send a repair technician to your location. Sometimes you can get them to just send you a replacement part, if you are very persistent.

I have a 2019 xps 13 that was delivered with ubuntu which worked well. Recently I've switched to Arch and everything has worked as expected.

Not sure what specific problems you had, but installing the base, sway and firefox had touch scrolling, webcam, mic, hdpi and everything else I expect working, which seems like a win to me.

I'd prefer a librem with the same form factor and specs, but this is working without issues and that's a lot more than I can say for the HP elitebook I had to use at the last job.

Can confirm System 76 and their customer support are terrific. Yes, I paid a little more, but worth it to me.

which system 76 laptop do you have?

Their meerkat mini NUC fully loaded. The fan hardly ever comes on.

I'm in Europe and didn't want to go with a US company so I bought a laptop from https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/ which is a German company which in theory does the same as System76 by shipping OEM laptops with Linux but the one I got was such low quality it basically broke down after only one year even if it cost around $1000. I even sent it in 2 times for repairs. I lost a couple of the screws at the bottom and the glue for the plastic around the border of the screen went bad and the plastic was only half glued and was hanging down. After a year it started to hang in both Windows and Linux so you would need to do a hard reboot every hour so I gave up on it.

At work I got a Dell XPS 13 with Ubuntu (switched it to Arch) and have no problems at all, everything works even now after two years of heavy usage.

I have Fedora on my small-and-light laptop (100% boring low-end Intel stuff) and it works perfectly. My daughter is using it now for homeschooling right now. I'd even go as far as arguing it's easier to keep happy than my Ubuntu one.

> Manufacturers are obsessed with shoving some half-baked proprietary hardware on their higher end laptops, rendering them unusable for anyone but Windows users.

Tell me about it, I just fought a whole afternoon against Dell EFI/Legacy BIOS's take on nvme drive management and... well... anything standard I can read on EFI or BIOS is useless because each hardware vendor seems to add special cases.

@axegon

Why do you hate Ubuntu ?

> I don't believe it. They said the same thing more than a year ago

On the flip side... Does it really matter?

I just checked and I could get a $100 off my ThinkPad of choice by selecting “no OS”. To me that’s more than sufficient.

I’ll setup my Linux the way I want it anyway, and you better believe that’s going to be from scratch.

Edit: from scratch with a vanilla installer. Nothing zealous or crazy.

Edit 2: I also found out my (Lenovo) work-computer is seamlessly receiving BIOS- and other FW-updates seamlessly via fwupdmgr in Linux. I have no reason ever to boot Windows on that thing.

All in all, happy Linux-using Lenovo-customer checking in.

I also enjoy to install linux from scratch. But having a laptop available with linux installed is a big plus. That way, I am sure that all hardware problems (correct throttling, hybernating, etc.) are my fault and not lack of hardware support. I also have an example install with working drivers. Then, I do the installation from scratch, if it is for me. Or if it is for a new postdoc that just needs a linux laptop I can leave it as it is.

I hope you mean Linux from scratch in the generic sense and not http://www.linuxfromscratch.org. Though I suppose it's to each his/her own.

LOL, I meant installing a regular distro such as debian on a new laptop.

(I also did the linuxfromscratch.org tutorial on a virtual machine several years ago, and it was an enjoyable learning experience, but this is not what we were talking about.)

> and you better believe that’s going to be from scratch

Unless you're doing it for the education, this sounds like a form of self-harm.

Depends on exactly what "from scratch" means. It could just mean "I don't trust what the manufacturer pre-installs and intend to reinstall immediately", which seems to be good advice on Windows and reasonable advice on Linux distros. Like... I wouldn't necessarily advise hand-configuring everything starting from a netinstall shell, but I do set up my systems by running a vanilla installer to lay down the base OS and then running my ansible playbooks against the system to make it fully functional; does that not count as "from scratch"?

Knowing whats on it, configuring it the way you like, selecting a different distro you prefer, certainty that if you needed to you actually could deviate from the OEM install... There are plenty of good reasons to load your own OS on your own hardware, that aren't purely for the exercise.

Three and a half years ago I looked into buying a Thinkpad with Linux. After not finding it on the web site I called the number listed there. It was a weekend. The person said Linux laptops are under commercial sales and gave me a number to call Monday during business hours. I never did and bought a Dell mobile workstation without Linux because it was a deal on the Dell Outlet. Don’t know if it’s still the case that Linux laptops are via commercial sales.

Today, I would just buy a Thinkpad and install Linux if I wanted a Thinkpad with Linux to the point I was ready to spend. It’s a simple problem to solve with little or no money depending on whether a Linux Thinkpad is cheaper. I’d rather spend a few minutes installing Linux than hours of shopping over multiple days. Or to put it another way, Google search doesn’t turn up a lot of pages with Linux on Thinkpad installation horror stories. At worst it will just be the usual Linux on a laptop friction.

They do make them extremely difficult to buy on their website and the linux offerings are generally more expensive when you do find them. Maybe that makes sense in some spreadsheet somewhere that takes long term support into account but when I look at a the same laptop, on with windows and one with linux. When the one with linux is $400 more, it's pretty clear that what the company wants to sell.

In some corporate environments $400 for preinstalled Linux might be a bargain given the logistics of receiving, unpacking, reconfiguring, testing, repacking, and shipping laptops out across the organization. At the consumer end, I can only imagine what it can be like to support a customer who fears installing Linux on a Thinkpad. It’s not a customer I would pursue with discounts.

If I could buy a Windows laptop, and be absolutely sure that it's the exact same hardware used in the corresponding Linux model, then sure, I'd save those 400 USD. As it is with laptops, the Windows version might have a Linux-unfriendly network card or something silly and the fun begins. That's why I chose a Dell with Linux pre-installed. Besides, it comes with support, including automatic BIOS upgrades.

My comments are about Thinkpads. And I am assuming Fedora or another stability motivated distro just to be clear.

Dell is also an option. Historically, I’ve seen discounts for selecting Linux. But it’s also been an older version based on when I’ve shopped. That probably varies relative to model introduction and distro release cycles.

I've got a P53 for work and I can think of a thousand reasons why this didn't pan out yet. One major problem is still updating your firmwares. While you can update your BIOS and "embedded controller" (https://fwupd.org/lvfs/search?value=p53), you miss out on firmware updates for your WWAN adapter, your Thunderbolt 3 docking station and several smaller things too. I suppose Lenovo's sales or whoever is in charge listens when the engineers tell them "you will have the following problems immediately, which we are not ready to solve yet". Would be nice if they actually delivered instead of promising, but I'm not mad at them for not rushing it.

The Lenovo engineers I spoke with are concerned about firmware updates for these things too, and will be working with their vendors to make sure they're in the LVFS.

System76 exists. I don't know what your requirements are, and I haven't used them so I won't swear by them.

Were I in the market for a new laptop, I would want their Lemur Pro. Open firmware, good specs, decent price. They have a variety of laptops and desktops as well.

I bought the Dell XPS developer edition last time I had a chance. I don't care how good Lenovo hardware may be so long as they pull this kind of stunt.

Vote with your dollars. Buy from a vendor who supports Linux.

Huh, I've been using Fedora on my personal T460 for a few years (now on 31) without any major breaking issues. Performs well, upgrades well, bought refurbished for ~$500 of Amazon, bought it extra RAM and an SSD, good life w/standard battery, I can't remember ever hearing the fans run medium/high, uses the standard Thinkpad docking station just fine, and more I'm sure. I'll edit my post if I remember anything worth mentioning.

A few minor issues that seem to get resolved by software updates within weeks of breaking installations:

- The touchpad goes out, so I'll use the red keyboard nub or reboot the machine.

- Sometimes can't use the touchscreen (between larger upgrades) but I don't use this often, it wasn't supposed to have one!

- Screen can flicker in GNOME when bouncing between workspaces (Windows + Page Up/Down)

Even then, these issues may just be my own machine/configuration!

Others have mentioned being wary of pre-installed Lenovo support, and I can agree. While I'd still replace their Fedora for my own install, they'd certainly help my confidence that the laptop was built to fit Linux expectations.

I had the same issue with the touchpad going out on my Thinkpad, running Ubuntu. This would always happen after coming out hibernation so I wrote a systemd service[1] that runs a small shell script [2] after coming out of hibernation.

[1] https://gist.github.com/briandeheus/bfa498000f52fbf1b581b9a0...

[2] https://gist.github.com/briandeheus/3c765d520680053da54b680d...

Thanks for sharing. I've been running the same modprobe commands, but manually using a bash alias. I'm going to use your systemd script going forward.

Thank you!.. I'll keep your gists in-mind if I ever come across this trackpad issue again. Thinking about it, since Fedora 30 or 29, I don't actually remember encountering this problem - I know where to come back to if I do though! Thanks again!

That's great news. It looks like Fedora will be available on the P series (powerful workstations) and X1 Carbon. I hope it will soon be expanded to other laptops. I am really interested in T series with AMD Ryzen 4000 line (should be released later this year) and would love to avoid paying the Windows tax.

I just wonder if the fingerprint reader is finally supported on Linux. Also the LTE modem on my X1 Carbon (6th gen) has no support.

The fingerprint reader is not yet supported on 6th gen X1.I never tried to get the LTE modem working. Funnily, I didn't even realize that the slot existed for almost a year after purchase.

I don't know which model of fingerprint reader is in the 6th gen, but on the 7th gen, enabling the beta firmware made it work perfectly.

  $ fwupdmgr enable-remote lvfs-testing

If you temporarily enable, apply the Prometheus fingerprint updates then disable you won't need to worry about installing unstable firmware that will affect the system more widely.

I'm getting the following after doing that:

    Firmware metadata has not been updated for 30 days and may not be up to date.

    Update now? (Requires internet connection) [y|N]: y
    Fetching metadata https://cdn.fwupd.org/downloads/firmware-testing.xml.gz
    Downloading…             [***************************************] Less than one minute remaining…
    Fetching signature https://cdn.fwupd.org/downloads/firmware-testing.xml.gz.asc

    Failed to update metadata for lvfs-testing: '48A6D80E4538BAC2' is not a valid signature

Anyone else seen that?

fwupdmgr / LVFS is such a breath of fresh air compared to the various old vendor specific fw update procedures!

The novelty of updating firmware via a GUI on Linux still hasn't worn off.

> I don't know which model of fingerprint reader is in the 6th gen, but on the 7th gen, enabling the beta firmware made it work perfectly.

The USB id of the fingerprint reader on X1C6 is 06cb:009a while on X1C7 it is 06cb:00bd.

This is the list of supported devices: https://fprint.freedesktop.org/supported-devices.html

As you can see the one for X1C7 is supported, X1C6 unfortunately isn't.

This is their gitlab issue for it: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libfprint/libfprint/issues/13...

It works on gen 7 with Ubuntu 20.04. I think it wasn't out of the box though and I needed to do some tweaks

Yeah, the same question about the fingerprint support. There are plenty of decent modern laptops with fine Linux support, except the fingerprint. Well, I'm typing this from my XPS 9575 under Fedora 31 with 5.5 kernel where everything works, except, well, the fingerprint.

Dell solved this problem with their Developer Edition of the XPS13 which they sell with Ubuntu pre-installed: by removing the fingerprint scanner ...

I'm still really happy about that groups work, gotta push further tough.

The fingerprint reader on my T495 works out of the box on the newly released Ubuntu 20.04 and the beta for Fedora 32. It did not on previous versions.

> I am really interested in T series with AMD Ryzen 4000 line

Same here

This is great news, even if you don't plan to use Fedora or if you plan to buy the same laptop with Windows pre-installed instead of Linux. It means some Red Had people were paid to make sure all the hardware in the laptop works. Even if the patches are not all upstream at the time of release (and I'm 100% sure the Fedora people will try to upstream as much as they can), you know they exist and you will be able to use if needed.

I recently got a Thinkbook from my employer and the touchpad doesn't work and there are no patches available for it. I'm stuck with having to use a mouse because my employer didn't care consult me before buying a laptop...

The areas where Linux shine are the areas where people are paid to get open source stuff done. And I am thankful for the existence of companies like Red Hat, Suse and Canonical. Because HW manufacturers and OEMs clearly have no clue about how to write and ship software...

> It means some Red Had people were paid to make sure all the hardware in the laptop works.

IIRC, I've heard from former RH engineers that RH already runs mostly on either Thinkpads or Dell laptops, so this could easily have been an internal push to make their own rollouts easier. It certainly makes provisioning faster if the guy preparing the Lenovo laptop doesn't have to start with blowing away the OS, loading Fedora, and then applying a dozen patches or other config changes to make the laptop happy w/ Fedora.

I understand what you say, but this is different because there is official support from the OEM now. If something doesn't work the Red Hat engineer won't have to reverse-engineer stuff, they will officially contact Lenovo, which will officially contact the manufacturer of whatever component is not working, and they are going to work to a solution the proper way. Much better and faster than the alternative.

Source: I worked doing exactly this many years ago.

> It certainly makes provisioning faster if the guy preparing the Lenovo laptop doesn't have to start with blowing away the OS, loading Fedora, and then applying a dozen patches or other config changes to make the laptop happy w/ Fedora.

Doesn't all of that boil down to, "plug into the imaging system, boot, let Foreman (or whatever) do everything"? I can't imaging Red Hat having laptop setup be a manual process.

We give our people Lenovo X1 Carbon, 7th gen, T490s, or T590. Our testing centers use Lenovo P73 and Dell Precision 7730 with 64GB or more of RAM.

This is a really good sign. I hope this means more corporate IT support for Linux desktops. This is the first year I've been able to use Linux (Fedora 31) on a corporate owned machine (T490s) and I don't think I could go back. For my work, it really is a better experience.

I've also been using Fedora as the primary OS on my personal devices since 2011 (T410 -> x220 -> T470s and a couple of custom PCs). I stay on fairly standard hardware and really haven't had any major issues in the past 9 years.

> I hope this means more corporate IT support for Linux desktops.

Admittedly I'm biased by my own experience, but my understanding is that many software-engineering-heavy companies already primarily use some flavor of Linux for their corporate engineering workstations, including many of the FAANG companies (and excluding, for obvious reasons, Apple).

Of course, I doubt many non-engineering workers are using a traditional desktop Linux, but I recently noticed that my kids' pediatricians' office does use a form of desktop Linux (something Gnome based) for their scheduling/reception system computers.

I’m at a FAANG for the first time, but was previously at a big financial company with a relatively large IT org. It would’ve been nice to have an option to use Linux there. I think FAANGs are the exception not the norm.

Edit: or maybe I haven’t been picky enough with my employers.

My last two employers (300-7000 employees) have both offered linux as a first class citizen for support (along windows and macos). The hardware for linux has been both very good and bad though, so the support does not count for much if the hardware sucks.

I prefer Ubuntu. If I buy one of these models, does it mean that there are drivers/support for all hardware in Ubuntu as well? Are some of the divers proprietary or Fedora-specific?

I don't have any definitive inside knowledge, but based on history and reasoning by analogy, I doubt there will be much - if anything - that is Fedora specific. My hunch is that it's very likely that Ubuntu will install and run well on these machines as well.

I believe Dell ships their XPS line of laptops with either Debian or Ubuntu preinstalled. Friends of mine who use them say the driver support is quite good, and the experience overall is also good.

I have a Dell XPS with Ubuntu installed from factory, and been really happy with it. Everything works very well and never had any trouble connecting any devices.

I bought a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon 7th gen a few months ago. And almost nothing worked with Ubuntu 19.10 out of box. (Also tried Debian and archlinux and had worse driver problems). Wifi driver doesn't work; audio driver doesn't work, pulseaudio is buggy (since volume up/down changes master and not PCM so it does not change actual volume output); hibernation doesn't work properly (still drains battery even when laptop lid is closed); wifi does not connect to 5G even after driver starts working, screen tearing on fullscreen, audio doesn't output as loud as Window even if it claims it's running software amplification (150% volume)...

Most of these were fixable, but took about a week of research on random forums, stackoverflow, kernel mail list (for wifi driver), Archlinux wiki etc...

I never had any issues with linux before. Never. Zero. i was very excited when I first bought this $3000 laptop since this is the first time I bought an expensive electronics. It was absolute shit show from beginning to end.

I'm still dealing with screen tearing and audio being quiet (compared to Windows running on the same machine, and my Macbook Pro playing the same song). I decided last night, I'll try another distro such as Fedora. I feel completely stuck. I hate using Windows. My macbook is work computer so I can't use it for personal stuff. I'm just stuck in this $3000 computer that requires hours of research every time.

I sure hope Lenovo get their act together and have a "Recommended" linux image for these machines.

Did you check the wiki for your specific model? It looks like there's still a few problems, but it's actually got pretty trivial fixes for just about everything:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Lenovo_ThinkPad_X1_Carb...

Yes of course. My issues were absolutely not limited to these though, but I encountered all of these issues. I had maybe twice this many issues. For those that are not in archlinux wiki I used other resources listed in my OP.

This was my experience with Lenovo laptops.

The thing is, I am pretty sure it's not uncommon. I'm pretty sure if you buy completely brand new hardware, there's a good chance it won't be ready to run Linux out of the box. Lenovo sure isn't putting in all the work to make it happen.

On the flip side, if you're a developer it may not be outside the realm of possibility to fix some of the problems yourself and contribute. If that's not what you want to be doing with a new laptop, totally understandable, but I have found some unexpected joy in doing so myself. Well OK. As long as nothing is wrong with the WiFi.

After about a year, pretty much any Lenovo laptop should be working well out of the box, at least that's what I've experienced.

And then when it comes time to refresh the operating system in a few years, get ready to do it all over again.

If you want hardware that is actually supported, buy System76 or Purism. I have two Meerkats, a Thelio, and a Librem 13. Everything just works.

Our niche is very small. Most people are frustrated by linux, and switch to Windows or OSX. I CANNOT do that, because Windows frustrates me even more, systematically; at least on linux it's tremendous amount of frustration the first time, then it just works. I suppose what I should have done was to buy an older laptop, instead of a cutting edge one. Oh well. The more you learn...

I just wish they offered higher density displays. I'd love to try them out but I'm never going back to a 1080p display.

Gladly... if system76 would offer a damn trackpoint on their laptops. Until then, I’ll take suffering.

"My macbook is work computer so I can't use it for personal stuff."

I'm not sure if you're talking about a legal issue (e.g. permission for personal use, or ownership of intellectual property created) or a technical issue (don't want any data to get polluted in either direction).

If it's just technical, then an external USB 3.0 SSD is a cheap and effective solution. A MacBook will happily boot MacOS from an external drive, and performance is beyond acceptable. Booting Linux from an external drive requires more work to set up, and you might still suffer from missing drivers. But I've booted MacOS from an external drive on 4 different MacBooks (Pro/Air 2015-2017 models) and it's been a snap. Just create a MacOS installer on a flash drive, plug in both the flash drive and your target USB 3.0 SSD, and install MacOS as normal. When powering up, hold down the {cmd?option? i forget} key to show the boot menu.

I mean, I don't wanna use work computer to work on side (software) projects or play video games. My employer probably wouldn't mind that much, but doesn't seem like a good idea in principle.

I wish I bought a macbook instead of lenovo. The only reason I got lenovo is because I like linux more than OSX, so I figured might as well get a lenovo with better spec than macbook. If I got a macbook, I would use docker to get linux (although wouldn't be able to use linux DEs like AwesomeWM etc which is a bummer).

For brand new hardware, you really need the most recent version of the kernel. For that, the best option is a rolling-release distro like Arch, Manjaro, Solus, or OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.

It's no guarantee, but that will give you the best chance for things working out of the box (and for getting fixes as quickly as possible).

Just FYI on Ubuntu you can enable a PPA and get latest kernel, you enable a different PPA and you can get latest Xorg and video drivers. So you have good options on non-rolling distro to get latest drivers and kernel, test them and if you don't like them go back to the LTS ones.

This is a good option for me, upgrade only what I want and don't touch things that work.

FWIW Linux works fine for me on MacBook Pro 2015 (Ubuntu) and MacBook Pro 2017 (Arch).

I would rather use an older model than be without a desktop environment. I suppose you can use Xquartz on MacOS to get the desktop environment, but it seems like an every day hassle.

I am running Linux (Fedora) inside VMWare on the mac. Runs very nice and Linux is just one desktop you can switch to.

I had the same issues with x1c7. The most annoying one was the mic not working. I was really frustrated saying I should have gone for Dell. I read somewhere that Ubuntu 20.04 solves some of the problems and it did! Everything works now - mic and fingerprint reader included.

Maybe now that Lenovo will supply a Linux distro, other distros will be better supported on new models as well.

you probably need to return the laptop. seems specific to your case. on thinkpad ubuntu works out of the box, like everything. I have a t490 currently but have had t460s n other models I have given to family members with no issues.

I doubt it, archlinux wiki is full of issues. More importantly, I made them all work by finding answers in stackoverflow specific to my drivers. Which means other people who need the same wifi driver experienced the same issue.

That sure sounds like a crummy situation and I'm sorry you have to put up with it.

I don't buy new computers very often (except Rasberry Pi, I buy a fuck-ton of those), but when I do, I always do an inordinate amount of research beforehand to make sure there are no major issues with the laptop running Linux.

The two most important pieces of hardware I look at when buying a laptop are: 1) Does it have _only_ Intel video? 2) Does it have Intel wifi? If both of those are true, then there's a strong chance most everything will work out of the box. I'm no Intel fan boy, but they are very good at maintaining their hardware in the kernel.

This also means staying away from the latest-and-greatest. I don't know how new the X1 Carbon 7th gen is, but I would never buy a machine that has been out for less than 6 months. A year would be just about the right time frame, that's more than enough time to let the early adopters work out the bugs and write blog posts about it.

The worst is the microphone - only the prerelease of the Linux kernel supported the mic on X1C7 when it was new and it required a lot of moving parts to get usable.

It took almost a year before it works out of the box on Ubuntu.

Dells strategy for this wasn't to ship new drivers, as much as it was to just use components that already have drivers. I imagine Lenovo would do the same, but I don't know.

It does make distro hopping painless on my precision (I'm running POP!_OS now, and still automatically get dell firmware updates!)

I'm curious about the same.

Fedora takes a slightly harder line on its "only free" philosophy than Ubuntu does, so the proprietary WiFi driver for the Broadcom card was a big headache back a few years back when I loaded Fedora onto a Dell XPS 13. It became such an annoyance that I tore out the card itself and replaced it with an Intel WiFi card, which had an in-kernel driver. Fedora worked happily with it after that.

I have a Dell XPS that came with Ubuntu and everything has drivers except the fingerprint reader. Dell actually opted to reimburse Ubuntu users something like $13 than have the fingerprint reader manufacturer create Linux drivers.

This is going to be stock Fedora Workstation, with no proprietary drivers. (You can install the Nvidia binary drivers after the fact if you need or want them.)

We follow the upstream kernel closely and generally do not include out-of-tree drivers (with a few historic exceptions). So, everything that works here should eventually benefit everyone.

Really glad they decided to launch this with Fedora. Nothing against Ubuntu per-se, but I - and many others - prefer Linux from the RHEL / CentOS / Fedora family. And there already are, or have been, OEM's shipping Ubuntu. Nice to see somebody go with Fedora.

Any grey-beards wanna weigh in on the state of current ThinkPad models? There usually seems to be quite a bit of nostalgia for the IBM-owned days, where everything was modular/replaceable and the laptops had a 10-year lifespan.

I've seen some murmuring that the more "ultrabook" they become, the less dependable. In which case, I would probably just stick with the Dell XPS line, which I've been pretty happy with so far.

My beard isn't completely grey yet but I've been to redhat offices in Stockholm and most people there use Lenovo laptops.

I've enjoyed them for many years too. My first Lenovo "ultrabook" was X1 Carbon. It was quite obvious that there were very few (perhaps none) CRUs on it. But it has served me for 4 years and still works. The battery discharges faster now of course.

So late 2019 I got an X1 Yoga to replace it, 2nd Lenovo Ultrabook. So far so good.

I work in Fedora every single day, very extensively. I find these laptops and Fedora to be very dependable. But of course that means little because people who run OpenBSD make the same claims.

I have a Dell Precision 15" with Ubuntu pre-loaded for work and a ThinkPad X1 Extreme with PopOS loaded by me. Just on hardware, I would take the Thnkpad. It's lighter (like WAY lighter) and I vastly prefer the keyboard and track point, not to mention I got it for 1/3 the price of my work Dell.

That said, I wouldn't not recommend the Dell. It's my second Sputnik system from Dell and this one had way better support out of the box.

Disclaimer: I am not a grey-beard.

I currently use a T460p which after almost 4 years of constant use and lots of traveling still runs perfectly and hasn't had any hardware defects. My battery even still has 95 % of its initial capacity, which I find really surprising in a positive way. The model I used before was a T430, which had to be repaired twice during its 3 year lifespan and which had many issues (broken/loud fan, failing hinges, broken display connectors, broken chassis parts). For a while I also used a Carbon X1 and a P60, which I had very good experience with again. So I'd say the build quality and materials can strongly vary depending on the model, though I think it has become much better again recently. The prices have gone up as well though, so I'm seriously thinking about buying a Macbook Air as my next laptop as the price difference to an X1 or T model isn't that large anymore.

They are better than most laptops in the market for sure, but still a far-cry from what they used to be. But at the same time, Thinkpads were in the verge of dissapearance back in the 20 days, they HAD to do something to appeal more to mass consummers.

I have two ThinkPads. One is a T510 from 2010 -- so yes, it literally has a 10-year lifespan. It was my daily driver up until 2018, now it is a NetBSD box.

The other is a T450s from about 2014. It is very light, but not an X1 Carbon so it is still pretty "thicc" and modular.

Neither machine will probably compare to the IBM days. They're tricky to disassemble and their components are not as modular as back then. But they are a lot more IBM-like than, say, the MacBook Pros of their respective eras -- even though the 2014 one comes from the era when Lenovo switched to chiclet keyboards.

I am using a T480S with CentOS and almost everything works to my satisfaction. Including battery life time thanks to systemd hybrid sleep.

It's a bit of a nuisance to have to change audio inputs and outputs with the Pulseaudio pacmd but maybe there's a better way I have not yet discovered.

Also as a long time Macbook user I am not happy with the Lenovo touchpad. This has been the topic of a call to action and many discussions such as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19485178

I was annoyed when they dropped the swappable external battery on the T490, especially since the previous few models had both a connectorized internal and an external battery, meaning that the external one was hot-swappable without a power outlet, which I thought was pretty neat.

So I ended up buying a used T480 on eBay and then completely gutting/refurbishing it. I'm talking display swap to get the 1440p panel, keyboard swap to get the backlit keyboard, trackpad swap because the one it came with was grungy, new SSD, maxed out RAM, clean out the inside, new thermal paste, new internal battery, new external battery, etc. I didn't replace the motherboard, RTC battery, fan/heat spreader assembly, webcam(s), hinges, or the external shell, because they were in pretty good shape, but it wouldn't have been difficult to do so.

I've upgraded laptops before, but it always seemed a little more perilous than upgrading a desktop, because I was always afraid of braking something, or not getting it back together properly. I'm really glad I took this route, because I no longer feel like I'm walking on eggshells. I can take this thing apart and put it back together blindfolded now, and if I accidentally break something like a snap, I know I can either work around it or get a replacement.

Construction on the T480 is still very good. Lots of magnesium on the core structure, captive screws, connectors everywhere, clever layout to make (dis)assembly easy. Unique parts are easier to get than I expected. You can pay full price and get them from Lenovo, but you can also usually find them new for a little (sometimes a lot) less on eBay.

The T480 is probably the best Linux laptop I've had so far (Previously I've had a T520 and a T60). Somewhat ironically, the only complaint I have about the hardware has to do with that battery hot swap feature that I wanted. The charge controller decides which battery to discharge when they're both charged. It prefers to draw power from the newer / less worn out cell first, and on my machine that seems to be the internal cell, and probably only because it came with a few hundred mAh more capacity than nominal, while the external battery was right around nominal. What this means is that it draws the internal battery down to 5%, then it discharges the external battery, and by the time you'd want to hot swap the external, the internal is somewhere between 0 and 5%, making the hot swap seem precarious at best. You can individually tweak the full charge thresholds to keep the batteries from wearing out prematurely, but you can't change that 5% threshold, and you can't change the discharge order. Maybe someone will write better firmware for this thing at some point. But still, I get like 15 hours of battery, and coach on long haul flights usually has an outlet now, so it's not a big issue in practice.

I've been using the combo for since the late 1990s. You always need to research the specific machine a bit, because each new generation of chipset or peripheral may introduce a temporary Linux headache. Being an early adopter means experiencing some of that until it converges back to smooth support.

I am currently very happy with a T495 and Fedora. I ordered it soon after it launched in the US, gambling that the chipset issues were mostly resolved with other machines that launched earlier with the same AMD Ryzen platform. I first installed it with Fedora 30 and upgraded to 31. There was one weird kernel update that would not boot without custom boot params. I think that was addressed with both later kernel updates and also a BIOS update that made some ACPI changes.

Mostly, I've seen Thinkpads that still worked fine when they were long in the tooth and I upgraded as work budgets cycled. This history includes (as best as I can recall): X20, X22, X40, T40, T41, T61, X200, T410s, T440p, T460s, and now T495. I had brief encounters with Dell, Hitachi, and Sony before that first X20.

Over all the years, I've had a few types of hardware failure. The worst was a T41 which failed thermally and had its mainboard replaced at an IBM service center. I also had a heatsink and fan replaced on the X200 because it made an annoying vibration at times. I had an Intel SSD fail abruptly in a T440p. I also had a key jam and then eject itself on that T440p, requiring a new keyboard. I had fluorescent backlights go pink and fail in the old days. An of course I've had batteries lose their capacity over time.

I've upgraded the SSD on a few devices to add space after a couple years, and I bought an aftermarket battery once. But, generally I've provisioned the machine with the RAM and wifi I wanted on day 1 and never touched it again.

Their E-series, normally targeted at budget buyers, still retains a fair bit of repairability. I have a recent E-series as well as a P-series from a few years ago, and there isn't really any difference in build quality between the two.

> I would probably just stick with the Dell XPS line

From the product line I think officially they only support the XPS13 on Linux. For larger screen sizes you're probably better off with something from the Dell Precision product line.

I have an XPS13 Developer Edition and have also been pretty happy with it. I like that the experience is improving over time as Wayland and Firefox get better. IMHO the XPS13 is somewhat like a 11" MacBook Air but with 13" screen and a quad-core processor.

One of the things that has kept me from trying Linux in earnest (and yes, I'm very lazy) is concerns about which hardware is supported by which flavors, and how much.

Buy a one- or two-year-old Thinkpad, and it'll be supported as well as anything.

> it'll be supported as well as anything.

But how well is that exactly? Don't answer that, it's a rhetorical question.

My Thinkpad was very poorly supported by Debian Stale when I bought it. I guess it would've been roughly one-year-old at that point.

Debian Stable is never going to be a “laptop” distro, to be fair. One needs Ubuntu, Fedora, or some other quick-turnaround distro.

> Debian Stable is never going to be a “laptop” distro, to be fair.

Will never be a new laptop distro - I'll bet you I can run Debian stable on my Thinkpad X200 without issue;)

Stable's entire selling-point is to be the Linux of yesterday, tomorrow. You probably would have had better luck with a distribution that didn't intentionally aim to be ancient.

A year-old laptop is just getting into the sweet spot for Linux in general and Fedora in particular. The new kernels that keep on coming into the release will help with hardware compatibility.

Debian Stable is definitely not so hot on a year-old laptop, though a newer kernel from Backports can really help.

I have a 3-year-old HP laptop and have been running Debian Stable on it for about 6 months now. It's been a fairly seamless experience, as these things go.

For newer laptops, I definitely recommend Fedora. It's the easiest way to get new kernels -- which are what you need for new hardware -- on the regular.

While this is probably generally true, the 2018 6th gen X1 Carbon (I have one and run Fedora on it) has had significant problems with Linux trackpoint support, which still aren't fully resolved. I had to run a firmware update from Lenovo to get things more or less working.

Even though Lenovo provides some firmware via fwupd, this particular trackpoint firmware was only available via a Windows utility, which sucked since I wiped Windows off the machine as soon as I got it. (I had to make a Windows live USB for the sole purpose of installing this update.)

The trackpoint still occasionally dies after waking up from sleep (but much less often since I installed the firmware update.) When this happens I have to run a shell script I set up to bring the trackpoint back.

So, I can't say the Linux experience with my laptop has been great. I'm guessing the device support for these new laptops with Linux preinstalled will be much better.

For the last couple years I've had very good luck running linux on Dell laptops.

Buy a laptop from a maker that gives Linux first-class support. I can recommend System76.

System76 just released the lemur pro:

https://system76.com/laptops/lemur

You can option it up to 40GB of ram, it comes with a banging CPU and it weighs less than a macbook air. System76 makes sure that PopOS and Ubuntu both work flawlessly with their hardware.

I bought one the day it was released to replace my Carbon X1 (gen 6) and it has been perfect. In particular for me, USB-C charging + monitor works flawlessly when I disconnect and reconnect, and the power button is on the side, which is great because I use my laptop as a workstation most of the time.

Highly recommended if you want a linux machine.

Really tempted by the System76 machines but my worry is the screen res. My MBP (2014) has 2880x1800 and I really don't want to go down to something less crisp than retina.

Also would love to hear about the keyboard compared e.g. to the older MBPs and the Thinkpads.

I plug in to a big monitor and full size keyboard for getting work done, but...

Regarding the monitor, I find the 1920×1080 resolution fine at 14 inches. Super high resolution monitors this small ended up being annoying to me.

Regarding the keyboard, I prefer the Carbon X1, which has deeper keys and more key travel. The Lemur has keys similar to the macbook keyboard, very low profile and very short travel.

As in, the post-2015 unusable MBP keyboards or the nice ones? That might be enough to push me towards the X1 instead of the Lemur although I'd love to get a System76 just to have something from an independent shop from whom I might expect decent service.

woah, thanks for pointing that out! I just configured one with Pop!OS, 24 GB ram, i7, 500 GB NVME and it's only $1500. That's a great price point in my mind. I'd also really like to support them for Pop!_OS which I really have enjoyed vs Ubuntu.

This Lemur Pro is an amazing deal. An i7/40G/1TB $1700 Linux laptop that weighs about as much as the now discontinued Macbook. That's just a dream travel machine.

I've been waffling around thinking about getting an old refurb Macbook (not Pro, plain Macbook) just for carrying around town and to client locations, but this is obviously way, way better for not much more money.

Think of all the Kube clusters and Docker containers you could be running on it. The mind boggles!

You can install Linux on part of your hard drive, and your other operating system on another part. Just reboot your computer to swap between them. It's called dual booting. If you don't like your experience with Linux, just delete its partition.

Just download Ubuntu, or Fedora. Both have great hardware support baked into the live image. Boot from the USB drive, and test all your hardware. There's absolutely zero cost or headache to you, outside of the 10 mins or so it takes to download and flash the iso to the thumb drive, and lets you 'try before you buy'.

I've been a full time Linux user since 2004, and can't remember having -any- hardware issues in the last five years. Prior to that, closer to 2004, I would have agreed. Finding and compiling alsa drivers, network drivers, graphics drivers, etc was a real pain in the ass. Not so today, AMD and Intel graphics are built into the kernel, even!

Ask a Red Hat employee which Lenovos are currently being handed out to employees. Those usually work pretty well.

Fedora has been the only distro that seems to work with my ThinkPad Yoga immediately after install. I battled against Ubuntu and other distros for ages trying to get the screen rotation to work and eventually just made scripts to convert between portrait and landsacpe and even with that the touch controls failed to work properly.

Red Hatter here. I have a Thinkpad T470s with Fedora as my daily driver and I have to admit it works pretty flawlessly

Interesting. My daily driver portable machine is a T470 so I may try that this weekend. I run out of a docking station with two monitors so have been scared to try it TBH. It works pretty flawlessly on windows though.

My docking station is connected to an external monitor :) works great -- I have just upgraded to Fedora 32

I have a T470p with a docking station and an external monitor and I have no complaints much like the other user.

How's the battery life? I dual boot ubuntu and win10 on my T450 and the battery life under win is noticeably better.

Still, you'll get a machine that's not pleasant to look at. Funny that GNU/Linux OS has been advancing greatly the past decade, outperforming Windows and Mac, but without proper hardware match. Lenovo laptops are so ugly and battery performance usually not more than 6h. My work laptop used to be Dell 7000 series, which is perfect on Fedora but with one drawback: calling Dell support to change motherboard every 6 months. Now some companies come to fill the gap, one of them is Purism. I was so happy to see them operating. Well, after paying 1300$, for a really modest processor, the whole laptop fell apart in less than 6 months. It was even worst than any Ascer laptops I've used!! You finally, with all the shame, go back using a Macbook. Fedora on MacBook is the future; but long way to go to get everything working properly.

Now Lenovo please step up your laptop game. 16:10 screen, small bezels, HiDPI screen with sane resolution (like 3200x1800) -> good trade-off between battery life and sharpness, and perfect for 2x integer scaling (better performance). Good speakers and microphone.

This would be a major game changer. Fedora does things the right way Linux support wise (not relying on proprietary drivers). Combined with the high build quality of a thinkpad, this may become the go-to developer laptop.

This is very good. Manufacturers will make sure that the hardware is fully supported. There is also System76 and I think you can buy laptops from Dell as well w/ Ubuntu preinstalled

My precision 5520 pre installed with Ubuntu was riddled with issues, had garbage audio compared to the windows version (tried all kinds of eq programs and tweaks), and the battery life was terrible... Was not a good experience

Lenovo (IBM) has been an active supporter of Linux since around 2006. The Thinkpad T43p had a lot of Linux enabled for the workstation users. I recall when I was at ATI involved in their effort, we worked closely with the engineering team in Japan to make sure that suspend/resume and hibernation worked well with the graphics portion.

It's good to see that this has continued.

Don't underestimate how much use of Linux on high end PC hardware happens within the Workstation market.

Sounds great. From the major hardware vendors, I heard only of Dell, to offer laptops with Linux preinstalled. Sadly my personal experience with an Dell XPS was so bad (hardware, quality-wise) that I do not want to buy their hardware again.

The big thing here is not that you don't have to install Linux yourself, but that they care about the driver support. Not having to install a Linux yourself is a nice bonus though.

What was your problem with the Dell XPS hardware?

It started with minor annoyances like the touchpad looking greasy at the center after a few days (cleaning didn't make a difference). After a few months, the touch screen didn't work anymore. I tried different OS and after a while, I contacted the support. I had a call for about an hour during which they updated the BIOS, but it didn't help. So they sent a technician, who found out, that the Touchscreen didn't work, but had no replacement at hand. So a few days later another technician came and replaced the display. I didn't use the laptop very often at that time, but after a while, I noticed that the display flickered sometimes now, I tried to track down the root of the issue but to this day I don't know what causes it (at least it doesn't seem to be an OS issue). However, by the time I found out that the flickering was not related to the OS, the warranty period was over.

In addition, to the screen issues, the touchpad is just not good. In the beginning, it was okay, after a while you couldn't press it properly anymore (didn't came back up). Some time later, the opposite effect was present: the touchpad popped out about 1mm and you can't press it again.

However, those are just the aspects in which I would categorize the issue as low build quality. For example, other aspects are, that I like the keyboard layout very much and learned that I hate glare-type displays even more than I thought I would.

This is great news.

I use Fedora on a Thinkpad X1 Carbon (7th Gen) and it works flawlessly. Enabling beta firmware even made the fingerprint reader (historically a problem area) work perfectly.

I'd definitely have bought it with Fedora if it'd been available at the time, the Windows 10 install was gone within twenty minutes of me opening the box.

Why should I trust their Linux installation any more than their Windows installations, which have been preloaded with backdoors, malware and all kinds of phone-home nasties at least several times over the years? It'll be nice if it ends up being cheaper than the Windows version, but I'll still be wiping it.

Linked article states that all software installed on the laptop comes from the Fedora repos.

This is awesome news with Fedora 32 right around the corner. I'm also in the market for a new laptop pretty soon.

As with most posters here:

* I love Fedora, use it as my primary OS for more than a decade

* also love Thinkpads, have used on and off for 25+ years

But I have mixed feelings about this announcement and hope it is just more vaporware (as Fedora on Thinkpad has been announced before).

Part of what I love about Fedora is that it is just on the other side of the river from corporate RHEL. So it inherits a ton of the infrastructure and the process and so forth, but it doesn't have to pay for it.

Instead Fedora gets shiny new things pretty quickly and sometimes, not often, things break. Support is- whatever you can find. That's great.

Once you get into the world where stuff has to work because sales and support contracts- the dynamic changes. Fewer new things, less speed, more conformity.

It's not Fedora any more.

We could see this looming in the acquisition. Hope it takes yet still longer for the bureaucracy to chew through.

A bit more information: https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2020/04/24/a-bold-new-chapter...

Righteous!

I had heard vague rumblings that something like this might be in the works, back when I was at Lenovo. Glad to see them actually take this step.

Now more than ever, I could see my next new laptop being a ThinkPad.

Holy crap yes. I don't care for Fedora, but it beats having to scrape Windows off, and hopefully it means these laptops will be engineered for Linux/open source from the start.

I hope this won't be US-only, does anyone know more details?

Looks like someone asked in the comments over there.

– Will it be available globally? I.E in the U.K?

>> As I understand the plan, yes, it should be globally, although there is some amount of regulatory red tape that needs to be cleared everywhere so I have no idea on timing. This is great for individuals around the world, of course, but it’s also important for companies who want to standardize on a Fedora OS and on the same laptop models worldwide

I have a ThinkPad P1 Gen 2 with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS installed. It works fine. By contrast I had gotten a Dell Precision 5530 with Dell OEM Ubuntu, and after a factory reset the GPU couldn't be detected afterwards. Unless they get things like battery management or fractional scaling or a fingerprint reader working properly, you already have the freedom to install Linux on your machine and honestly you might do a better job than what a manufacturer might do anyways.

I also have a P1Gen2, though I'm still on Ubuntu 19.10, haven't updated to 20.04 yet. For the most part it works fine:

- Haven't tried the fingerprint reader - Multimonitor with the docking stations is extremely flaky. With various messing around with connecting/disconnecting cables, closing/opening the lid etc. I've occasionally gotten it to work, but not reliably. - Fractional scaling is reportedly not working with the nvidia driver in 20.04. In 19.10 it does work, though it's not enabled by default, you have to set an option on the cmdline to make it appear in the GUI. - And yeah, the entire multi-GPU thing is klunky, as you have to run the prime-select tool and reboot when switching.

Neat. I've already been running Fedora on my ThinkPad for a few years and it works great. All devices are working, BIOS updates from boot USB. One issue was with that Intel security thing that needed updates and it was impossible to do on Linux. If someone is worried about backdoors or malware, you can easily wipe whole drive and install fresh from trusted source.

I couple of words of warning.

1. Lenovo has a bit of a shady history, with Superfish and Service Engine/Center being the main pre-installed malware or data leaking things that come to mind. Those were windows focused, but if they'll do it there, why wouldn't they do it on linux?

2. Often manufacturers who ship linux will add really stupid EULA/TOSs to the system. A few years ago I bought a Dell linux system only to be greeted by one that had all kinds of things like arbitration clauses I did not agree to, so I highly suggest not using pre-shipped linux versions!

3. Be prepared to distro-hop to find the right one, regardless of "linux compat" tags. Each batch of production even on the same laptop line will have small variations, and after many years of testing linux on many laptops, my general advice is you really have to distro-hop to find the right linux for the laptop you have. I know this isn't ideal, but it is the state of things. For example, I have a newer Ryzen laptop 2-in-1. Every single major distro including arch with newer kernels had major, showstopping issues... On a hunch I tried Devuan... and I have now been running a non-systemd system for half a year with no major issues at all. (and it helps me stay on top of sysvinit land since I still manage some non-systemd boxen) On other systems I've had to distrohop and the one that works ends up being something else. For example in 2015 I had a MBP on which Ubuntu seemed to just work better than fedora or debian or arch. In 2017 the MBP I had Manjaro ended up being what worked over the others. (the Manjaro hardware detector is the best in linux land imho)

4. Consider different desktop environments and window managers. One of my pet peeves is someone trying out Ubuntu with KDE/Gnome with something and when it doesn't work throwing up their hands. I think far too often what people blame linux for is really the fault of the DE/WMs. Consider going outside the norm, try XFCE, i3, or my favorite, Awesome. (there are many more)

5. Finally, while I understand we all want things to just work on the practical side, remember that computing is inherently an ideological choice, at least in my opinion it is. (I am excluding work computing because sometimes you don't get a choice on that /stares at work Macbook menacingly) I believe in the four freedoms as posited by RMS and try to match my actions to that, for example almost everything I use is gpl+, with only a few exceptions which I am always looking for alternatives to. I've sacrificed some things to get here (gaming w/ friends on some games that don't work in proton/wine, for example) but it is worth it to me.

Don't tease me like this son. Currently running Fedora on an old Thinkpad.

If this was truly serious I would be interested. Dell has had a tenuous relationship with Ubuntu, but it was enough that I seriously looked at their business line a few months back.

I have mixed feelings here. On one hand, more hardware makers supporting Linux is good. On the other, I don’t really feel like I want the kind of pre-installed “support” software Lenovo has given Windows to come to Linux.

Good news! The people we are working with at Lenovo have no interest in this either. We don't have any special deal here: they're shipping Fedora under the standard open source licenses and https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal:Trademark_guidelines#OE..., which means there's nothing added (except their docs in /opt/lenovo).

Interesting. I wonder if this will help bring better eGPU support. I have a Thinkpad 25 Retro with an NVIDIA 940MX and it doesn't play well with suspend and resume, optimus, etc.

Oh wow! I think I could finally be tempted to get an X1..!

Don't even bother.

I have an X1E and the whole dual GPU situation is still a mess under Linux.

Of course it depends on your use-case, but stuff like running external displays or using fractional scaling on the 4k internal display never seems to work. nVidia drivers are buggy a/f, Nouveau is a pain to get working properly.

Totally agree with the whole dual GPU + nvidia thing, now using a modern intel integrated on an XPS 9370 FHD and zero issues... It makes me feel like the most i have to look forward to on linux is maybe the more powerful integrated vega AMD gpus which look to have good in kernel linux support.

Is there any reliable mobile discrete GPU graphics experience to be had on linux these days?

I had a hard time getting Fedora to run reliably on the P53 models we recently bought. Of course, NVIDIA turned out to be the culprit once more. Things improved after installing the proprietary drivers, but it sure would be nice if things would Just Work out of the box.

Honestly, ever since i moved from a pure linux environment, to just using Windows 10 pro, I have had 0 issues, and have spent a significantly smaller amount of time tweaking my environment settings.

I get why some people would want a bare-metal OEM install of linux for technical reasons (some languages/tools just run better on linux, or are only available on linux), but I really don't understand the hate people have for Windows 10. With the WSL, I've actually got a linux shell I can pop into whenever the need comes up, as well.

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. I also like WSL but the lack of a functional network stack is limiting.

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish hasn't been the Microsoft mantra for years now. I mean, I get it, 90's Microsoft burned you, but come on, that was 30 years ago now.

I don't hate Windows 10 by any means, I just find Linux works better for me.

I use a Thinkpad and all the drivers work fine without tweaking, so that's not an issue for my setup.

Personally, I just really like the little features I get with Linux.

For example, I have a little script that recognizes when I insert a certain encrypted SD card, and automatically copies over some config files from my home directory.

There may be a way to do that on Windows, it's just so much easier on Linux that Windows doesn't seem worth the trouble.

It's much easier on Linux because you know how to do it on Linux.

Totally could be!

I'm sure a bunch of people are more familiar with Windows, so they find that easier. There's probably a way to do it with Powershell and the Event Viewer.

But since I personally find Linux more straightforward, it makes sense to me to use Linux on bare metal when I can :)

All of your statements make perfect sense. I was more addressing the comments that were acting like Windows was some kind of toxic sludge they had to swim through to get to a linux install.

Much of that stems from the days when Microsoft used to threaten OEMs that offered an alternative to Windows.

I don't want to use Windows. That's not because Windows is bad it's because I like Linux and want to have good Linux experience. That Microsoft has previously used try to stop that leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

Every OS has its quirks and things it does well or poorly.

Mileage varies. I have a Lenovo that dual boots into Win10 or Centos 7. Trying to get my usb audio interface to work on Windows 10 involves messing with some janky ASIO driver that barely works with anything. OBS? There's a plugin on GitHub with no documentation. Audacity? Here's a 1.x build with vendor modifications to get ASIO to work.

I was about to send the thing back when I thought I'd boot Centos 7 and try it. It was 100% plug-and-play. Pulse audio device just shows up. No issues.

definitely mileage varies. like I said, I understand why some want a bare-metal install of linux for reasons like the one you described. It goes both ways for sure. Some things have better support on linux, and some have better support on windows.

“but I really don't understand the hate people have for Windows 10”

The constant dialling home to Microsoft? I’ve not used Windows since Vista but my partner uses W10. She’s working from home on it and my PiHole is working overtime. W10 is not just dialling home to Microsoft but also to all the preinstalled software such as Netflix which she never ever uses.

It’s her work machine so I can’t cleanse it of the various crap on it but I’m intrigued to know if the telemetry/updates/nags can be blocked on the machine rather than via a PiHole (and by blocked I don’t mean any Microsoft supplied privacy options via a UI toggle switch or two).

> W10 is not just dialling home to Microsoft but also to all the preinstalled software such as Netflix which she never ever uses.

That behavior is entirely up to the app that installed, though. Dunno what Microsoft has to do with Netflix, last I checked they were separate companies.

> The constant dialling home to Microsoft?

My opinion on the matter: so what? If whatever telemetry data they send back along with logs and other junk helps improve the OS experience, then go for it, I say.

> > The constant dialling home to Microsoft?

> My opinion on the matter: so what?

I understand that everyone has different opinions on this topic, but to me it's indefensible to allow this kind of surveillance without opt-in (or at the very least opt-out). I think it's a grotesque violation of privacy and does not consider the risks it poses to all the people who actually need or want privacy.

I had the same thought as you. When I got a new laptop, I left Win 10 on it and got Ubuntu in the WSL.

After about 2 years, I went to Debian Stable.

The biggest pro about Win 10 is that it handles 1080p resolution so well. Why Linux distros are not "tuned" to 1080p out of the box, I don't know, because there are few non-HD laptops out there these days.

But the Win 10 cons drove me away:

* Terrible driver support from vendors (what's broken stays broken, I had sound issues that were never going to be resolved)

* Windows 10 updates are horrible, and they kill your productivity. I had a couple of incidents where I couldn't use the laptop for DAYS at a time.

* I really missed the sane package management you get from a good Linux distro. I never tried Choclatey, so maybe that would have made me a happier Windows user.

* WSL is great, and so are Git and all the other Unix/Linux-originated apps I was using. After awhile I figured, "I don't use MS Office or Adobe apps, so I might as well just run the Linuxy stuff I use on a real Linux."

as far as package management on windows is concerned, i use Scoop: https://scoop.sh/

It is better than Chocolatey, imo, because the packages are installed into your user directory rather than into Program Files. Also, the packages appear to be kept up to date much better than Choco.

Really, the reason I left linux originally was partially because of the screen issue you mention. That, and driver issues with Thunderbolt 3. Don't know if it is any better now, but when I left, Thunderbolt 3 display drivers were horrendous on linux.

For me, it's not that Windows is bad, or even that Linux is somehow technically better.* The cool thing about Linux (Fedora or whatever else!) is that it's the operating system that belongs to us, the people. That's amazing.

I have no judgment at all against people who have other priorities and, like, just need to get their job done.

(* I mean, it is, obvious,y but that's not the point)

> The cool thing about Linux (Fedora or whatever else!) is that it's the operating system that belongs to us, the people. That's amazing

100% agree. I would love to have a solid desktop experience in linux where everything just works without having to spend a week configuring drivers and other crap just so I can be productive. But, it is what it is. Others have said they had issues with drivers on Windows 10, so clearly there are downsides to both.

omg, is it true! finally!! i have to get a new lenovo in soon, and this is really good news! I will skip the windows backshis :)

Bought a used ThinkPad 420 and stuck arch with lxqt on it. My teen child is quite happy with it!!

Great. Do they come without hardware backdoors as well?

Finally!

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