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?
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.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Lenovo_ThinkPad_X1_Carb...
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.
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.
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 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).
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).
This is a good option for me, upgrade only what I want and don't touch things that work.
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.
Maybe now that Lenovo will supply a Linux distro, other distros will be better supported on new models as well.
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.
It took almost a year before it works out of the box on Ubuntu.
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.
It does make distro hopping painless on my precision (I'm running POP!_OS now, and still automatically get dell firmware updates!)
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.