Lenovo’s Fedora-Powered ThinkPad P53 Is Everything I Want in a Linux Laptop | Hacker News Reader

Lenovo’s Fedora-Powered ThinkPad P53 Is Everything I Want in a Linux Laptop

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159 pointsrkangel71 comments

For anyone looking for a Linux laptop without an Nvidia card, Lenovo allows you to customize P1 Gen2s so that they only have an Intel GPU. For day-to-day dev work it's more than enough even on a 4k screen.

I just bought one and it's a really good Linux laptop, by which I mean most of the hardware works at an acceptable level out of the box. (That's no small feat for a current-gen laptop of any brand.)

Complaints:

- The OLED screen option has some kind of visible honeycomb layer on top. Forums threads suggest this is the touch layer, but it's really distracting and shockingly low-quality. My unit also came with a pink tint across half the screen which is a common OLED defect. I swapped it for the IPS screen which is excellent and doesn't have touch, a bonus in my book.

- Current Intel GPU drivers on Ubuntu 20.04 suffer from visible lag and tearing when using the built-in 4k screen. I believe Canonical has fixed this for 20.10 but it doesn't seem to be backported yet.

- The GPU drivers suffer from a bug that disables the HDMI port if a cable is present at boot. There are bugs filed in the Intel tracker but this is an older GPU so I don't know if they'll ever get attention.

- The trackpad is coated in some kind of matte coating that makes your finger stick and skip when using it. Very uncomfortable. They claim it's glass but I've used really nice glass trackpads (in 5-year-old machines even) and this ain't it.

Besides these nits, two of which are fixable driver issues, it's a great machine and I'd recommend it with the IPS/Intel-only options.

The P series seems pretty overpriced compared to the competition today IMHO. And 9th gen Intel CPU in 2020?! My current laptop mantra is Ryzen 4000 or bust.

But ok, ok, say they didn't have time to port their design to the new AMD chips since they're new. Fine, but I better see Ryzen based notebooks with more than 16GB of RAM and 512GB SSD and 16:10 screens with res higher than FullHD in 2021 or I'm gonna lose my shit.

I agree the sticker price is a bit high; I got mine on sale. Gen3 is coming out soon (or is already out) so I imagine there will be more sales on Gen2 soon.

The real selling point for me is no Nvidia. That's hard/impossible to find on a current-gen laptop with similar specs.

The P series' draw for me is that it is almost bulletproof. The body is sturdy and the internals easily accessible. I on on a P50 that is still going strong without any issues.

I have a p1 gen core i9 32gb 4K oled with dgpu. Battery life is horrible, max 3 hrs on battery saving mode. The thing doesn’t really feel that fast on windows, dispute 16 threads, 8 cores. And the keyboard is horrible, constantly missing keys. (Yes, updated all the drivers). I had a t470s before, keyboard was really nice, but somehow the p1 is really bad, I only want to use it with an external keyboard.

I believe there was a BIOS fix for the keyboard issues very recently. Check to make sure you have the latest BIOS version installed.

I just ordered a few of the new amd think pads (T14s amd), 8core/16thread, 32gb ram, looking forward to it.. only real downer is the screen res (1980x), but oh well. just waiting for 5.8 kernels to hit mainstream distros.. Ryzen 4000 needs at least 5.7 for graphics, and 5.8 has some power mgmt/thermal goodness.

https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-t-ser...?

For macOS users:

Checkout Lenovo Carbon X1. It is one of the best things I own.

Ever picked up a macbook and paused for a second to think subconciously "it's gonna feel cold on my lap until it warms up to my body temp"? I know everytime I wanna use my macbook, the cold aluminum is such a pain. I think about it everytime I sit down with it.

With Carbon X1 (running macOS[1]), it just feels wonderful to touch, magnesium/carbon body is way lighter than anything Apple makes.

I think it is time for Apple to use magnesium alloys, soft touch coating and still maintain extremely premium/luxury aspect. Keyboard is amazing. LCD is on par with Apple or even better. I have the HD 2560x1440 400 nits model. There is a shutter for webcam.

I also opened it up and replaced the thermal paste with gallium since the heatsink is copper (can't do this if it is alumnium). It runs cool but there is a problem with the macOS battery management and that's being solved right now. Regardless, I still love this thing.

[1] https://github.com/tylernguyen/x1c6-hackintosh

How is the power management aspect of running Mac OS? That's the only complaint I have (using windows) on my X1 carbon compared to my old macbook pro.

Yea that's the only pain, sleep doesn't work and it runs slightly hot. There is an issue around it and hopefully it will be fixed.

X1 carbon seems nice, but it tops out on 16GB of ram and quad-core cpu. That doesn't look very good when you compare it to macbook pro

The ergonomics of using any mac laptop are terrible, unless you're indoors at a desk.

My eyes are somewhat light-sensitive, and it can be difficult to work outdoors without the aluminum body of the laptop reflecting 90%+ of the light that hits it into my eyes.

The body is so slick that unless I have at least one hand on it (gripping it from the side, not just pressing down with the heel of my palm on the wrist rest area), it will just slide right off my lap whenever I shift position or cross / uncross my legs. Likewise, if my lap is not perfectly horizontal (say, if I'm sitting on a couch any way except perfectly straight), macbooks just slide off.

The aluminum body is so slick that the only safe way to carry them with one hand is like you're carrying a high school microscope, with your hand cradled under it and it tucked securely against some part of your body, otherwise the laptop turns into "Bilbo Baggins Going on an Adventure" / "Why Can't I Hold All These Limes?". I dropped my first work MBP onto a brick fireplace from waist height, it landed on one of its corners near the hinge -- to its credit, the aluminum deformed a bit but it kept working. I don't even have dry skin (which I think would make this problem worse?).

Compare these two points with thinkpads: black body thinkpads reflect more like 10% of incoming light, and they're matte so there aren't any particularly bad angles for light to hit the laptop. I never have to worry about my x1 carbon sliding anywhere; it stays put on my lap no matter what weird position I'm in or how I move. I can pick it up with a thumb and forefinger and not worry about dropping it / can treat it almost like a trade paperback for all the care that's necessary to not drop it.

(This is all not even mentioning that I don't have to change the way I type or position my hands to avoid spurious trackpad input on a thinkpad. To begin with, the problem isn't nearly as bad because lenovo is thankfully ceding the trackpad size arms race, but I can also just disable the damn thing in the bios and use the trackpoint.)

I predominately run Fedora when I use a laptop, along with Debian. I really have come to enjoy Fedora. I don't notice a ton of difference over Debian moment to moment, except perhaps you tend to have newer versions of things in the repos (like Firefox), with the flipside being, you are upgrading your distro major version much more often (and you get used to it). On the other hand there tends to be a touch more in the Debian repo and I've noticed there are some apps that support Debian packaging out of the box but not Fedora (Signal Desktop, Spotify) - for me this is less of an issue because I just make a new debian VM (I use the Qubes hypervisor, which uses Fedora for dom0 and Fedora as default in VMs).

All that said, there is no way I'd carry around a 5.5lb laptop, personally :-) Fedora seems happy with my X1 Carbon gen5 though.

I use Flatpak to install things such as Signal and Zoom. It covers most of the situations where I'd install a deb or rpm in the past.

Nice, I may try that - I assume you get everything from flathub by default?

Yup. All from Flathub.

For me, the main difference is that Fedora packages are close to the upstream code, while Debian makes heavy and sometimes controversial changes (remember Iceweasel?).

In an ideal world I would use Flatpak for everything -- code direct from upstream, decoupled from the base system.

We're slowly getting there.

From the Arch wiki

  Use nvidia-prime to switch between cards. External outputs are connected to the nvidia gpu.

My X1 extreme gen 2 has PRIME, and the experience is miserable. I got so used to everything just working with intel integrated graphics, but I wanted to be able to use cuda on my laptop. With hacks you can get external displays working, but my understanding is that the current solution is to run a second Xserver for the dedicated GPU and blit everything across. The display is too laggy for anything other than a static presentation.

For your use case the best option is to run video off the intel integrated graphics and leave the DGPU entirely for compute.

That's how I have this very laptop configured, and also how I configured the workstations for the people here using GPUs for DL development (because a composited desktop will get very janky if you try to run it off a GPU currently being brought to its knees by a training process).

For Gen 2? I did try that.

My understanding was that the external outputs were wired to the nvidia card, and therefore I wasn't able to use them without the wacky PRIME setup.

yes I have had a similarly difficult time with nvidia graphics on my lenovo laptop. Also, it happened to be vulnerable to the lenovo/superfish malware, so I'm definitely not trying another lenovo computer.

Maybe it might work if you run wayland on the intel chip, and run Xwayland on the nvidia chip? is that even possible to configure xorg.conf on Xwayland?

As soon as I see anything nVidia related I know not to waste my time with it. I am not a gamer, I want secure, easily-updatable, stable drivers. That is exactly what you will not get from nVidia. Intel or AMD are the only sane options.

I have the same, and I concur. In the end, I gave up and just kept the GPU on all the time. Now it works great with external displays in Xubuntu 20.04 at the expense of battery life.

Have you tried disabling your compositor? My i3+picom was too slow until I killed picom.

I'm running the Nvidia edition of Pop!_OS on my X1 Extreme Gen 1. I've got 3 external 4k monitors connected to it, in addition to the built-in 4k screen, and it's running perfectly with a minor nitpick that the fans turn on a lot (probably due to scaling). I'm running Pop!_OS exactly for this reason. They've got an Nvidia edition that includes the Nvidia driver and they pre-configure Nvidia Prime for you.

Neat! I've had a rpm/red-hat based OS (mostly Fedora) on Thinkpads for years now. I'll check this out.

Also interesting they chose to compare to System76, presumably it's because it ships with Linux, but I feel like a real comparison would be with Dell or Acer offerings.

> Let’s focus on the hardware in the spotlight now. And lest you think I’ve lost my ability to be critical, I’ll open with this: the bezels on this beast look comically oversized for a laptop in 2020. I understand the P53 isn't a sexy ultrabook and isn’t trying to win any thinness awards. I also get that the thicker bezels reinforce the durability of the display panel.

Aye, I think bezels are flimsy and lead to lots of fingerprints on the edges. I don't buy Thinkpads because they're sleek and sexy, I buy them because they're robust and starkly elegant. Same idea as having a small/mid-sized pickup truck: I don't need it to be pretty, I just need it to be reliable and functional enough for regular use.

Odd choices of gaming comparisons though -- Dawn of War III & DiRT Rally, but not LoL, Overwatch, Red Dead Redemption, etc.

Except it has a number pad. A pet peeve of mine because they shift everything over which is off putting for a laptop.

I love that the P53 has all the ports on the back so I don’t have cables cluttering up the sides of my on the road desk spaces where I like to keep a proper mouse and mouse pad and a notebook. In the office it’s still nicer too even though it gets hooked up to external monitor and keyboard. No I don’t have a docking station.

This works well if the laptop is front and center, but I actually have my laptop in a stand which holds it vertically to save desk space. I suppose the laptop could sit in my stand at 90 degrees but that might look a little strange! There are plenty of desk laptop stands though, so I am sure options exist.

I'm a fedora and thinkpad user for 8+ years now, I would love to see Lenovo consider selling this machine (or any 15+ inches) without the numpad and with a centered touchpad.

It's like they don't expect people to type on it

Just don't multiplex the edit keys.

> I would love to see Lenovo consider selling this machine (or any 15+ inches) without the numpad and with a centered touchpad.

Yeah I don’t get this trend either. Are any pro users actually asking for this?

I'll disagree for my personal preference. I'm not a fan of small keyboards. I really enjoy having my 104 key buckling spring keyboard. So to me it is nice to see a laptop with a numpad as I like having mine.

I was seriously considering ordering a Model F keyboard ( https://www.modelfkeyboards.com/ ) But the largest model is a measly 77 key model :( For desktop use, my requirement is to have a numpad. I realize why they did it as costs are a lot lower for 77 keys vs 104 keys. But still disappointed.

Aren't there numpads on some keyboards on that page?

Well... They have P1 "Coming Soon", that is:

1. Touchscreen 4K OLED

2. Light(half the weight of P53)

3. Slightly slower graphics(T2000)

4. Also Fedora certified!

Hoping for the version without a discrete GPU.

I wish Lenovo gave a P53 and GTX graphics without the "gamery" glitz of the Legion lineup.

I really want a workstation class laptop where IO isn't severely limited. Lenovo really cuts down on USB-C and Display IO across their lineup, their marketing is misleading where on the t580 one of the USB-C ports only charges so you're left with just one thunderbolt USB-C port.

Right now I'm looking at the Clio based System76 series but not sure of their build quality.

I bought a Legion (the 4800H-based one) for my daughter a couple of months ago; "glitz" is not a word I'd use to describe it and I/O limitations haven't been an issue. As far as I can tell it's a fine machine, and excellent for the sub-US$1000 price. The only negative I can think of is using a proprietary power brick. :(

There's the T line of ThinkPads, that does that.

P line is workstation and only comes with "pro" graphics... but the latest T2000 is basically GeForce 1660Ti MaxQ.

Hmm always found Gnome to be too bulky for laptop screens. Pop modified gnome with tiling and minimal borders is a bit better

Pop made Gnome exactly what I wanted out of the box. Plus the new tiling was the icing on the cake. Minimal tweaking to start doing what I want it to do.

I heard good things about Fedora and tried to switch to it from my Ubuntu 19.10 install. I have a somewhat custom install of specific partitions across two SSDs and the installer just couldn't cope with it. It didn't give a choice to map some partitions to just a mount point without formatting and some others were simply not visible. Tried Pop!_OS next and all these issues went away. I could see all my partitions, assign them to whichever mount point I wanted and choose whether I wanted a partition to be formatted or not. Not a surprise though since it is based on Ubuntu and uses the same installer.

Having used several distributions, Ubuntu's Ubiquity installer is the gold standard in my opinion in terms of striking the balance between flexibility, user friendliness and UX. Pop!_OS has been awesome so far but would like to try out Fedora at some point.

What's exactly Anaconda made wrong? Distro-tossing isn't a way how you can polish your Linux skills.

> What's exactly Anaconda made wrong?

As I mentioned earlier:

"It didn't give a choice to map some partitions to just a mount point without formatting and some others were simply not visible."

> Distro-tossing isn't a way how you can polish your Linux skills.

I agree with you. Though my primary purpose behind using Linux is not to polish my Linux skills (I've been using Linux for close to 20 years now) but is driven by my belief in open source, Linux's flexibility and the great ecosystem of software. However, one has only a finite amount of time and since Anaconda didn't provide me with an option to work with my current setup (I explored various options like advanced mode etc without much success), I had to move on to something that worked which turned out to be the Ubiquity installer used by Pop!_OS. I probably should have tried to document the probelms and raise an issue in the Anaconda forum/github - will do that next time I try Fedora.

> It didn't give a choice to map some partitions to just a mount point without formatting and some others were simply not visible.

Yeah, I got it. I've just wanted to get a more deeper explanation of your existing partitioning situation - I've set up RHEL derivatives on some very vague partitioning variations. Never thought that there could be the problems. Maybe it's just a GUI limitation?

I think it is almost certainly a GUI limitation. E.g. I have a ext4 partition that I usually mount on /other and preserve it when distro-hopping. I can't remember exactly but one of these things happened - it didn't detect this partition / didn't give me the option to preserve it / didn't allow me to specify the mount point for it. Had a similar issue with another partition too. I think I also had some minimum space related restriction that refused to go away. Wish I had taken notes/pictures.

I stopped using redhat at redhat 8.0 and never looked back, redhat's desktop market share is nothing comparing to debian/ubuntu these days, I have no plan to ever try fedora again, time is limited and ubuntu did its job well so why bother.

I read somewhere that Fedora is a pretty significant contributor to the Linux kernel project. I've also heard good things about dnf. So I wanted to support an alternative to Ubuntu (especially after the force-feeding of Snap). That was the reason I wanted to move on to Fedora. We must support alternatives if we want healthy competition to thrive.

I have been using a 17" Serval WS System 76 Ubuntu laptop for ten months, particularly heavily since March (when Covid started). I have been happy with it. I upgraded to Ubuntu 20.04 at the beginning of July and that has had no problems.

I have used System76 laptops for eight years. Around 2012-2014 I was not totally satisfied with them because of issues that would come up now and again. I kept buying from them though as I did not see any better alternatives. They have gotten better in recent years from my perspective, I have been happy with the laptop I bought last year.

I ran Linux on a P50 for years and that unit, which is sitting in front of me right now, is the reason that I won't buy another ThinkPad, ever.

It was the biggest lemon I've ever owned. I've been through multiple mainboards, dozens of repair center calls for battery and power issues (which persist even now).

(Having owned somewhere around a half dozen different ThinkPads, all of them well loved up till the P50, this was a sad end to my support of that platform.)

Lenovo slowly transitioned away from IBM's design over the years. They are now using cheaper plastics and have horrible chassis designs which dig into your wrists due to their non-rounded edges. They're trying to make Thinkpads look more slick while at the same time reducing the cost to manufacture them. IMHO the Thinkpad can no longer be considered a platform which you can safely buy knowing that every component will be fully supported in Linux. Some hardware components are not even working correctly in Windows or are faulty (I'm looking at you Fibocom WWAN modem; see: https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-T400-T500-and-newer-T-...). I would happily buy from any other brand if they have a laptop model with a good trackpoint.

I just picked up their new Ryzen 5 4500U laptop and slapped Mint on it with the latest rc for kernel 5.8. its one of the best laptops i've had, esp running linux.

Now that would make a cool review, interested in that setup!

As a developer, the two most important things to me in a laptop are durability (I take it many places) and a good keyboard, and I have found that the ThinkPad P, X and T series are equally good in these regards and leagues beyond the competition.

I'm currently running Fedora on a ThinkPad P52 and couldn't ask for a better development workstation.

I love the P53! I got one to replace an X1 Carbon after I kept thermal throttling when compiling Rust.

I run NixOS on mine, and it's almost perfect. Hopefully, with this official Fedora release, I'll be able to change the screen brightness when using the Nvidia GPU - it's currently stuck at 100%. Damn Nvidia + Linux :(

No mention of battery life yet - and unfortunately for me that's pretty important. I daily drive a Linux laptop that gets 9 hours (but with a good amount of tweaking), and the day we get 13 hours or more is the day I become a complete advocate for Linux on the go.

AMD Ryzen 4000 laptops have much better battery life. My year old Intel Thinkpad (not the one discussed here) gets about 3-4 hours on a good day. My HP Envy x360 gets 12+ hours. Both run the same version of Fedora and a similar mix of browser/compiles. As an extra bonus the AMD portable chips are much faster.

All that space and they couldn't fit in a full-sized arrow-key cluster :(

>The ThinkPad P53 is a great machine, but maybe it's time for Lenovo to implement a more ... [+] fingerprint-resistant material? - No please, I prefer fingerprints than scratches

Even just a matte finish should fix fingerprints, no?

I liked the mentions of the system76 boxes. I'm hoping for their internally designed laptop to be my next workstation.

Nonetheless, this Thinkpad sounds pretty good.

Interesting, can you provide any references for info about their internally designed laptop?

There have actually been no other news about that project since late last year, when they announced they were working on it.

They, however, haven't announced that the idea is shelved, so I remain hopeful that the laptop will see the light one day.

Looks good except it still has a 16:9 screen. Looking forward to the rumored Titanium and Nano.

this thing is already big enough to have its own orbit. imagine a 4:3 screen on this beast

Based on the title ("Everything I want in a Linux Laptop"), it seems like the author needs to learn about coreboot and Intel ME. It's hard to take a review seriously when it doesn't even touch upon built in backdoors.

or maybe people want different things from their products...

there are vendors these days that ship new laptops with coreboot firmware (and presumably cleaned with ME cleaner).

Well, it's everything he wants, not necessarily everything you want.

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