Lenovo Selling Linux Laptops Directly in the US | Hacker News Reader

Lenovo Selling Linux Laptops Directly in the US

lenovo.com

244 pointsekianjo148 comments

Can’t trust them since the multiple spyware incidents. Fool me four times, shame on me

Eg,

> But it did more than that. It injected a self-signed root HTTPS certificate, which allowed them to hijack any and all encrypted traffic

Different incident

> This malware was hidden in the laptop's firmware, and abused the anti-theft feature in Windows 8 and 10. Whenever the laptop booted up, the executable would be extracted from the firmware at boot-up and installed

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/now-three-pre-installed-malwar...

Secondary source that mentions FTC fines

> Lenovo cannot install any bloatware on its laptops without customers' express agreement, under the terms of its settlement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over the Superfish scandal.

> On top of a $3.5 million fine that the company agreed to pay in September, Lenovo will now be required to obtain express consent from consumers before any preinstalled software is able to run on a laptop, as well as provide an easy means of uninstalling any Lenovo tools.

https://www.itpro.co.uk/desktop-hardware/29396/lenovo-settle...

This is the only thing stopping me from buying an X1 Carbon. I had decided to buy a Dell Latitude instead, but apparently Dell did something similar [1], so now I don't know what to buy. Maybe a Huawei? AFAIK they haven't been caught in these shenanigans yet, but I still don't feel comfortable with them for some reason.

God, the laptop market is awful.

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/11/superfish-20-now-dell-...

It depends. If you wan't to run linux, then on your location. If you want to run Windows, i can't help you. As others have allready mentioned, take a look at System76 if you reside in the US. Another option would be https://puri.sm/

Slimbook was mentioned, they are in the UK IIRC.

If you are somewhere else, https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/ might have something for you.

I have recently become aware of https://laptopwithlinux.com/

Looks good, thank you for another option.

(edit) Tuxedo is based in germany.

Addendum for folks who might have favourited/bookmarked this, contains mainly additions to the excellent comments by others (credit where it is due):

Slimbook is actually from Spain, they are the guys who offer the KDE laptop, they donate a part of the price to KDE: https://kde.slimbook.es/ No idea how they get away with only 1 year of warranty in the EU though.

Starlabs is the company i confused Slimbook with, they have 2 laptops on offer: https://starlabs.systems/pages/laptops

Laptop on Linux (https://laptopwithlinux.com/linux-laptops/) looks really good, they are based in the Netherlands. They sell Clevo barebones without additional branding, interesting IMO. They offer a liquid metal by Thermal Grizzly as a paid upgrade instead of Arctic MX-4. Pricy at 47€ but going from 8.5 W/mK to 73 W/mK should be worth it for people who dislike loud laptops.

Actually Slimbook is from Valencia (Spain). But AFAIK they send worldwide. At least I got mine in Finland at a reasonable shipping price.

I see, thanks for the correction. didn't check up on them. Had them mistaken for Starlabs, mentioned in your sibling.

Starlabs systems as well.

Yes, thank you. Took Slimbook for them cause i didn't check.

I've been buying Fujitsu laptop for all of my friends, relatives, and family for the last 10 years, and all the issues I've had is one dead fan and one shitty touchpad. Tough, reliable, no bloatware, "Made in Japan" sticker... why does nobody in the US talk about Fujitsu laptops?!

I went to Fujitsu.com and found their laptops, but no way of buying directly. I googled fujitsu + store, buy, laptops; all returned results for european sellers and refurbished laptops from 10 years ago. They have a list of resellers, but all they carry are scanners and printers. They don't make it easy.

I went to Dell.com and the first thing I see is a giant banner that wants to sell me a laptop. When I click on Products, I get a page describing their main product lines and the all say SHOP. They want to sell me a laptop. HP wants to sell me a laptop. Lenovo wants to sell me a laptop. Fujitsu does not.

Seems to be "out of stock" at all sellers. Found just 1 seller in Italy: https://www.ebay.com/itm/124852437225?

> why does nobody in the US talk about Fujitsu laptops?!

Probably little to no corporate availability? My past jobs have had Dell or Thinkpads as an option, none has ever had Fujitsu.

But now I am interested in it as a personal laptop. What would be the Fujitsu equivalent of a Thinkpad Carbon X1 or a Dell XPS 13?

I have a U939X and I'm very happy with it. Very light (<1kg), a lot of ports, even a Ethernet port. Nice keyboard, full sized cursor buttons, real PgUp, PgDown buttons. Pen and mate touch display. Does run linux without trouble.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Fujitsu-Lifebook-U939X-Review-...

Where did you buy it? I get exclusively old/reused machines when searching for Fujitsu laptops.

Hardware-wise, these do actually seem very compelling! Like a breath of sane design after a decade of worse and worse design.

I'm from switzerland and bought it from Dicitec (digitec.ch). They are not the cheapest, but they run forever. No bloatware, also my moms notebook does still run nice after 10 years. I just swaped the HDD to an SSD some years ago.

Guess Fujitsu Lifebook U9311 would be an alternative? Haven't bought any of these yet though, so I can't share personal impressions.

Fujitsu's PC division (FCCL) is now 51% acquired by Lenovo.

Even here in Japan, Fujitsu laptop can be bought everywhere but considered to mostly boring (except a few extreme lightweight models) but also not very rock solid. It's just a PC for average people and public sector. Enthusiasts buy ThinkPad, Let's note, Dell, HP, or Vaio.

I got an X1 Extreme, went to switch the graphics from Hybrid to Discreet in the BIOS to install Linux, and immediately bricked it. It was a bug.

No reset can fix it. They have to replace the motherboard. They had it four months before I finally got them to just replace the machine.

> I got an X1 Extreme, went to switch the graphics from Hybrid to Discreet in the BIOS to install Linux, and immediately bricked it. It was a bug.

See, you should have picked the "Discrete" option instead. Happens to the best of us!

(Apparently there is a workaround where you can remove the hard disk from the machine to make it easier to enter BIOS, then trigger the "Reset to factory defaults" and "Save and exit" options by blindly pressing the right key sequence on the keyboard. It might or might not work for anyone experiencing this.)

Hahaha. What a typo.

I didn't know about the workaround. The repair facility didn't either, evidently.

It wouldn't even show anything on the screen, or light up the keyboard caps lock etc...

Same happened to me. They had to come twice, first time repare service came they had the wrong motherboard. Worst ever laptop ordering experience I had in my life, after more than 20 years of Thinkpad usage. Still sitting on the X1E Gen 1 - afraid to order a new one. I would absolutely like to go to another brand, does anyone have a suggestion? My requirements are:

1) Optimal Linux support (no Nvidia please)

2) Best possible US layout keyboard, centred, i.e. NO numpads

3) Trackpoint with physical buttons below, optimally 3, could live with 2

4) At least 15 inch screen, bright enough to work outside, and as good as possible to the eyes.

5) Option for 64 GB RAM or more

6) Option for 4 TB SSD or more

7) As much autonomy on battery as possible, as few noise and heat as possible.

8) Nice to have, but not crucial, would be repairability and extendability.

I don't care much about CPU power and prefer less power to heat and throttling. So if somebody has any suggestions, I would be very glad.

If a trackpoint is a hard requirement then you have very few options to choose from.

That's true, but I would like to know if there's a way to find laptops that have Trackpoints (or whatever they are named on different brands [1]). My experience is that there were different brands that had some models at some point in time (HP, Toshiba, Dell, Fujitsu), but don't even mention it on the website, and from one generation to the other they decide to remove or to add them. I would happily go with Dell or some other brand if I knew how to chase for all the requirements above.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_stick

Their entire graphics setup on the X1 and P1 laptops is atrocious, and I've definitely bitched about it here before. Basically, you can't turn off GPU without loosing the external HDMI, so you need to leave it on if you use an external monitor. But that eats battery. And you can't easily turn the GPU on/off whenever you "go mobile" - it requires an Xorg restart. There's some software crap you can do (Bumblebee? Primus?) that works on some distros but it's a total pain in the ass on others. There isn't a clear consensus on which to use either, and I haven't found a single sane set of instructions for it anyway. Avoid avoid avoid.

Absolutely agree with you. Still suffering from it. Worst and most expensive experience since more than 20 years of ThinkPads. I was buying ThinkPads for the good linux support, the keyboard, the Trackpoint, the excellent repairability and extendability. Last year august ordered the P1 Gen 3 without Nvidia, after being delayed for more than 2 months and I had to go on travel, cancelled it. In hindsight it was good to cancel, the gen 3 apparently has the same heat problems. Maybe the gen 4 will be better, however already now is known that key travel has been shortened. If there would be another brand that fullfils my requirements, would switch in a heartbeat.

Honestly, I bought my X1 Extreme Gen2 explicitly for the Nvidia GPU. Having had trouble to get multiple external monitors to work, along the integrated display, I run it basically since day one with the Intel GPU deactivated in Bios. My understanding is that, besides the fingerprint reader, dual GPUs are the main problem regarding Linux on that machine. If so, I don't care. Not that I had the time trying it out so yet.

Isn't it the way Intel designed their reference motherboard?

No idea. All I know it's that the HDMI is hardwired to the NVIDIA on these Lenovo laptops. I don't think it has to be this way. Surely that Intel integrated graphics chip is capable of driving an external HDMI? Perhaps what they should have don't was make the hardware of the port switchable. Even a physical switch would have done.

It's so that you can drive more monitors than a single GPU supports. For example, my T430 with discrete graphics could drive 4 monitors simultaneously while the iGPU model was limited to 2 (3 unofficially).

It became so annoying at one point that I just replaced the motherboard with the iGPU version. Apparently now nvidia optimus support on Linux is improving somewhat, but having had to deal with this and other issues for years, I'm probably never getting an nvidia GPU again unless I absolutely have to.

If they broke the ability to easily connect 1x monitor in the attempt to support more than 3x monitors, I don't know what to say. The needs of the many should outweigh the needs of the few.

Hmm, about two years ago I bought an X1 5 gen, it had horrible Linux support.. as in it just didn't work properly. So I sent it back for refund, that was no problem.

I'll say this: I respect Lenovo customer service.

Linux support usually improves in ~6-12 months after release. It is just a reality with how Linux kernel development process works - it takes some time for drivers to be accepted upstream and then for kernel to be released and propagate to distros.

However, this is good thing in my book compared to usual vendor "lol idk lets just outsource development of crappy drivers to lowest bidder and preinstall them on Windows (and also put bunch of workarounds for broken bios/fw there because it is cheaper than actually fixing and updating any of the firmware blobs)". Case the point - my X1C g6 now works quite well with Linux but I had some troubles initially when i bought it.

No 15% restocking fee? Lucky you. Every one of my Lenovo customer service interactions made me regret my purchase.

Restocking fee must be some US only concept. At least that won't fly in EU.

Any idea if the accidental damage protection in the EU covers has international coverage? Probably the most annoying thing about Lenovo is that all their insurance partners are different depending on which region you buy their devices from.

Nope, no idea. I would cover accidental damage through my house/travel insurance.

Interesting. I nearly got an X1E, but really didnt want a 15" model.

I actually got a Razer blade stealth instead. Despite the massive complaints about batteries (and im still in the window of it not affecting me) I have been happy. It works fine with linux, and has all the graphics chips i could want. I can switch to windows to quickly play some kerbal and back to linux for daily work.

That said i did have to go with a new-ish version of Ubuntu and a couple of the other distros I was using on my x200s (including Elementary OS) just flat didnt work.

But i assume thats more the 11th gen intel and drivers, especially Iris more than anything.

Is there no way to reset the BIOS in a semi-dead mode? I seem to recall some Lenovo laptops had a mechanism where you detached both battery and AC, and then pressed the power button for like 20+ seconds or something like that, and it would reset some settings. Did you try anything like that?

Others have a «router-like» reset button which you shove a paperclip into. I’ve seen it on at least one X1 yoga.

Neither of these would work. Even Lenovo said you have to replace the board (probably just a chip on the board but they replace the whole thing).

Lenovo's BIOS setting is infamous for that. I once disabled built-in camera and it was bricked.

If spyware concerns keep you from Lenovo and you then consider Huawei.... I don't know, man.

I read that as a 'tongue in cheek' comment.

What a shame. I was about to recommend Dell as an alternative, based on GitLab's public documentation that recommends it for GitLab employees and indicates decent linux support. [1]

I made the mistake of sticking with Lenovo due to the expectation of good Linux support, and while most stuff works, I can't say I'm particularly impressed. Aside from a loud fan (not sure if that is due to poor Linux support or just a property of the device), the service in the Lenovo online store was impressively bad. Wrong descriptions of the hardware, insane shipping dates that were pushed out over and over, refusing to simply remove the unavailable component without cancelling the order and going to the back of the queue, and last but not least, Lenovo defrauded me by first having me jump through hoops to claim their 'best price warranty' promise then simply refusing to honor it altogether.

[1] https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/business-technology/team-m...

I've 3 ThinkPads and never really dealt with Lenovo.

The reason why Linux users love ThinkPads is because they're mostly supported OOB by the kernel (not by Lenovo themselves). This wasn't true of most other laptops for quite a few years.

I bought my T61 in 2008, and the ThinkPad recommendation was old then. Things change with time. I believe most laptops these days are rather standardized, so linux support is ubiquitous.

My point being, it's not really Lenovo supporting Linux but the linux kernel drivers that for a number of years supported ThinkPad OOB where all(?) other brands required a lot of fiddling.

(And you probably just need to install thinkfan if you have full speed fans. Check out the ThinkWiki for your models.)

To be fair, Lenovo is now pushing out firmware updates via fwupd, employs at least one engineer to work on Linux support for ThinkPads (Mark Pearson, does he have a team?) and apparently also asks their component suppliers for Linux compatibility now. They might not do all or even most of the work, but even the requirement to certify your devices with Ubuntu and Red Hat stickers is a positive change compared to the early days or vendors like ASUS who just ignore Linux entirely.

> I bought my T61 in 2008, and the ThinkPad recommendation was old then. Things change with time. I believe most laptops these days are rather standardized, so linux support is ubiquitous.

No, it is not. "Modern standby" on most laptops can't be disabled and will discharge your battery overnight. Also, non-Intel WiFi is buggy 90% of the time. And don't get me started on fingerprint readers...

One problem I had with the Dell shipped linux was the abusive EULA/TOS that shipped with it. Just a heads up. I bet Lenovo is doing something similar.

I actually have an X280 in my hand. The reason why wanted it was so I would get 5 years of international warranty on it. Turns out most countries don't actually accept the accidental damage coverage from another country(I paid about $600-$700 in coverage, so for the first 3 years it's no better than an AppleCare, which is international as well).

Also when I wanted to switch it for an X1C because the new ones came out while I was waiting for the stock to arrive(and well they shipped me the wrong model without LTE). They wanted to charge me 15% restocking fee not only on the device, but also on Tax and Insurance.

Currently my touchpad randomly dies when the device goes into sleep. I suspect it's related to some recent firmware update that happened.

The amazing premium Lenovo warranty that everyone talks about must have been before my time.

But given that I want international coverage, I really don't know what options I have. Currently it seems better to just buy a framework laptop, save my money on the insurance and just pay for parts as I go.

The same problem touchpad issue also exists on my Lenovo L380 Yoga. I don't think it is due to firmware issues as the problem existed with the original and the replacement motherboard.

I had two repairs done and a good experience. One time a fan and one time a motherboard replacement. Both times the Lenovo comes to you service promised dates were a day off. This was due to a regional holyday they could have scheduled for.

The reason why i think it might be firmware(not the touchpad firmware) is that it was working happily for 2 years and i just recently booted into windows to do some flashing(not firmware, just rockchip firmware) and lenovo vantage decided to upgrade.

MHH maybe you are right. I can't exactly say when it started with my touchpad. Is your https://xkcd.com/243 also affected? Are the buttons of the mouse pad also affected?

Touchpoint seems to be affected too, but starts working again when I suspend and resume. Buttons as well. The thing that doesn't recover at all is the touchpad itself. Although I have also had cases where none recovered.

How was it for yours?

I don't remember if the xkcd://243 is affected but I think so. Touchpad buttons are also affected. However the digitizer pen works, I don't know if it charges though.

For $600-700 you can get a backup laptop.

Dell lets you pay $100 for a "long-life" one-year extended warranty battery when new batteries are, you guessed it, $100. It's actually the exact same battery your laptop normally comes with only this one refuses to quick charge even after the warranty period is over, no matter if its done low cycles.

The Framework laptop seems to be a safe purchase. Even though the company is still young, all the reviews are praising it.

Framework is only available in the US now, and no AMD option. Despite all their past shenanigans, I got a Lenovo as they have solid Linux support. Erased Windows from it right away.

No Linux support yet. Which is a real shame. If you sell an open laptop Linux should be the first OS you support.

I think latest Fedora runs out of the box.

I'm happy with my System76 Lemur Pro.

It's refreshing to buy a nice laptop from a linux vendor who are maintaing their own (ubuntu based) distro and actually shipping a very polished gnome experience.

Edit: Forgot to mention they ship with coreboot too.

After two System76 laptops I have now switched to Dell. System76 is good, but it's just too much of a hassle when buying from the EU; particularly when dealing with hardware defects under warranty. After all those years I had hoped System76 would have partnered up with a representative in the EU internal market, but alas.

Dell is also acting corporately weird by the way. The XPS 13 (9310) is available with Ubuntu 20.04 installed, but it's not possible to pick it in their Dutch online store like you can in the US one. You can buy it in the Netherlands (and presumably all of the EU) by calling them though. The Dutch Dell salesperson did find a way to configure it that way (with a proper 32GB of RAM too), but that took a bit of prompting and they were genuinely baffled that this option existed and that the configuration tool accepted it (they were cooperative; the knowledge just wasn't available).

>Dell is also acting corporately weird by the way.

My employer offers a modest Dell discount via an Employee Purchase Program. (EPP). You can order the 9310 with 16 or 32 gigs of memory through the EPP with Windows, but if want one with 32 gigs of memory and Linux, you have to engage their small business group and ask for a quote. Exact same machine in every way, just more memory. As I understand the memory is now soldered on the 9310 it's worth paying up front to get maximum, but I've read the storage is still upgradeable.

So Dell still thinks only businesses use 32GB of memory with Linux and for that matter Linux developers only want 13" screens. Both assumptions are (IMHO) obviously false, but there's that corporate weirdness for you.

If anyone from Dell is reading this please expand your Linux offerings to your larger laptops, preferably ones with bigger batteries and discrete GPU options. Not every developer on the planet wants an Intel-based macbook air clone, particularly when a) Iris XE GPUs benchmark slower than the current M1 GPU (which is about to get refreshed), and b) the i7-11{6,8}5G7 CPUs support 64 GB of memory. Stop crippling laptop features to fluff up your battery life numbers.

Dell isn't visibly offering Linux on their laptops in their Dutch digital store front at all. Despite being able to configure them. Which is weird, because the developers who want to buy it certainly exist.

I was forced to use Dell by my previous employer for many years. After a couple of kernel upgrades in the beginning everything was smooth and rock-solid. I bought several unused ones for a symbolic price from that employer and they still serve well as family machines (running Linux), despite being over 10 years old now.

Because I don't fiddle with my machine a lot I liked the way you just enter the service tag into their support site and even years later you got all relevent information about the machine including the full configuration when it was built.

Recently I had to do support for a new a Dell, some XPS 15 really high end machine. I was disappointed to see that they seem to have closed their Finnish internet store altogether, the links to the resellers are broken, the support page only tells me that the machine has run out of warranty 3 months ago (lasted obviously only 1 year). So no more Dell for me in the future.

Calling them may be a drag, but when I did so last year, the rep pulled the specs that I've chosen on their webshop and gave me a 5% discount, which is quite a bit considering a £4500 laptop.

I'm going to buy a steam deck and plug a keyboard into it. Perhaps carry around a really nice portable monitor as well.

The Steam deck is certainly an intriguing device, but it isn't even out yet. It will be interesting to see what can be done with its "native" gamepad input and touch screen, might enable some interesting use cases for actual useful work on the field.

According to the project at the Github page, the online check has been superseded by a newer one:

https://badssl.com/dashboard/

I have a Huawei matebook x pro and I would highly recommend it. Great build quality and 3:2 screen.

Taiwanese laptops? Asus is a contender in every weight class. Acer maybe too.

Or Japanese. I personally don’t like Sony, but they and Fujitsu are alternatives to crapware from the PRC too.

Have you considered a Framework? frame.work, mostly open, modular laptop

No official Linux for Framework yet. While its certainly possible to install it.

I'm looking at a Librem. System76 also does laptops, as does Pine.

I'd like to see Pine offer a larger screen and battery.

PineBook is fine the way it is, but the keyboard is abysmal, that's the only thing that made me switch from it as daily driver to my old Frankenpad.

Using preinstalled OS is weird. Just reinstall it front the scratch. Issue with Lenovo was that their BIOS injected their malware anyway. Dell is not so advanced.

I think Slimbook is also a brand that is worth considering.

The M1 macs are insanely amazing machines.

I look forward to using Linux on them shortly.

Nah, it's not. Buy a MacBook.

I wouldn't use the preinstalled OS anyway, no matter if it's Linux or not. The good thing about them offering Linux is that they must ensure hardware compatibility (though I don't recall it having been a problem with Thinkpads) and be ready to give some support, and I also would expect the machine to cost a bit less for using a free OS.

Honest question: how does this firmware spyware affect Linux? If I get a ThinkPad and overwrite the pre-installed OS with my own, would spyware like this be able to do anything on Linux?

I guess they could do the same thing, extract some binary from the firmware pre-boot and inject it to /boot to mess with the boot process... but does that give them viable persistence and ability to do stuff in Linux once the OS is booted?

The "anti-theft" firmware exploits a Windows misfeature where the BIOS can include stuff that Windows will simply install automatically at boot. So it wouldn't directly affect Linux just yet. But firmware can do other shenanigans that would render any system fundamentally insecure (e.g. via SMM).

This is something that could be addressed by coreboot/libreboot, but it will probably require some time until most recent models are supported.

https://www.coreboot.org/

Ideally it should if you format your laptop.

But the problem is working with a vendor that has a track record for compromising its customers.

How do you know they aren't inserting backdoors in the firmware?

The problem is the lack of trust.

To be fair, I'm still spotting an X1, but next time I might consider librem, or something else.

Everyone who's calling out Lenovo should be calling out apple and talking about how they can't use any apple product lines, for the same security concerns.

Nothing is safe!

> Nothing is safe!

I'm no Apple fan, but I certainly have a special level of distrust in anything based in China.

This thread is about Linux. I know they have been caught for spyware on Windows more than once.

Has there been anything similar bad as worse Intel ME by Lenovo on lower level? (Serious question, I don't know)

I would buy a Linux machine from them mainly to know that drivers exist for all components and not to pay the Microsoft tax (symbolic reason, I don't think you really see a difference in price). I would still install my own Linux as I prefer it. So their spyware would not apply to me, I'd hope.

Of course ideally one should not support shitty vendors. Unfortunately all of them are, just in different ways.

Edit: Well, maybe System76 is not shitty. But they are expensive and still seem to have no European support whatsoever. So not an option for me either.

Do you think Linux magically will stop them from integrating UEFI backdoors or something hardware-related? I don't wanna test it and don't buy Lenovo.

Technically it won't stop them. But have they been caught for it? I hope lack/price of skills will stop them. Windows programming is cheap compared to UEFI programming. As long as they can address >90% of their spying "needs" by Windows I hope they stick to that.

It's all about trust. But whom should I trust? I don't trust Intel for their ME, their Meltdown and whatever. But still I have to use them in real life.

Yup, no one should trust them given their reputation of installing spyware + being Chinese owned.

I thing Dell is amongst the top choices nowadays with regards to Linux laptops.

P.s. I miss the old Thinkpads (the IBM era)

I have a t420 as my daily driver. Nothing to miss, it's still a good device by any standards

That makeuseof article from six years ago has little or no relevance to any new ThinkPad you might buy today.

Lenovo's consumer and business divisions are best thought of as nearly separate companies within one conglomerate.

Lenovo (formerly Legend) sold laptops and desktops for years before they acquired IBM's personal computer business. But they didn't just buy the ThinkPad name, the people came along with it.

The old Lenovo became the consumer group, and the IBM team became the business group. It's very common to find different approaches on hardware and software between the two lines.

As an obvious example, every ThinkPad (with some recent exceptions) has a TrackPoint, but no other Lenovo machine does.

This applies to software too. If you see something bad that happened on Lenovo consumer machines years ago, it's very unlikely that it affected ThinkPads. It just wasn't the same people making these kinds of decisions.

The ThinkPad team's bread and butter is not individuals like you or me, it's corporate customers who buy hundreds or thousands of machines at a time - and have IT staff who scrutinize the hardware and software.

The 2015 makeuseof article made three points. Let me address them in reverse order.

(3) BIOS-Based Malware. The source for that reporting is this Ars Technica article:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/lenov...

Lenovo followed up quickly with a description of the security issue and provided a removal tool:

https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/product_security/lse_bios_n...

Near the bottom of the page is a list of the affected models. Note that they were only consumer machines, not ThinkPads.

(2) SuperFish. This was really stupid on Lenovo's part, but again, it was the consumer team who did this. The ThinkPad team would never have allowed something like that, and didn't.

(1) Lenovo Is Spying On You. Some guy bought two refurbished ThinkPads in 2014 and claims they had some Windows spyware. And this is somehow supposed to have anything to do with a Linux ThinkPad you may buy today? Give me a break.

Full disclosure: I am a major ThinkPad fan. I got my first one in 1998, and I have four of them within arm's reach right now: an X1 Extreme and X1 Carbon from work, and my personal P1 and old Yoga 460. Also have a mostly retired W520 and X220 Tablet in the other room, and a few older busted machines. I'm always happy to talk ThinkPads with anyone. :-)

This only concerned Windows and non thinkpads from Lenovo. Dont spread FUD.

This is why you always install your own OS on a new computer.

They used rootkits

Yep. Never ever buy Lenovo. Personally, I buy HP and sometimes Dell. But Lenovo is forever off my buy list.

really

you should move from china

Two notes on the X, P, and T laptops:

Lenovo's case design does not provide support for the USB-C connectors. The only support is the connector's attachment to the motherboard. If the port is damaged, the motherboard must be replaced.

If you only use USB-C ports with the laptop securely on a table or in a stand, this is not an issue. Sitting the laptop vertically on the floor, with the charger plugged in, and having it tip over onto a chair leg was enough to break the port loose. If you are used to Apple laptops, which provide significant support for USB-C connectors via the case, this may come as a surprise.

If you are coming from a lifetime of Apple laptops: primary cooling is done through the bottom of the laptop. Using it on a lap, pillow, carpet, blanket, etc may adversely impact performance / increase fan noise.

Other than these use-case specific issues, I've enjoyed the laptops. Get the upgraded screens if it fits your budget -- the low cost screens are intended for bulk purchases for corporate use and feel like using a laptop from 10+ years ago.

Current Lenovos: P1 (2020), X1 Carbon (2018), T14s (2019).

Edited to add note about Apple's cases providing USB-C connector support.

They've been doing this for a little while. I just bought an X1 Carbon without Windows.

I don't plan on using the pre-installed Linux, but I appreciate that they're confirming that Linux works with the laptop and all its components.

I think that pre-installed Linux also means that company is going to provide some customer support, be it BIOS fixes or maybe addressing a driver issue after an OS update.

Without such support it was common to simply get “an unsupported OS” reply, which will necessarily limit how popular product is with non-tech people.

Yep. I've had my X1 Carbon for eighteen months and keep receiving firmware updates via lvfs. Every piece of hardware, fingerprint reader included, works flawlessly out of the box with Fedora.

Using several x1 carbons and also a T14s under Arch Linux and no problems at all. It's a great machine. Bios updates can be had also, just like you said.

I have an X1 yoga and have had a similar experience. Everything from touchscreen and pen to the fingerprint reader works well on Ubuntu.

Does this mean they ensure power-save / sleep works correctly along with using a dock in all sorts of configurations?

I am using a T460s and have always had problems a) the device draining more power on Linux than on Windows; and b) docking/un-docking while sleeping causing a subsequent boot failure.

I have a T590 whose USB driver crashes whenever it's hooked up to a specific combination of daisy-chained monitors through USB-C, causing the laptop to become unresponsive and requiring a hard reboot.

Who knows? I know better than to try Lenovo support, ultimately it'll be a bug in some chipset driver that's "supported", and I haven't got time to debug it.

Lenovo is still far away from Dell in this regard. None of Lenovo's top of the line Thinkpad workstations allow you to choose Ubuntu. The example you've sent has Ubuntu 18.04 which is over 3 years old and not the latest LTS version. It's a pathetic half-assed attempt from Lenovo and they're gonna have to do a lot better if they want to get in to Linux laptop market.

The fact that they offer Linux does not mean you have to stick with what they install. It means Linux hardware support is safe.

Interesting. I picked the T series [0], as that would be what I would purchase, and it comes with Ubuntu 18.04. I thought they had made a big announcement where they were working with Fedora to get Fedora shipping as their Linux option at the tail end of last year?

[0] https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-t-ser...

It's an option in Matt Millers link here: https://mobile.twitter.com/mattdm/status/1401929147937607687

Yes although that is the X series, I've been browsing after my comment and had noticed that there is a mix and some seem to be Ubuntu and some Fedora, which is great.

I also appreciate that they are saying that everything should work, including the fingerprint reader which is one thing I'm a little bitter about the XPS series. They'll sell you a laptop that is Linux compatible, but not everything will work.

Actually the X series seems to let you pick you Linux flavour. https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-x1/X1...?

> They'll sell you a laptop that is Linux compatible, but not everything will work.

That is despicable on Dell’s part. The definition of ‘compatible’ is that everything will work.

> That is despicable on Dell’s part

Meh. It was well known when I bought one so it's not underhand and I find it a pretty irrelevant feature anyway. Ubuntu logs-in very quickly so using a power button finger print reader is a more convoluted gesture to me than putting hands on the keyboard. It would need that newer feature that caches the fingerprint from the power-on event to be worthwhile.

I have the Precision 7750 with power fingerprint button, but I'm not losing sleep over it. I will suffer a lot more than that before I go to Windows or worse, Apple. Besides, usually it's just a matter of time before the driver gets into a kernel.

As would I. But I would still prefer if they sold XPS' that supported Linux.

Completely agree, which is another reason I wouldnt buy XPS, aside from the terrible webcam.

then I have never bought a single "compatible" appliance ; all my windows-preinstalled laptops always came with a few issues

Lenovo is actively submitting kernel patches for the finger print readers, they should be 100% compatible.

There are multiple versions of the XPS 13 and XPS 15.

Most are Windows based. Only the “Developer Edition” of the XPS13 is sold as Linux compatible and everything on it works with Linux.

Mine lacks a fingerprint reader because Dell couldn’t, at the time, get the OEM to provide decent Linux support. So they just left that out of the build.

The other Windows builds are not sold as Linux compatible so if you go that route you’re not getting any guarantees things will work.

For 15” laptops you have to move to Dell’s Precision line for Linux compatibility rather than the XPS 15.

Seems poor marketing to me. They should have a line where all the models are linux compatible and it would much easier for consumers.

I have recently written up my experience of installing Debian on a Dell XPS 13 7390, in case anyone is interested.

http://h2.jaguarpaw.co.uk/posts/how-i-use-debian-dell-xps-13...

I believe there are drivers available for fingerprint riders for Ubuntu 20.04. Needs an up to date bios update and I'm not sure about compatibility with older models e.g.

http://dell.archive.canonical.com/updates/pool/public/libf/l...

Quite hilarious to see the page with photos of the laptops showing windows running...

I have the X1 9th gen.running Ubuntu 21.04. As of now, my Microphone doesn't work, and the get the speakers to be adequate was a challenge (some Dolby Atmos thing). They specify "Linux" as the OS but not which distribution. I'd love to see how the setup is in "Linux" so that the audio system works well.

Other than that, it's a stellar machine. 32GB ram in that form factor and keyboard goes a long way.

I had a ThinkPad T14 AMD, which is Linux-certified by Lenovo. If you are used to the warts of Linux on laptops, it is quite ok. However, coming from MacBooks, the experience was comparatively bad.

Pros:

- The CPU fan on the Ryzen 7 Pro 4750U is not very loud.

- You can easily add more memory (bumped up mine to 32GB RAM).

- You can easily replace the SSD (replaced mine by 1TB) and there is M.2 slot for WWAN which can also be used for an SSD.

- Having a variety of ports is nicer than 2/4x USB-C + a stereo jack.

- Performance is good. Single core performance is of course worse than the M1, but having 8 high performance cores plus hyperthreading compensates a lot, especially for development.

Cons:

- I enabled S3 sleep (Linux compatibility), but the laptops drains the batteries like crazy in sleep. 1-2 days in a backpack and it's dead. To make it worse, Lenovo's own charger couldn't revive it. I had to borrow a MacBook Pro USB-C charger to get a reasonable charge again, after which the Lenovo charger would work again.

- Battery life on Linux is ok-ish (typically 6 hours with light use), but nowhere near an M1 Mac (or even an Intel Mac).

- Suspend/resume continues to have issues on Linux. Sometimes, the screen does not wake up. Especially after plugging or unplugging a DisplayPort alt-mode USB-C cable. Usually moving the TrackPoint fixes this.

Every few resumes, the TrackPad and the left button of the TrackPoint do not work anymore. Only switching off the machine fixes this. With a reboot, the TrackPoint still doesn't work.

- Suspend/resume has an issue in Windows, where resuming often results in an unusable TrackPad that continuously clicks. This is solved by disabling fast boot (or whatever it is called in Windows), after that suspend/resume works fine in Windows.

- The 14" 1080p screen is only well-readable with 125% or 150% scaling. Unfortunately, GNOME support for fractional scaling is not great (even with Wayland). XWayland applications are blurred, there are several open issues about this in the Mutter/gnome-shell issue tracker, but no solution. The only way to have a usable display is to set font zooming to 125%-150% and hope that you have an external screen where that scaling is also acceptable.

- The fingerprint scanner results a lot of false negatives on Linux (works fine on Windows).

- The speakers are much worse than modern MacBooks.

- I bought a Lenovo USB-C Gen 2 Dock. However, 4k@60Hz does not work on Linux through the Dock. The proper dock configuration is to use 2 lanes for USB 3.1 Gen 2 and 2 lanes for DP Alt with HBR3 (to have enough bandwidth for 4k@60Hz). However, Linux doesn't configure the 2 DP Alt lanes to use HBR3 and can only use 4k@30Hz [1]. Of course, the Dock works fine with Windows. There is an issue about this in the AMD DRM bug tracker, but it has been inactive for months.

I wanted to like Linux on the ThinkPad and it certainly has a lot going for it, but it still has many paper cuts. Since I use a laptop quite intensively for work, I decided to sell it after ~7 months and buy a MacBook again.

[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/1317

Nice detailed Linux-on-ThinkPad review. As a counter-point, my almost two year old ThinkPad E495 (Ryzen 3 so not nearly as high-end as yours) keeps on chugging on 20.04 with absolutely no hardware/driver problems whatsoever, including power management. It sure helps that the thing doesn't even have a fingerprint scanner.

No match to the XPS I had before (at twice the price) in terms of display and keyboard, though. And lack of keyboard lighting sure sucks. But then, Dell doesn't do AMD so you need a dysfunctional setup with Nvidia/optimus to get half-decent graphics.

> I enabled S3 sleep (Linux compatibility), but the laptops drains the batteries like crazy in sleep. 1-2 days in a backpack and it's dead.

84hrs off power and 45% remaining on MBA. I can't go back.

> - Battery life on Linux is ok-ish (typically 6 hours with light use), but nowhere near an M1 Mac (or even an Intel Mac).

To be fair, my 2019 Intel MBP barely survived 6 hours.

The battery drain while in sleep is my only real complaint about my X13 AMD. That and sometimes things get weird with volume controls when plugging and unplugging headphones (never had that issue with any of my Intel Thinkpads). Other than that, it's by far the best laptop I've ever had, including a 2020 MBP.

I don't have the same laptop but regarding hibernate/sleep; In the end I configured my linux machine to shutdown and never use hibernate or sleep. It made the experience a lot more reliable. A longer boot time beats having intermittent trouble on wake.

I've only ever had reliable sleep/resume using a mac.

They have been selling laptops without os for quite some time. I guess having a preinstall has some use but not much for me.

The E14 gen3 is looking pretty nice for myself. Zen 3 ryzen (not quite M1 levels of raw power but not too far behind) with 24G ram and 512+1000G SSD for little over 1000 euros.

Had E14 gen2. Was very happy except screen. Colors are wrong and not visible when in bright environment. Sold it and got an M1. For compile, programming etc. tasks its 2-3x faster.

Did you run Linux or Windows on it?

> Sold it and got an M1. For compile, programming etc. tasks its 2-3x faster.

You mean the M1 is? That seems slightly incredible. 20-50% improvement I would've accepted easily, but 200-300% seems a bit on the high side.

AFAIK, mobile Zen 3 is behind M1 in single-core workloads but wins in (most) multi-core tasks if you're using the top core count models (5800, 5900).

Yes, the M1 is about 0-20% faster in single core benchmarks and slower in everything multi-core. https://www.notebookcheck.net/R7-5700U-vs-M1_12978_12937.247...

My general go-to for PC hardware is ASUS with none of their weird extra drivers installed but I’d be willing to try a Lenovo next.

My experiences with Dell have been nothing but bad, we’ve had a bunch of XPS 15s at the office and they all developed all sorts of weird symptoms and instabilities, we’ve had one Quadro-powered one bloat up and the first and only thunderbolt dock exploded its connector, an ultrabook with very little use had its m.2 SSD just randomly die after a few months, etc.

Acer is alright but they go for very cheap components and sometimes compromised design (I had one I owned suck in a bunch of dust that caused it to run warm and melted something in the keyboard so keys stopped working, but replacement parts were available and the repair was painless)

I think (hope) it is matter of time before they will also start supporting coreboot, probably.

Bought a Lenovo laptop 10 years back with free-dos on it.

Installed Ubuntu on it, now at 20.04 LTS. This laptop runs 8 to 16 hours* a day; still on stock hardware except the CPU-fan.

* torrenting & internet-surfing

Does anybody know who makes a good 4:3 screen ratio laptop anymore? Lenovo used to years ago then almost everything went wide screen.

Not sure about 4:3, but I saw the Framework ones are 3:2. I’ll probably get one for this reason and for sustainability when my current laptop needs replacement. I’d like to hear some first hand reviews here if anyone has one. https://frame.work

I had a Lenovo Duet Chromebook delivered a few days ago, bought it directly from them. My gear is Apple and System 76, and I bought the Duet on a whim, to get a very portable Linux laptop (Linux container support is pretty good on Chromebooks). I was surprised how good the build quality is, given the very low price.

Did they not?

Not sure how this showed up in front page. This is a major clickbait!

In my opinion, they are quite expensive for the hw specs!

is that coz no "msft subsidy" ?

That sounds good.

Operating System Ubuntu 18.04 Desktop Edition

nice

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