Comment by bmastenbrook | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bmastenbrook | Hacker News Reader

tl;dr: don't believe it, at least not for any recent Intel ThinkPads.

I have the ThinkPad T420 with Sandy Bridge graphics that they list as "Certified" under 11.04. This is at best highly misleading. I bought this laptop under the delusion that choosing components that were supported by open source in-tree drivers written by the actual hardware vendor was the right decision to make. Alas, Natty out of the box hangs quite frequently, and X is very unstable. The DisplayPort output is unusable, and even non-DisplayPort output via an adapter didn't quite work.

After quite a lot of fiddling, I've found that the latest upstream kernels (I'm using 3.1-RC9 at the moment) from the Kernel PPA mostly fix the hanging, and using KDE with the XRender compositing backend addresses the rest of the issues I have. OpenGL stability is still a disaster, but I don't really have any need it for anything. I'm not sure if native DisplayPort actually works yet; I got a small HDMI adapter to use instead. Using XFCE would probably work just as well, but don't expect stability from Compiz.

Oh, and if you use dm-crypt (which you should on a laptop) you'll get a stupid error from Grub on every boot unless you uncomment GRUB_TERMINAL=console in /etc/default/grub (&& run update-grub). For reference: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+bug/699802

tl;dr: don't believe it, at least not for any recent Intel ThinkPads.

Counterpoint: I chose the ThinkPad X220 because it was on that list and it works (nearly) flawlessly under Linux. The only problem I know of is that the mic mute button doesn't work. That's it.

Unless you were naive enough to buy the X220 with the "Thinkpad b/g/n"[1] wireless option. Then, grief, anger, acceptance/resignation (in the form of a USB wireless stick[2]).

There is a host of other issues, but nothing that can't be worked around after hours of researching blog posts and manuals. More kernel panics on suspend (related to the aforementioned USB wireless), external monitor issues, USB 3 port disappearing ... You know, small stuff.

[1] RTL8188CE 802.11b/g/n WiFi Adapter (in my case, anyway)

[2] SMCWUSB-N2

I checked this page also before buying: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/X220#Wireless

Which distribution of Linux? Do you use compositing? If so, what compositing window manager are you using? What's your typical uptime? Do you use multi-monitor? Have you used an 802.11n AP, particularly a 5GHz AP supporting WLAN power save (such as an AirPort Extreme)?

Under a different set of circumstances, Natty could have been said to be flawless on my T420, and indeed I thought it was for the first few days. When I started using the system more intensively for the tasks I bought it for, I began to notice the problems.

  - Distro: Ubuntu, then Fedora
  - Compositing: Yes
  - WM: Mutter
  - Uptime: weeks, currently 15 days
  - Multi-monitor: haven't yet, I could try and let you know what happens
  - 802.11n: No

I noticed on the notes for your laptop that you have an Nvidia graphics card. I had an Nvidia on my last laptop and that experience convinced me never to get a card that requires a proprietary driver. I always had issues with compositing, resuming from sleep, and artifacts appearing on my desktop (especially text corruption in terminals).

I'm also using an X220 and Linux, without problems. Debian Sid. Everything seems to work, no lockups (not using compositing though). Nice laptop.

I'm a 2011 MacBook Pro (8,1) owner who, due to some lapse of rational thinking, bought the laptop with the intent of running Linux on it from the get-go.

tl;dr -- Natty was a horrible experience for Sandy Bridge systems, but Oneiric has been much, much better.

I think this was the case for all SB systems during the Natty cycle. When SB dropped in the beginning of this year, the Intel code throughout the kernel (graphics, as well as general processor stuff) was pretty bad. I had a lot of lock-ups and freezes with those kernels back in the Natty beta (I got my MBP in early April, IIRC). Even after upgrading to the bleeding edge kernel (to get extmon support with integrated graphics), things were still pretty ugly (the biggest insult was the wireless card not working).

Suffice to say: I ran back to OSX screaming like a big, first-world-problem-having baby.

So, I labored until the hateful gaze of Cupertino for those six months (my work is done in a Windows VM so the host system doesn't matter, beyond what "makes me happy".. pleasure coding happened in an Ubuntu VM running awesome-wm). When Oneiric came around, I decided to give it another try and, I'm happy to say, they finally got their shit together. Anecdotally, I haven't had a single lock-up. I've gotten wireless working (was a bit of an effort and I have to rebuild kernel drivers whenever the update manager installs a new kernel) and the remaining issues are pretty minor: inferior battery life (paradoxically with better resource usage for my workflow), sub-optimal resolution on monitors, OSX vs Linux trackpad drivers, etc. But, overall, I'm much happier that I was able to stick it out (I was this close to offloading the machine on craigslist).

How are dual booting your MBP, with Bootcamp, or some other way? I've been thinking about doing that too but it's hard to find good info on how feasible it is.

I use rEFIt[0]. It's somewhat customizable/themable (you can change the icons, default partition, etc), but is otherwise nothing special/flashy. I've never used bootcamp, so I can't really do a feature comparison between the two. It gets the job done.

0 - http://refit.sourceforge.net/

Good enough, thanks. As long as it just works and there are no showstopping bugs I couldn't care less about the eyecandy.

Oh, and I forgot that I had to disable powersave for the iwlagn driver in order to get any kind of performance out of it. I'm using the Intel 6300AGN; I tried to buy a 6200AGN from Amazon to try it out but Lenovo locks their BIOS to specific PCI product IDs.

If by any chance anyone else needs this, I just put a small shell script that runs "iwconfig wlan0 power off" in /etc/pm/power.d/wireless . The name is important because it overrides another script elsewhere with the same name.

There are probably other things I configured or changed that I can't recall right now. I need Linux to get my job done, but I'd be using VMware under Windows if I could get away with it. (For various hardware-development reasons I can't.) It really wasn't worth my time to figure all this out.

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