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Comment by francis-io | Hacker News Reader

The professional (T series) line of the Thinkpads are my go to.

I've been running ubuntu 20.04 for the past few years. You can have hot swap batteries and an inbuilt SIM slot if you choose. Not sure if the fingerprint is working (I didn't select that option) but everything else works flawlessly.

Side note: I have been maintaining an Ansible playbook for years now that sets up my developer workstation. I do know Ansible already, but I think it's a worthwhile weekend project if you are starting from scratch. You just need to be consistent and have all changes go through Ansible.

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I recently wimped out of buying a thinkpad due to uncertainty regarding getting Ubuntu running correctly and the time it would take me to do it. Do you have a guide you’ve used or instructions you have stashed somewhere?

Ubuntu more or less just works, just shove a bootable usb stick in, install it, and use it.

Things get a bit fiddly if you want to use something like Manjaro or Fedora. But even then, it all just works.

For my Thinkpad (Thinkpad 13, I think it's called L-series now) installing Ubuntu was no trouble at all - set up a bootable USB, install, and done. Ubuntu actually runs much better than Windows!

I'm running Debian on a t490 and have had no issues so far. I can find a replacement t490 for under 600$ and it's a great dev machine.

What needs to be done depends on the model. Some models are Ubuntu certfied [0] and just work. They even sell some with it. Some need a little tweaking. I recently got a P14s Gen 2 AMD at work and all I really had to do was install the OEM kernel to get WiFi working and set sleep in the BIOS to Linux instead of Windows. Otherwise everything works.

[0] https://ubuntu.com/certified

Ubuntu runs flawless out of the box on my X1 Extreme Gen 2, when I installed it only Gen 1 (or 3, not sure anymore) was officially supported by Lenovo. My guess would be if the "same" laptop is supporting Ubuntu according to Lenovo it should be fine.

There were some BIOS settings to change first to get the machine dual-boot ready, nothing fancy so as I don't even remember what it was. Getting a bootable USB stick was more challenging for me!

This is the classic "not the question you asked" but I strongly recommend running Fedora on laptops, particularly Thinkpads. It works perfectly on every Thinkpad I've tested on (a good half dozen models at this point) with the only exception being the usual graphics stuff if you have non-integrated or Intel graphics.

There are two reasons for this - Fedora ships a far more recent kernel than most distros (the only competitor being Arch), and Redhat does a lot of work on Thinkpad support. On my T430 at home literally everything worked out of the box with zero config, all the way down to fingerprint reader and keyboard backlight.

I run PopOS (System 76's Ubuntu derivative) on my T490, and it works flawlessly with all the upgrades (aftermarket SSD and RAM). I think the only major system-level config I've done is install TLP for better power management.

I would recommend PopOS over plain Ubuntu because they have some nice utilities for managing things like hidpi, and in my experience hardware "just works" more often, e.g. wifi.

Caveat, I didn't get the discrete GPU, those can be hell, and I made sure to get an Intel wifi chipset (same price) since it has the best Linux support.

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme (Gen 1) here with Manjaro, runs great. So I recommend ThinkPads.

Is that playbook open source? I would love to see it.

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