Comment by quanto | Hacker News Reader

Comment by quanto | Hacker News Reader

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Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen5 (Intel i7, nVidia)

Pro: * The warranty service is wonderful. Both online-scheduled mail-in service and in-person service. Calls are answered by real people quickly. Fan broke, but it was quickly replaced. Some electrical noise coming out of the motherboard -- Lenovo is willing to replace the motherboard, but so far no catastrophic failure.

Con: * Poor QC with thermals. I had to repaste myself after both factory and service center couldn't get it right. * Fan and motherboard issues (as mentioned above) but fixable/fixed by Lenovo under warranty. * Small things are broken all the time with Ubuntu: speakers, microphone, screen sheering etc. With the lastest Ubuntu, it is marginally better.

I still would not recommend this model unless one is an advanced user willing to debug these things (I still haven't figured out what's wrong with the headphone jack noise). But once the bugs/defects are fixed, this machine is a dream to use.

The headphone jack noise might be from automatic power saving of the audio controller. You can deactivate that with tlp. It helped me with my ancient Acer ES1 some years ago.

Thinkpad fans spin up quite aggressively in my experience. You can use thinkfan to set higher threshold temperatures.

Screen tearing has been solved for me after switching to Wayland.

A very handwavy final remark: some problems might vanish on their own by using a recent kernel, e.g. on Fedora instead of the Ubuntu LTS release.

Thank you for your comment. I find it assuring that I actually had followed every point you mentioned before. My observations are below.

1. I tried every power saving option available at every layer (snd_hda_intel, pulseaudio, TLP). None of that eliminated the problem. 2. ThinkPad fans are aggressive indeed, and I did use thinkfan to reduce the noise, but it turns out the physical fan was just terribly pasted. Re-pasting with a higher quality paste helped immensely. 3. I did try Wayland, but I am told it has its own issues. In the end, I put up with shearing under X as it didn't bother me that much. The most recent kernel mitigates shearing. 4. Indeed, a recent kernel automatically solves many issues that I had previously solved manually (mic, speakers, etc)

I had thought LTS with its continual updates should address these problems as well as a more recently released distro should. It seems that I was mistaken.

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