Ubuntu on the ThinkPad X13s Review | Hacker News Reader

Ubuntu on the ThinkPad X13s Review

ahoneybun.net

37 pointsahoneybun23 comments

Wrt the non-func camera... that is strange. As much as I like to rag on microsoft, I thought they solved this problem with their uvideo spec.

Update found a dmesg. I am used to obsd dmesgs and am probably reading this one wrong. It looks like there is an on chip video stream accelerator(qcom-venus) that is not initializing correctly. is the camera attached directly to this? or does it act as an accelerator for any video stream?

https://github.com/altacus/lenovo-x13s/blob/main/dmesg-6.5.y...

It's a Snapdragon device so maybe through MIPI or something?

Less than six hours of battery life, issues with audio, non-working suspend, non-working webcam: sounds awful.

It's 2008: Linux has issues with battery life, issues with audio, non-working suspend

It's 2012: Linux has issues with battery life, issues with audio, non-working suspend

It's 2016: Linux has issues with battery life, issues with audio, non-working suspend

It's 2020: Linux has issues with battery life, issues with audio, non-working suspend

It's 2024: Linux has issues with battery life, issues with audio, non-working suspend

Unless its vendor supported day 1, always buy an older gen laptop where other people have done the hard yards to get all the bits and pieces working correctly.

If that's too much hassle, just run WSL2 on Windows.

I’ve been pretty careful to buy laptops that are new, but well-supported by Linux.

They all had better battery life than windows, and more reliable suspend/resume. Audio was generally fine.

(Not all those things were true out of the box, though.)

I've just moved to WSL2 - its from Microsoft so no qualms if you want to use it on a corporate laptop, and honestly there is no GUI software I want to use on Linux that isn't available on Windows anyway.

I'd rather deal with many of the issues the op faces than deal with Microsoft Windows in its current iteration. Fortunately, I don't have to do either.

Not sure what all these windows issues are - assuming you have windows pro or above, just disable auto update installation and win11 nagging via GPO.

> ... issues with ... non-working suspend

In 2020 I made it work for me with 'systemctl hybrid-sleep'. Audio worked most of the time, although sometimes I had problems with the Thinkpad plugged into an actual docking stations with additional ports.

Also Linux has issues with Bluetooth :)

(On unsupported hardware; on supported hardware everything just works and has done since at least 08)

yeah. Older generation Thinkpads had better suspend than mac's did, back in like 2015 with the butterfly keyboard issues

It's even worse at it varies from distro to distro. My laptop had battery life issues and some graphical issues[1] in Ubuntu but worked fine in Pop!_OS, even being an Ubuntu based distro.

In my experience, those "for dummies" distros are the best to not have those kind of issues, like Pop!_OS, Linux Mint, or Elementary, but with so much closed source in hardware manufacturers it's normal to the community to don't be able to give a solution in a short time period.

[1]: It has dual Intel and AMD hybrid graphics, so it's understandable to some degree.

I feel like he should have tried it with a newer kernel. 6.8 was released 10 days ago.

It is not available for this device from the looks of it, at least not on normal updates, perhaps an oem kernel or something.

Looks like linux-image-6.8.0-11-generic can be installed and it does install the .dtb file into /boot/dtbs so I'll reboot in a bit to test.

That kernel does not boot on the system.

I had suspend problems until 6.8.0. Now I have 100% CPU usage by bwrap and still occasionally green glitches on the screen. Not impressed with my thinkpad...

Linux Mint 21.3 on T14s is fantastic. Only minor bluetooth issues which come and go with kernel updates. Love the three-finger swipe to switch workspaces.

You may already be aware of this, but the T14s is "just another" Intel box, whereas the X13s is Snapdragon/arm64. I despise the random nomenclature of their product lines for that very reason. But IMHO a blog post about Ubuntu on more Intel stuff would not make the front page versus "here's the current state of arm64 on the desktop" is something I have keen interest in. I still have high hopes someone is going to have better luck with Microsoft's Dev Kit since it comes with a lot more ram (recently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35757277 et al https://hn.algolia.com/?query=windows%20dev%20kit )

> To my surprise the fingerprint reader works well and I can enroll my fingers! It even unlocks the system the system at the login screen too!

well, shit, that's better than my Thinkpad X1 on Ubuntu where they never worked

I actually came very close to getting that exact same setup (from the Amazon Refreshed store) but waved it off because I could not get Chrome (not -ium, I mean the real one) nor Zoom which for doing worky stuff is "well, good luck". Yes, I'm aware one can join zoom meetings from the browser but with eyes toward that "chromIUM" part I felt it would be really, really rolling the dice, and that's before I knew that the webcam doesn't work

there have been a few other threads on this, but it's great to have a more recent version: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=thinkpad+x13s

Wake me up when it's the year of linux on a laptop again.

It depends on whether you count Chromebooks as linux or not. ARM bring-up without vendor support is non-trivial and full of hacks.

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