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Lenovo ThinkPad T460 – A Good Linux Laptop for Development

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Re: Lenovo ThinkPad T460 – A Good Linux Laptop for Development

#91

Post by karussell »

EdwinHoksberg wrote: post #53

I bought a T460p a few months ago and am not very happy with it. The problem I have is that linux(I am running debian) has quite a few problems with the Skylake architecture, especially the graphics driver. I tried everything I can think of, installing the intel driver manually and installing the newest kernel(4.9.0) but I still have some troubles with the graphics glitches. So I when I'll be buying a new laptop I wi…

That was the problem I mentioned regarding the scaling of the video. In VLC this was easy to fix -> see article. For in-browser videos like youtube all was fine without a config.

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad T460 – A Good Linux Laptop for Development

#92

Post by endgame »

cryptarch wrote: post #74
endgame wrote: post #37

Lenovo are on my personal shitlist after superfish and abusing the windows platform binary table. When my current laptop dies (a thinkpad T440p that I'm reasonably happy with), I may have to suck up the performance hit and go to minifree for a machine I can actually trust.

I'd recommend going with another vendor than Ministry of Freedom (by Leah Rowe). I ordered a laptop from there and it took months to get the payment processed and the laptop shipped, with barely any contact in between. I thought it was very unprofessional and it definitely was the worst online shopping experience I've had so far. Expect to wait at least three weeks for every time you send them an email. The laptop is…

Any vendors you'd recommend? (Non-x86 is fine.)

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad T460 – A Good Linux Laptop for Development

#94

Post by Stratoscope »

endgame wrote: post #37

Lenovo are on my personal shitlist after superfish and abusing the windows platform binary table. When my current laptop dies (a thinkpad T440p that I'm reasonably happy with), I may have to suck up the performance hit and go to minifree for a machine I can actually trust.

ThinkPads never had Superfish nor the Lenovo Service Engine (the Windows Platform Binary Table thing you're referring to).

Of course you're right that Lenovo never should have put those on any of their machines, but my impression is that ThinkPads and the consumer line are run by very different groups within Lenovo.

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

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

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad T460 – A Good Linux Laptop for Development

#95

Post by yuhong »

endgame wrote: post #92
cryptarch wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd recommend going with another vendor than Ministry of Freedom (by Leah Rowe). I ordered a laptop from there and it took months to get the payment processed and the laptop shipped, with barely any contact in between. I thought it was very unprofessional and it definitely was the worst online shopping experience I've had so far. Expect to wait at least three weeks for every time you send them an email. The laptop is…

Any vendors you'd recommend? (Non-x86 is fine.)

Personally I think the FSF ideology taken too far is pretty ridiculous anyway.

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad T460 – A Good Linux Laptop for Development

#96

Post by yuhong »

dom0 wrote: post #87
yuhong wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Core i5 would not be DDR2.

Correct, all three-figure models are at least DDR3. The X20x support up to 8 GB (2x 4 GB). Edit: And no, they really don't support more. The memory controller only supports 2 Gb chips, so with two ranks per channel you only get 2x 4 GB. (Intel i7-600, i5-500 series processor datasheet, section 2.1.1).

The datasheets are often outdated. See http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20100923006778/en/Sams... for an example.

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad T460 – A Good Linux Laptop for Development

#97

Post by yaantc »

bbtn wrote: post #61

I have Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon. At first, I thought I am buying an almost IBM quality laptop. Craftmanship is not good, it looks cheap, screen is flickering and there is a constant 20 kHz hiss from cpu fan. Battery does not long last as it was promised (they had ads: battery life longer than macbook air's). Touchpad is not very responsive. And finally: another new type of usb-size adapter port, I have not seen anyw…

Very different experience with a X1 3rd generation (Broadwell). Battery life is 10h+, touchpad is butter smooth (to my surprise, better under Linux than with the original Windows 8.1), fans are stopped most of the time and the laptop is very silent. All this with Debian stable (more recently testing), so a pretty conservative set-up.

For battery life (and maybe fan noise?), have you installed "laptop-mode" or its successor "tlp" (the laptop project)? Both will tune the system automatically for AC or battery power, and it does make a huge difference for battery life. If you don't use either, you should really try them: the 5 mn installation time will be a good investment ;)

Main issue on my side: I bought it just after it was announced, and Linux support was so-so (functional, but annoying glitches and stability problems). Next time, I'll wait for the new models to be out and will buy the last gen one on the cheap --- there's so little changes anyway nowadays. But now all this is gone, and Linux support is top notch.

Quality ok but not as good as I had imagined: there's now a bit of flex in one corner. Not a problem in practice, I just expected more sturdiness from a TP.

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad T460 – A Good Linux Laptop for Development

#98

Post by HarrietJones »

endgame wrote: post #37

Lenovo are on my personal shitlist after superfish and abusing the windows platform binary table. When my current laptop dies (a thinkpad T440p that I'm reasonably happy with), I may have to suck up the performance hit and go to minifree for a machine I can actually trust.

One thing to consider w.r.t. SuperFish is it was two years ago, and Lenovo did apologise for it. Sometimes you have to keep a grudge, but my opinion on this is it was something that pretty much any laptop manufacturer could have done and they did deal with it. YMMV.

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad T460 – A Good Linux Laptop for Development

#99

Post by dom0 »

yuhong wrote: post #96
dom0 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct, all three-figure models are at least DDR3. The X20x support up to 8 GB (2x 4 GB). Edit: And no, they really don't support more. The memory controller only supports 2 Gb chips, so with two ranks per channel you only get 2x 4 GB. (Intel i7-600, i5-500 series processor datasheet, section 2.1.1).

The datasheets are often outdated. See http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20100923006778/en/Sams... for an example.

Yes, such things are often outdated, but the availability of different memory chips does not change existing hardware. The MC really doesn't support it, there is no way to change anything about that...

I believe there were other chips at the time that supported more than 8 GB (i7-9xxM perhaps), but these are a different die (Clarksdale quad cores, ie. high end mobile chips that are selected desktop chips).

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad T460 – A Good Linux Laptop for Development

#100

Post by yuhong »

dom0 wrote: post #99
yuhong wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The datasheets are often outdated. See http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20100923006778/en/Sams... for an example.

Yes, such things are often outdated, but the availability of different memory chips does not change existing hardware. The MC really doesn't support it, there is no way to change anything about that... I believe there were other chips at the time that supported more than 8 GB (i7-9xxM perhaps), but these are a different die (Clarksdale quad cores, ie. high end mobile chips that are selected desktop chips).

The point is that the datasheet is now inaccurate. This happened before with 2Gbit DDR3 and Intel had to update the datasheet for the Mobile 4 Series chipsets.
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