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Lenovo now shipping Ubuntu on high end workstations in the US

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Re: Lenovo now shipping Ubuntu on high end workstations in the US

#41

Post by mikece »

leetrout wrote: post #4

I wonder if there is some market pressure from players like System76? For anyone coming along- I managed two Lenovo ThinkStation P7 series towers and these cases (the P5 series looks almost identical) are really great. Everything in the case is screw-less / tool-less. I can't remember how the M.2 drives mounted- they may have had a screw but it was a great case.

Speeaking of System 76: is Pop_OS easier to use than Mint? Does it support things like watching Netflix and DVDs without needing to look for packages and apps to install?

Re: Lenovo now shipping Ubuntu on high end workstations in the US

#42

Post by HeWhoLurksLate »

qchris wrote: post #36
thdrdt wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux is very 'tweakable' so it is used a lot for custom software and custom pipelines. A lot of software can be run on almost all operating systems. Including software that is used by the industry, like Houdini, Blender, Unity, CryEngine, Unreal Engine. And so on. So yeah, Linux is used a lot in the 3D industry. But my guess is that when it comes to CAD/CAM Windows is still leading.

I think that's very much true in terms of engineering CAD/CAM. As far as I know (and I check back fairly often), none of the major CAD packages in Solidworks, Autodesk Inventor, CATIA or Creo work on Linux. The only local Linux CAD project I know of (if you exclude some of the browser-based ones) that's remotely comparable in terms of general 3D parametric design is the open-source FreeCAD, which has come a long way,…

Yeah, I'm going to be stuck doing CAD on a Windows machine for a good long while. Once you get used to the power of the programs, it becomes really hard to go down to something less powerful- and going from SolidWorks or Autodesk Inventor to FreeCAD is like that- there's a noticeable drop in usability and versatility that might be okay for an amateur, but not as a professional.

Re: Lenovo now shipping Ubuntu on high end workstations in the US

#43

Post by myself248 »

emadehsan wrote: post #26

Will they be putting Lenovo bloatware on Ubuntu too? There are more than 200,000 google search results for "remove Lenovo bloatware", for their laptops that ship with Windows

This is a super valid point, and I'd never trust a factory Linux install any more than I'd trust a factory Windows install. Wipe and start from trusted media, 100% of the time.

The news here is that my machine is still supported if I do that. I don't have to wipe Linux and reinstall Windows and deny ever having run Linux on it before sending it back for service, if that becomes necessary.

And things like the fingerprint reader drivers might suck less.

Re: Lenovo now shipping Ubuntu on high end workstations in the US

#44

Post by csdreamer7 »

RandomGuyDTB wrote: post #30
ilikepi wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I messed with the low-end config a a bit, and it looked like the "Windows 10 Pro 64bit English,Spanish,French" license is more like around $100. Still a nice drop though. Too bad there's no way to choose "No OS installed", but maybe Canonical kicks them a little bit of money to offer Ubuntu.

Didn't Europe (maybe someone else) forbid shipping computers without operating systems? Might be because of that.

Microsoft did that after the US government made them stop charging for a Windows license after every computer a vendor shipped... regardless of the OS installed.

IBM just included a copy of FreeDOS for every PC before it sold it's business to Lenovo.

This was over a decade ago.

Re: Lenovo now shipping Ubuntu on high end workstations in the US

#45

Post by xur17 »

mindcrime wrote: post #21
loudmax wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if this isn't in response to a single large customer. Maybe some film studio has ordered a large number of these and they want official support for the OS of their choice. Since Lenovo is already supporting this configuration for one particular customer, it's relatively easy for them to offer support to anyone else who wants to run the same platform.

FWIW, I was a Lenovo employee up until a couple of months ago, and while I didn't work in that division specifically, you hear rumblings. And there is definitely a sentiment among many within Lenovo that wants to push Linux harder, in order to get out from under Microsoft's thumb. It's a delicate dance though, as Lenovo (like all PC OEM's at the moment) is so dependent on MS. And I don't know if this sentiment goes a…

I would love for them to do this. Definitely pisses me off everytime I go to buy a new pc, and have to pay for a Windows license that I immediately wipe from the machine. Any reason they got rid of the blank disk option?

Re: Lenovo now shipping Ubuntu on high end workstations in the US

#46

Post by Zhyl »

mikece wrote: post #41
leetrout wrote: post #4

I wonder if there is some market pressure from players like System76? For anyone coming along- I managed two Lenovo ThinkStation P7 series towers and these cases (the P5 series looks almost identical) are really great. Everything in the case is screw-less / tool-less. I can't remember how the M.2 drives mounted- they may have had a screw but it was a great case.

Speeaking of System 76: is Pop_OS easier to use than Mint? Does it support things like watching Netflix and DVDs without needing to look for packages and apps to install?

For Netflix and DVDs both are the same (seamless out-of-the-box). Pop!_OS has an advantage on NVidia drivers as you can select a download which includes them and enables them by default. Mint includes a driver manager which makes installation straightforward, but it's an additional step and nouveau is enabled by default.

I recently installed pop on my new build because the graphics card I was using caused crashes on nouveau (Mint) but worked flawlessly out of the box with the NVidia drivers on pop.

Re: Lenovo now shipping Ubuntu on high end workstations in the US

#47

Post by Zhyl »

marriedWpt wrote: post #35

I'm not sure how Ubuntu desktop became the standard for Linux desktop. I love Ubuntu server, but some quick issues with Ubuntu desktop- Netflix needs a hard to install plugin, mouse acceleration cannot be disabled completely, unstable operating system installs that could break with a reboot or update. Like I said, love ubuntu server, but I can't understand why Ubuntu desktop is recommended.

Netflix works fine on the latest Firefox and Chromium, included as default on a large number of distros.

Re: Lenovo now shipping Ubuntu on high end workstations in the US

#48

Post by TheCoelacanth »

mikece wrote: post #40
marriedWpt wrote: post #35

I'm not sure how Ubuntu desktop became the standard for Linux desktop. I love Ubuntu server, but some quick issues with Ubuntu desktop- Netflix needs a hard to install plugin, mouse acceleration cannot be disabled completely, unstable operating system installs that could break with a reboot or update. Like I said, love ubuntu server, but I can't understand why Ubuntu desktop is recommended.

I'm not a "Linux community member" but I have never understood why having a popular distro that included non-F/OSS libraries and tools in the distro to make the transition easier for people coming from macOS and Linux was such a bad thing or a reason to fight. If, instead of Ubuntu, something like Mint were the Linux distro option for Lenovo, HP, Dell, etc then new users could do "common user things" like watch Netfl…

It just the inevitable conflict between deontological and consequentialist ethics.

Deontological ethics: non-free software is bad, so making a distro that includes non-free software is bad

Consequentialist ethics: non-free software is bad, so reducing the amount of non-free software that someone uses by giving them a mostly-free distro that includes non-free software is good

There's never going to be agreement because they are using completely different frameworks for judging if an action is good or bad.

Re: Lenovo now shipping Ubuntu on high end workstations in the US

#49

Post by gfiorav »

I'm not really proud of this, but I never really found a Linux OS (or BSD) that "just worked". Maybe I'm too picky, but just being able to resize windows dynamically should be out-of-the-box.

Ever since Windows steered away from Balmer and WSL and other things happened... I'm really comfortable in Windows. It's polished and offers all the Linux I need.

Re: Lenovo now shipping Ubuntu on high end workstations in the US

#50

Post by parvenu74 »

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #48
mikece wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a "Linux community member" but I have never understood why having a popular distro that included non-F/OSS libraries and tools in the distro to make the transition easier for people coming from macOS and Linux was such a bad thing or a reason to fight. If, instead of Ubuntu, something like Mint were the Linux distro option for Lenovo, HP, Dell, etc then new users could do "common user things" like watch Netfl…

It just the inevitable conflict between deontological and consequentialist ethics. Deontological ethics: non-free software is bad, so making a distro that includes non-free software is bad Consequentialist ethics: non-free software is bad, so reducing the amount of non-free software that someone uses by giving them a mostly-free distro that includes non-free software is good There's never going to be agreement becaus…

You don't think that going the "Consequentialist Route" and funding bounties for developing F/OSS alternatives to the non-free components[1] if viable? What's not viable, in my opinion, is the shunning by the purists of everyone who doesn't believe and act like them. Some of us might if we're allowed to get there one step at a time and if they encouraged the transition the F/OSS as a whole would benefit.

[1] Setting aside issues like NVidia drivers...

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