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Lenovo to Certify ThinkPad and ThinkStation Workstation Portfolio for Linux

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Re: Lenovo to Certify ThinkPad and ThinkStation Workstation Portfolio for Linux

#22
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately AMD doesn't really compete in the machine learning space. Hopefully one day ROCm will offer a viable alternative but until then we are pretty much captive.

If you really need nvidia so badly, put that GPU into headless machine, where you don't need any UI. Otherwise, you will be frustrated on desktop and it still won't work out of the box.

Or just use integrated graphics for the desktop, and reserve the GPU for GPGPU work.

Re: Lenovo to Certify ThinkPad and ThinkStation Workstation Portfolio for Linux

#24
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you really need nvidia so badly, put that GPU into headless machine, where you don't need any UI. Otherwise, you will be frustrated on desktop and it still won't work out of the box.

Or just use integrated graphics for the desktop, and reserve the GPU for GPGPU work.

Yes, that would be an option too.

Re: Lenovo to Certify ThinkPad and ThinkStation Workstation Portfolio for Linux

#25
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Graphics drivers and WiFi drivers never worked without significant pampering for me in Ubuntu, and I've been using Linux for 15 years. Just last week I updated my working Nvidia drivers for my RTX 2070 card via Ubuntus GUI and lo and behold after restart the screen is just black. It's at a point where I just want it to get a working system and never update it, security and performance be damned. I know how to fix it…

"Gentoo was the most reliant by a long shot (maybe for the simple reason it always asked if it should replace my config), but that is a time sink in whole other league." I think I can see Arch showing off a bit of ankle at you. Think of Arch as a bit like Gentoo without the burning lap.

I have used both Arch and Gentoo, and the only similarity between them is steep learning curve. They are based on completely different tech (pacman vs. portage, systemd vs. openrc) and philosophy, they pursue completely different goals and solve different problems (or, rather, I hesitate to give a quick answer what problem does Arch solve, unlike Gentoo that gives the ability to customize the system all the way down, for a hefty price, of course).

Re: Lenovo to Certify ThinkPad and ThinkStation Workstation Portfolio for Linux

#26
post #14
post #5

Is Nvidia Optimus going to work or will it still require a dirty hack? Will you have to choose between decent battery life and the ability to use an external monitor? I bought an X1 Extreme and even with Pop!_OS it is incredibly annoying.

Dirty hack, like bumblebee? Well since driver 440.44 this kind of thing is incooperated into the nvidia driver itself. You can use it on demand. It idles at around 1w and is used for some physics and other decoding capabilities if i recall correctly. If you want to run a game or an app using nvidia you prepend it with an environment variable, otherwise intel gfx is used. It's not dirty, and works quite well imho... T…

when was 440.44 released? i tried 1 month ago to get this running with ubuntu20 and failed hard :-(

Re: Lenovo to Certify ThinkPad and ThinkStation Workstation Portfolio for Linux

#27
After IBM acquired Red Hat I was once asked what I am hoping to come out of this acquisition.

My answer was that for me personally the hope was to have more Linux ready machines and laptops available in the end consumer market (i.e. non server, non cloud market). Although the Thinkpads are long not anymore IBM products, somehow I was still hoping for the closer connection between hardware and OS know how in the form of the IBM-Red Hat relationship would trickle through.

Seeing Red Hat next to Ubuntu as supported Linux OS makes me think that Red Hat made actually some contributions to making this announcement possible.

It's great to see that it's not just one model but all models in all configurations will be supported. This is great news to businesses who need computers only as a gateway to cloud apps. Why would you pay windows licenses (particularly professional), if you can get a decent OS that can be managed better by IT for free? This is will weigh in particularly with cheap machines that are used by office workers in the throughout of the service economy.

Edit: maybe this will be the start of the height of the current trend to push all applications into the cloud, which is the SUN workstation 2.0 model. I wonder if the cyclical nature of this trend makes a comeback in the form of bringing cloud compute back to edge devices in 10 years. I would wonder what could drive such a comeback for the average Joe?

Re: Lenovo to Certify ThinkPad and ThinkStation Workstation Portfolio for Linux

#29
I must point out that this does NOT cover ThinkPad T and X series. From the press release:

> Our entire portfolio of ThinkStation and ThinkPad P Series workstations will now be certified via both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ubuntu LTS – a long-term, enterprise-stability variant of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution.

Re: Lenovo to Certify ThinkPad and ThinkStation Workstation Portfolio for Linux

#30

This is great news. Honestly I've never had a problem with Ubuntu on machines that are just a 1-year or older. There are so many i7 laptops in the secondary market that work perfectly.

Graphics drivers and WiFi drivers never worked without significant pampering for me in Ubuntu, and I've been using Linux for 15 years. Just last week I updated my working Nvidia drivers for my RTX 2070 card via Ubuntus GUI and lo and behold after restart the screen is just black. It's at a point where I just want it to get a working system and never update it, security and performance be damned. I know how to fix it…

Some days ago I installed Ubuntu on a system with a RTX 2070 super. There were no problems at all with the Nvidia driver.

But it was a kind of miracle it worked out of the box. Because before that I had to manually fix the Wi-Fi driver.

Hardware changes sometimes turn into a hell on Linux (Ubuntu). But I still won't go to Windows or MacOS. I just like the freedom of Linux. And when things are working, most of the time they keep working. On an other pc I have over 6 years of Ubuntu upgrades and it is still running fine.

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