Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Lenovo to Certify ThinkPad and ThinkStation Workstation Portfolio for Linux

news.lenovo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 205 posts

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

#31

Post by Havoc »

vetinari wrote: post #19
fungi wrote: 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.

>put that GPU into headless machine

Possibly one of the saddest solutions ever proposed. Besides then one can’t game on it

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

#32

Post by dathinab »

panpanna wrote: post #11

Didn't Ubuntu/redhat certify some thinkpads in the past?

Yes a view thinkpads here and there had been somewhat verified. Through I don't remember if it was fully certified. Like I think the fingerprint reader was always excluded from certification.

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

#33

Post by thdrdt »

vetinari wrote: post #8
danielscrubs wrote: post #4

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…

> Graphics drivers and WiFi drivers never worked without significant pampering > my RTX 2070 I still do not understand, why you folks with Nvidia hardware expect it to work out of the box in Linux, when there have been two decades of experience that Nvidia doesn't care about that and won't allow anyone to do anything with that. So no, your RTX won't work as nice OOTB as Intel and AMD GPUs do. It will continue to be t…

I am not sure what you are talking about.

The Nvidia drivers provided by Nvidia work great. In Blender I got full CUDA support and even RTX raytracing support (RTX 2070 Super).

And as far as I know developing with the CUDA toolkit just works fine.

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

#34

Post by nnq »

paines wrote: post #14
dempseye wrote: 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…

> to have the nvidia card kick in triggered by the OS somehow when really needed would be the non-plus ultra, but come on, this is science fiction

Can't smth simple & obvious like the macbook pro GPUs work fine, eg. Intel graphics for everything when on battery, dedicated graphics for everything when the power cable is plugged in?

This covers like, everyones uses cases, right?! I mean, you almost never plug into an external monitor without having the power cable plugged in to... and who tf games on battery?

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

#36

Post by easytiger »

rkangel wrote: post #12
danielscrubs wrote: post #4

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…

My approach to Linux laptops: * Buy Lenovo * Have integrated graphics (i.e. Intel) * Run Fedora This combination has, for a few years now, given me excellent reliability 'out of the box'. I don't have to do anything and everything from the fingerprint scanner to the wifi Just Works. There's still a bit of a battery life penalty compared to Windows, but it's not enormous.

This has been a source of much consternation. Basically want a 15" x1 Carbon without any of the complications of the dual GPU laptops. But no one seems to make it. I guess to push margins up they force higher prices on larger laptops as they become more "niche"

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

#37

Post by rsynnott »

nnq wrote: post #34
paines wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> to have the nvidia card kick in triggered by the OS somehow when really needed would be the non-plus ultra, but come on, this is science fiction Can't smth simple & obvious like the macbook pro GPUs work fine, eg. Intel graphics for everything when on battery, dedicated graphics for everything when the power cable is plugged in? This covers like, everyones uses cases, right?! I mean, you almost never plug into an e…

If only that were what the MBPs actually did. The real rule is, dGPU when plugged in, iGPU when on battery, _unless of course Chrome feels like forcing the GPU on for no good reason, which it will do multiple times per day_ (any app _can_ do this, but in my experience it's mostly only Chrome, and sometimes electron nonsense, that does).

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

#38

Post by robin_reala »

paines wrote: post #14
dempseye wrote: 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…

(ne plus ultra: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ne%20plus%20ultra)

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

#39

Post by Nullabillity »

nnq wrote: post #34
paines wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> to have the nvidia card kick in triggered by the OS somehow when really needed would be the non-plus ultra, but come on, this is science fiction Can't smth simple & obvious like the macbook pro GPUs work fine, eg. Intel graphics for everything when on battery, dedicated graphics for everything when the power cable is plugged in? This covers like, everyones uses cases, right?! I mean, you almost never plug into an e…

No. Different GPUs support different features (especially NVidia who still can't just use MESA like all the reasonable people) and have different hardware characteristics, so you can't just move applications back and forth on a whim.

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

#40

Post by ckastner »

This is good news, but Lenovo should be lauded even for their current Linux support, which already extends to a great deal of their systems, see [1].

https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/solutions/pd031426

By chance, I interacted with one of their devs through the Debian community, and came away very positively surprised. They really seem committed to this.

Post reply on HN