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Lenovo to Certify ThinkPad and ThinkStation Workstation Portfolio for Linux

news.lenovo.com

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

#61

Post by fluffything »

I have a Lenovo Thinkpad Yoga that claims to be certified by both Lenovo and Canonical for Ubuntu.

Finger print sensor doesn't work, the fans are super loud all the time, audio doesn't work (requires a newer Linux kernel than the one shipped in the latest Ubuntu), EFI problems, sleep, hibernate, fast-boot, restore from hibernate problems, battery life on Linux is horrible...

So at least the certification for Ubuntu is completely worthless. Reading the first comments in the Ubuntu forums from a year ago and the evolution of the Arch Wiki for my laptop, I have a hard time believing that somebody actually tested it before releasing the laptop. At best, somebody looked at the spec sheet and said "we have supported similar hardware before, this is good to go".

1 year later, the laptop is almost in a barely usable state. Canonical broke Audio support (soundcard not detected anymore) with 19.04 and did not fixed it before 20.04, essentially telling users to wait till the next Ubuntu release due to in 6 months. The only officially supported version is a 4 year old custom 16.04 that I never got the chance of trying, but this should tell you a lot about "long term" support of Canonical and Lenovo for these machines.

The only ones that should be getting any praise are the dozens of volunteers that have been screwed by both Lenovo and Canonical into buying one of these and have made their work and support time available to others for free.

If you want to buy a Linux laptop, avoid Lenovo like the plague. They have absolutely zero quality assurance for Linux.

EDIT: link to certification: https://certification.ubuntu.com/hardware/201906-27127

what a worthless bag of bytes.

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

#63

Post by nymiro »

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…

I would be interested to know which gnome extension in particular are you referring to :)

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

#65

Post by danielscrubs »

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…

Pretty much

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

#66

Post by linker3000 »

Jonnax wrote: post #23

Got a ThinkPad T450 in my cupboard running Ubuntu as a home server. Everything works perfectly. I'd argue that thinkpads aren't stylish, but they're bricks that work well.

I have a T420 as my non-work laptop. It's running Mint and has been no trouble whatsoever, including close-the-lid sleep and graphics.

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

#67

Post by lallysingh »

fluffything wrote: post #61

I have a Lenovo Thinkpad Yoga that claims to be certified by both Lenovo and Canonical for Ubuntu. Finger print sensor doesn't work, the fans are super loud all the time, audio doesn't work (requires a newer Linux kernel than the one shipped in the latest Ubuntu), EFI problems, sleep, hibernate, fast-boot, restore from hibernate problems, battery life on Linux is horrible... So at least the certification for Ubuntu i…

I have an older X1 yoga. I haven't tried to make the fingerprint sensor work, but the rest works quite well. Especially after I updated the firmware with fwupd.

It's not my first Thinkpad running Linux, and the prior two ran quite well.

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

#68

Post by bluedino »

Jonnax wrote: post #23

Got a ThinkPad T450 in my cupboard running Ubuntu as a home server. Everything works perfectly. I'd argue that thinkpads aren't stylish, but they're bricks that work well.

Are you using the touchpad, wifi, fingerprint scanner, bluetooth, graphics in your cupboard?

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

#69

Post by JoachimSchipper »

throwaway-9320 wrote: post #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.

Yes, but note that the P1 workstations are pretty much the same as the X1 Extreme series (but with Nvidia's Quadro "workstation" GPUs rather than Nvidia's "customer" GPUs.)

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

#70

Post by thdrdt »

vetinari wrote: post #42
thdrdt wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I am not sure what you are talking about. Literally the parent post, emphasis mine: > 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 . So which is it?

I was commenting on "I still do not understand, why you folks with Nvidia hardware expect it to work out of the box in Linux"

It does work out of the box for most people. Of course there are people with problems. But overall you can expect Nvidia to work out of the box. There are loads of people gaming (Steam) and CUDA programming on Linux boxes. So I don't understand why I should not expect Nvidia to work on Linux. To me it just sounds like a false statement.

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