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

Lenovo Selling Linux Laptops Directly in the US

lenovo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 154 posts

Re: Lenovo Selling Linux Laptops Directly in the US

#111

Post by 9mmjournal »

tdsamardzhiev wrote: post #60
young_unixer wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the only thing stopping me from buying an X1 Carbon. I had decided to buy a Dell Latitude instead, but apparently Dell did something similar [1], so now I don't know what to buy. Maybe a Huawei? AFAIK they haven't been caught in these shenanigans yet, but I still don't feel comfortable with them for some reason. God, the laptop market is awful. [1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/11/superfish-20-now-dell-.…

I've been buying Fujitsu laptop for all of my friends, relatives, and family for the last 10 years, and all the issues I've had is one dead fan and one shitty touchpad. Tough, reliable, no bloatware, "Made in Japan" sticker... why does nobody in the US talk about Fujitsu laptops?!

I went to Fujitsu.com and found their laptops, but no way of buying directly. I googled fujitsu + store, buy, laptops; all returned results for european sellers and refurbished laptops from 10 years ago. They have a list of resellers, but all they carry are scanners and printers. They don't make it easy.

I went to Dell.com and the first thing I see is a giant banner that wants to sell me a laptop. When I click on Products, I get a page describing their main product lines and the all say SHOP. They want to sell me a laptop. HP wants to sell me a laptop. Lenovo wants to sell me a laptop. Fujitsu does not.

Re: Lenovo Selling Linux Laptops Directly in the US

#112

Post by caskstrength »

jopsen wrote: post #58
winrid wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got an X1 Extreme, went to switch the graphics from Hybrid to Discreet in the BIOS to install Linux, and immediately bricked it. It was a bug. No reset can fix it. They have to replace the motherboard. They had it four months before I finally got them to just replace the machine.

Hmm, about two years ago I bought an X1 5 gen, it had horrible Linux support.. as in it just didn't work properly. So I sent it back for refund, that was no problem. I'll say this: I respect Lenovo customer service.

Linux support usually improves in ~6-12 months after release. It is just a reality with how Linux kernel development process works - it takes some time for drivers to be accepted upstream and then for kernel to be released and propagate to distros.

However, this is good thing in my book compared to usual vendor "lol idk lets just outsource development of crappy drivers to lowest bidder and preinstall them on Windows (and also put bunch of workarounds for broken bios/fw there because it is cheaper than actually fixing and updating any of the firmware blobs)". Case the point - my X1C g6 now works quite well with Linux but I had some troubles initially when i bought it.

Re: Lenovo Selling Linux Laptops Directly in the US

#113

Post by beezischillin »

My general go-to for PC hardware is ASUS with none of their weird extra drivers installed but I’d be willing to try a Lenovo next.

My experiences with Dell have been nothing but bad, we’ve had a bunch of XPS 15s at the office and they all developed all sorts of weird symptoms and instabilities, we’ve had one Quadro-powered one bloat up and the first and only thunderbolt dock exploded its connector, an ultrabook with very little use had its m.2 SSD just randomly die after a few months, etc.

Acer is alright but they go for very cheap components and sometimes compromised design (I had one I owned suck in a bunch of dust that caused it to run warm and melted something in the keyboard so keys stopped working, but replacement parts were available and the repair was painless)

Re: Lenovo Selling Linux Laptops Directly in the US

#114

Post by thevagrant »

microtonal wrote: post #31

I had a ThinkPad T14 AMD, which is Linux-certified by Lenovo. If you are used to the warts of Linux on laptops, it is quite ok. However, coming from MacBooks, the experience was comparatively bad. Pros: - The CPU fan on the Ryzen 7 Pro 4750U is not very loud. - You can easily add more memory (bumped up mine to 32GB RAM). - You can easily replace the SSD (replaced mine by 1TB) and there is M.2 slot for WWAN which can…

I don't have the same laptop but regarding hibernate/sleep; In the end I configured my linux machine to shutdown and never use hibernate or sleep. It made the experience a lot more reliable. A longer boot time beats having intermittent trouble on wake.

I've only ever had reliable sleep/resume using a mac.

Re: Lenovo Selling Linux Laptops Directly in the US

#115

Post by caskstrength »

sigg3 wrote: post #51
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a shame. I was about to recommend Dell as an alternative, based on GitLab's public documentation that recommends it for GitLab employees and indicates decent linux support. [1] I made the mistake of sticking with Lenovo due to the expectation of good Linux support, and while most stuff works, I can't say I'm particularly impressed. Aside from a loud fan (not sure if that is due to poor Linux support or just a pr…

I've 3 ThinkPads and never really dealt with Lenovo. The reason why Linux users love ThinkPads is because they're mostly supported OOB by the kernel (not by Lenovo themselves). This wasn't true of most other laptops for quite a few years. I bought my T61 in 2008, and the ThinkPad recommendation was old then. Things change with time. I believe most laptops these days are rather standardized, so linux support is ubiqui…

> I bought my T61 in 2008, and the ThinkPad recommendation was old then. Things change with time. I believe most laptops these days are rather standardized, so linux support is ubiquitous.

No, it is not. "Modern standby" on most laptops can't be disabled and will discharge your battery overnight. Also, non-Intel WiFi is buggy 90% of the time. And don't get me started on fingerprint readers...

Re: Lenovo Selling Linux Laptops Directly in the US

#116

Post by locusm »

ekianjo wrote: post #80
Joff wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Framework laptop seems to be a safe purchase. Even though the company is still young, all the reviews are praising it.

No Linux support yet. Which is a real shame. If you sell an open laptop Linux should be the first OS you support.

I think latest Fedora runs out of the box.

Re: Lenovo Selling Linux Laptops Directly in the US

#117

Post by reirob »

erik wrote: post #77
reirob wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same happened to me. They had to come twice, first time repare service came they had the wrong motherboard. Worst ever laptop ordering experience I had in my life, after more than 20 years of Thinkpad usage. Still sitting on the X1E Gen 1 - afraid to order a new one. I would absolutely like to go to another brand, does anyone have a suggestion? My requirements are: 1) Optimal Linux support (no Nvidia please) 2) Best…

If a trackpoint is a hard requirement then you have very few options to choose from.

That's true, but I would like to know if there's a way to find laptops that have Trackpoints (or whatever they are named on different brands [1]). My experience is that there were different brands that had some models at some point in time (HP, Toshiba, Dell, Fujitsu), but don't even mention it on the website, and from one generation to the other they decide to remove or to add them. I would happily go with Dell or some other brand if I knew how to chase for all the requirements above.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_stick

Re: Lenovo Selling Linux Laptops Directly in the US

#118

Post by raffraffraff »

sam_lowry_ wrote: post #48
raffraffraff wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their entire graphics setup on the X1 and P1 laptops is atrocious, and I've definitely bitched about it here before. Basically, you can't turn off GPU without loosing the external HDMI, so you need to leave it on if you use an external monitor. But that eats battery. And you can't easily turn the GPU on/off whenever you "go mobile" - it requires an Xorg restart. There's some software crap you can do (Bumblebee? Primu…

Isn't it the way Intel designed their reference motherboard?

No idea. All I know it's that the HDMI is hardwired to the NVIDIA on these Lenovo laptops. I don't think it has to be this way. Surely that Intel integrated graphics chip is capable of driving an external HDMI? Perhaps what they should have don't was make the hardware of the port switchable. Even a physical switch would have done.

Re: Lenovo Selling Linux Laptops Directly in the US

#119

Post by rjzzleep »

freemint wrote: post #104
rjzzleep wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason why i think it might be firmware(not the touchpad firmware) is that it was working happily for 2 years and i just recently booted into windows to do some flashing(not firmware, just rockchip firmware) and lenovo vantage decided to upgrade.

MHH maybe you are right. I can't exactly say when it started with my touchpad. Is your https://xkcd.com/243 also affected? Are the buttons of the mouse pad also affected?

Touchpoint seems to be affected too, but starts working again when I suspend and resume. Buttons as well. The thing that doesn't recover at all is the touchpad itself. Although I have also had cases where none recovered.

How was it for yours?

Re: Lenovo Selling Linux Laptops Directly in the US

#120

Post by sneak »

young_unixer wrote: post #12
gentleman11 wrote: post #10

Can’t trust them since the multiple spyware incidents. Fool me four times, shame on me Eg, > But it did more than that. It injected a self-signed root HTTPS certificate, which allowed them to hijack any and all encrypted traffic Different incident > This malware was hidden in the laptop's firmware, and abused the anti-theft feature in Windows 8 and 10. Whenever the laptop booted up, the executable would be extracted…

This is the only thing stopping me from buying an X1 Carbon. I had decided to buy a Dell Latitude instead, but apparently Dell did something similar [1], so now I don't know what to buy. Maybe a Huawei? AFAIK they haven't been caught in these shenanigans yet, but I still don't feel comfortable with them for some reason. God, the laptop market is awful. [1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/11/superfish-20-now-dell-.…

The M1 macs are insanely amazing machines.

I look forward to using Linux on them shortly.

Post reply on HN