I think that pre-installed Linux also means that company is going to provide some customer support, be it BIOS fixes or maybe addressing a driver issue after an OS update. Without such support it was common to simply get “an unsupported OS” reply, which will necessarily limit how popular product is with non-tech people.
Yep. I've had my X1 Carbon for eighteen months and keep receiving firmware updates via lvfs. Every piece of hardware, fingerprint reader included, works flawlessly out of the box with Fedora.
I have an X1 yoga and have had a similar experience. Everything from touchscreen and pen to the fingerprint reader works well on Ubuntu.
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…
To be fair, Lenovo is now pushing out firmware updates via fwupd, employs at least one engineer to work on Linux support for ThinkPads (Mark Pearson, does he have a team?) and apparently also asks their component suppliers for Linux compatibility now. They might not do all or even most of the work, but even the requirement to certify your devices with Ubuntu and Red Hat stickers is a positive change compared to the early days or vendors like ASUS who just ignore Linux entirely.
Ideally it should if you format your laptop. But the problem is working with a vendor that has a track record for compromising its customers. How do you know they aren't inserting backdoors in the firmware? The problem is the lack of trust. To be fair, I'm still spotting an X1, but next time I might consider librem, or something else.
Everyone who's calling out Lenovo should be calling out apple and talking about how they can't use any apple product lines, for the same security concerns. Nothing is safe!
> Nothing is safe!
I'm no Apple fan, but I certainly have a special level of distrust in anything based in China.
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.
It's so that you can drive more monitors than a single GPU supports. For example, my T430 with discrete graphics could drive 4 monitors simultaneously while the iGPU model was limited to 2 (3 unofficially). It became so annoying at one point that I just replaced the motherboard with the iGPU version. Apparently now nvidia optimus support on Linux is improving somewhat, but having had to deal with this and other issue…
If they broke the ability to easily connect 1x monitor in the attempt to support more than 3x monitors, I don't know what to say. The needs of the many should outweigh the needs of the few.