Live data from Hacker News

Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen3 Review – with Linux

ernestas.me

221–230 of 492 posts

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen3 Review – with Linux

#221
post #193

Based on all the comments on HN about how great Thinkpads are supposed to be with Linux, I bought an X1-Extreme some time ago. From my experience, Linux support for Lenovo devices is terrible. ACPI, power management, and UEFI are consistently causing problems. Grub has an issue with the 4K display, causing it to render at about 1 FPS. The dual-GPU (Intel and nVidia) situation is unworkable under Linux. Suspend on lid…

Don't use Grub or any bootloader if you can avoid it. I haven't used Grub in 10 years. Load Linux directly as an EFI executable via the EFISTUB approach.

You almost certainly only need to run two or three efibootmgr commands to accomplish this. For most people that means only the "Using UEFI directly" section is relevant.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/EFISTUB

S3 suspend was removed as a default option by many hardware manufacturers. You will likely need to enter the BIOS to change this.

There is a bug in 5.17.x kernels where suspend doesn't work with bluetooth enabled. It will be fixed soon.

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen3 Review – with Linux

#222

I find it rather peculiar that tech folks think a plastic laptop is good build quality considering what we have from Apple and others. I wish more linux laptops had the build quality and support of macbooks. This isn't a rant from an Apple fan, this is a rant from a laptop fan. ThinkPad's aren't good laptops despite what the guy with the pocket protector says. They are flimsy and feel cheap. They still have 20th cent…

prediction: 2025 will be the start of significant visible market adoption of "Asahi Linux" on Mac.

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen3 Review – with Linux

#223
post #193

Based on all the comments on HN about how great Thinkpads are supposed to be with Linux, I bought an X1-Extreme some time ago. From my experience, Linux support for Lenovo devices is terrible. ACPI, power management, and UEFI are consistently causing problems. Grub has an issue with the 4K display, causing it to render at about 1 FPS. The dual-GPU (Intel and nVidia) situation is unworkable under Linux. Suspend on lid…

Thank you for sharing; these comments make me pause.

At work, RHEL on Thinkpad is one of the standard offerings, and has continued to be across many generations. EVERYTHING works. I've had a work-provided RHEL Thinkpad (T450) which was smooth and seamless, as have my colleagues (most of them chose X1 variations, some T480, some with the newer T14).

I have a large number of Thinkpads at home and I want to install Linux on some of them, but comments like these make me wonder how much extra work and special juice our IT department had to commit in order to make it happen - and what my own experience would be in real world.

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen3 Review – with Linux

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not having good linux support is a deal breaker for me.

Yeah, I am getting there; I just like working under Linux more and mac OS X does a bit, but nothing is like Linux with i3 for me; it is so much more productive (for me).

i3 runs fine on macOS

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen3 Review – with Linux

#225
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On most laptops I find using a battery for any kind of heavy work a non-starter anyway. I might send an email or take a call on battery but I wouldn’t even launch a heavy IDE. Without aggressive power saving (I.e CPU sits under 1GHz even att full load meaning less than half the performance) then battery is often less than 30 minutes. I should add that this is for scorching hot “desktop replacement” (45W) laptops. But…

What?? I use mine for all heavy work (ide, video editing, Ableton) on battery. Why would you ever purchase a laptop you can't use lol.

I don’t intend to use it away from a socket so I dont want to conpromise 1% of the performance when plugged in by getting a lower power CPU that has better perf only when not plugged in. What CPU do you have that doesn’t throttle? It’s not an Intel H, I’m guessing an Intel U version, M1, or Ryzen then.

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen3 Review – with Linux

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aluminum for me is a big no-no considering that I always get static discharge from them.

I also distinctly remember the unnerving feeling of getting a tingling sensation on my wrists when having a macboook pro charging connecting to mains. I have only used them when clients specifically request it, but otherwise connect them to a workstation of my choice.

It is because it is not grounded. The leakage current then goes into the case.

Unfortunately it seems to be quite difficult to buy grounded usb-c chargers. Most of them seem to come with C7 cables with no ground.

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen3 Review – with Linux

#227
I still wonder what could have been if IBM just kept the Thinkpad lines. Those IBM-designed Thinkpads were built like tanks. Industrial. Legendary keyboards. I really miss those machines. I had some of the best coding sessions on them and can’t help but think Thinkpads played a role in creating that experience.

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen3 Review – with Linux

#228
post #227

I still wonder what could have been if IBM just kept the Thinkpad lines. Those IBM-designed Thinkpads were built like tanks. Industrial. Legendary keyboards. I really miss those machines. I had some of the best coding sessions on them and can’t help but think Thinkpads played a role in creating that experience.

One of my college seniors had one. It was such a beauty with that small yellow light bulb protruding from the top. Absolutely gorgeous experience.

I used to want one so much, none of the laptops since have ever enticed me like that, the MacBooks I use since then are nothing compared to that. Computing was so much fun those days (rosy eyed fallacy likely).

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen3 Review – with Linux

#229
post #193

Based on all the comments on HN about how great Thinkpads are supposed to be with Linux, I bought an X1-Extreme some time ago. From my experience, Linux support for Lenovo devices is terrible. ACPI, power management, and UEFI are consistently causing problems. Grub has an issue with the 4K display, causing it to render at about 1 FPS. The dual-GPU (Intel and nVidia) situation is unworkable under Linux. Suspend on lid…

Don't use Grub or any bootloader if you can avoid it. I haven't used Grub in 10 years. Load Linux directly as an EFI executable via the EFISTUB approach. You almost certainly only need to run two or three efibootmgr commands to accomplish this. For most people that means only the "Using UEFI directly" section is relevant. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/EFISTUB S3 suspend was removed as a default option by many hard…

> Don't use Grub or any bootloader if you can avoid it. I haven't used Grub in 10 years. Load Linux directly as an EFI executable via the EFISTUB approach.

I run Windows dual boot, since I need (native) Windows for certain work related tasks.

> S3 suspend was removed as a default option by many hardware manufacturers. You will likely need to enter the BIOS to change this.

It's on, S3 is not the problem

> There is a bug in 5.17.x kernels where suspend doesn't work with bluetooth enabled. It will be fixed soon.

I'm not running 5.17.

But frankly, I don't want to care about all this "oh, but you just have to do [insanely_technical_thing]"

Sure, if I invest $LOTS_OF_TIME in it, I might be able to fix most of the issues. But this is a $3000 professional laptop, which is supposed to have good Linux support. This machine is my work equipment and I chose this expensive machine so I don't have to tinker with this stuff. It should just work.

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen3 Review – with Linux

#230
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fwiw, i have a Thinkpad x395 with AMD Apu. It's mostly nice, but there are GPU driver issues that have been unsolved for almost 3 years now with that generation of ThinkPads (0). Let's hope such issues are sorted out for newer models (0) https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1870971

With such issues, don't expect Ubuntu to fix it while staying at the same kernel version. Instead, either try their HWE-stacks or upgrade to the intermediate non-LTS releases. Fedora, for example, will always use the latest upstream kernel while keeping the rest of the packages reasonably stable. Usually, this plays nicer with new hardware.

What gave the impression that I stay with lots releases? New kernels,.distro releases, different amdgpu ppas.... I've tried a lot of stuff, but these errors don't go away
Post reply on HN