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

Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen3 Review – with Linux

ernestas.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 492 posts

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen3 Review – with Linux

#351

Post by 323 »

JetSetWilly wrote: post #323
323 wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grounding doesn't make much sense for devices which are completely plastic encased. I get your point about "pass-through grounding" to the laptop, but then again, a lot of time the laptop is not connecting to a charging wire anyway.

The problem is - laptops used to have their own dedicated chargers. And generally speaking, they were grounded. Now we're moving to usb-c though, it means we've lost it being grounded. And many laptops are made of conductive materials so therefore it is an extremely minor annoyance and downside of usb-c. Also, I'm in the UK with its crap ring circuits packed with 240v/13amps. I'd rather have a ground when I'm one fau…

My understanding is that all chargers, GaN or not, are required to use a transformer to electrically separate the primary (wall input) from the secondary (charger output). So a fault directly connecting you to the wall circuit should not be possible with an authentic charger.

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen3 Review – with Linux

#352

Post by csdvrx »

pmontra wrote: post #99
faeriechangling wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I owned a Mac laptop a decade ago, I always had my laptop positioned near a power outlet. When I got laptops with more battery life, the charger is now used to charge the laptop overnight so I can use it throughout the next day. If you never use your battery, why own a laptop at all? Why not buy a Mac mini or an iMac?

A battery is nice as an integrated UPS, to be able to move the machine between rooms, put it into a bag for hours and resume from suspend in a different place without having to restart every single application, same thing over a night. About Macs, in my case I never liked their GUI since the very first Mac (the top bar, the menu, etc) and that's an instantaneous show stopper.

> About Macs, in my case I never liked their GUI since the very first Mac (the top bar, the menu, etc) and that's an instantaneous show stopper.

I'm a huge fan of the modern UI seen in Windows and Gnome where the "wasted" space of the title bar can show open tabs in Windows Terminal or Edge: with a minimized taskbar, the browser and the terminal can be used in fullscreen with 0 vertical space lost.

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen3 Review – with Linux

#353

Post by z2h-a6n »

323 wrote: post #293
faeriechangling wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I make a distinction between "Plastic" and "Carbon Fibre Reinforced Polymer with a magnesium roll cage" that this laptop uses. We don't think an aluminium bike is better than a carbon fibre bike, so why is an aluminium laptop better than a carbon fibre laptop? I mean aluminium has some nice advantages like heat dissipation but CFRP allows for much lighter laptops. If anything I prefer CRFP because of the weight advan…

> We don't think an aluminium bike is better than a carbon fibre bike Depends on how you define better. Carbon bikes are prone to catastrophic failure, and if you fall often are a bad idea. Of course, you might just say "just don't fall".

Out of curiosity, do you have any sources with actual evidence that carbon fiber is prone to catastrophic failure in bike frames/components, particularly compared to aluminum? From my (rather limited) research, there seems to be plenty of speculation and anecdotes online about the fragility of CF, but not much actual evidence of rates of catastrophic failure. My impression (not based on expertise or much evidence) is that properly designed CF is much stronger for a given weight than most metals, but can fail at relatively low loads if stressed in a way it wasn't designed for. As it applies to biking, I guess this would tend to mean that CF bikes are more likely to be structurally damaged because of a crash/fall, but not necessarily more likely to fail and cause a crash/fall. This of course supports your point that CF is not a good choice for someone who falls often.

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen3 Review – with Linux

#354

Post by klazutin »

bhaak wrote: post #245

> Lenovo is famous for their TrackPoint (that little red thing on the keyboard), but I am not sure if I’ll take the time to learn using it. Some say it’s far more precise and comfortable as you don’t have to lift your fingers from the keyboard. I might give it a shot sometime. Why buy a ThinkPad if you don't use its most important selling point?

I've also switched from a MacBook to a T14 Gen 1 about a year ago and the TrackPoint is the one problem I struggle with on Linux.

On Windows, it's buttery smooth and a joy to use. On Linux, the refresh rate tops out at 80 Hz, and if you so much as lightly touch the touchpad with your palm, it goes further down to ~45 Hz for the next few seconds. All of this makes for a very rough, jerky and imprecise movement.

I really want to use Linux on my T14, but this problem just makes the experience a pain. I really wonder if everybody recommending using TrackPoint and running Linux have somehow solved this issue?

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen3 Review – with Linux

#356

Post by vel0city »

avl999 wrote: post #333
l30n4da5 wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i mean, as far as wireless headphones/headsets are concerned, my counter-argument is this: I really don't like having a wire constantly tethering me to my desk. With my wireless headset, i can get up, walk around my office, throw something away, or walk out to the other room and grab a coke from the refrigerator; all without pausing my music or taking my headset off. I charge it at night and it is good all day. no wo…

I don't want to have to keep track of charging yet another device, esp one as important and frequently used as headphones. Heck, some days I forget to plug in my phone to charge let alone headphones. Not worth the headache esp when there is another version of the device available with "infinite battery life". If some people prefer wireless and don't mind having to deal the potential inconvenience of always having it…

My headphones (Sony WH-710n) have ~35 hours of battery life. That's a bit over 4 workdays of battery life. They seem to recharge from very low to full in less than an hour. So every few days I'll plug them in at my desk for about an hour, and I'm good for another few days. Its not too difficult for me to find up to an hour every four days to charge them. Its not like I'm having to micromanage charging them, needing to plug them in every night or else I don't have headphones at all the next day. And they charge off the same cable as a lot of the stuff in my bag already, USB-C.

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen3 Review – with Linux

#357

Post by ulrikrasmussen »

halotrope wrote: post #110

Generally great machines for Linux. Just a PSA from a X1E gen2 owner: Do NOT get the NVidia GPU, do NOT get the fastest CPU and most importantly: do NOT opt for the 4k screen. With 1080p and Intel GPU it is a good, even great laptop with ok battery life (if you can look over the touchpad). Wonderful keyboard, good Linux support (even fingerprint reader works). But just as with the last Intel macbook, the GPU, 10th ge…

Note that the newer P1/X1E Gen 4 have a much upgraded cooling system if you configure it with an Nvidia 3070 or higher. I don't experience any heat issues, even during heavy compilation and integration test work. The exception is if I run games at 4k resolution on an external monitor, then the GPU appears to overheat, resulting in the screen randomly going black.

See also https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkPad-P1-G4-laptop-r...

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen3 Review – with Linux

#358

Post by sudosysgen »

csdvrx wrote: post #348
sudosysgen wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Battery life is perfectly fine with an NVidia GPU on any modern laptop with Optimus or a MUX. You just have to set it up to fully power down the GPU. I get 9+ hours of battery life with a 3070 on Linux, it's just always fully powered down. Even at 1440p 240hz, pushing 2x more pixels than 4k60, I still get 5-6 hours of battery life. Yes, it sucks that you have to go through the weeds to get it to work, but once it wor…

> You just have to set it up to fully power down the GPU. Can you please tell us a bit more? I have a NVidia + Intel GPU. I was thinking about using the NVidia for KVM (the NVidia would be powered down when not using KVM), and the Intel for native linux display with Pop or Ubuntu 22 LTS as another attempt to use Wayland (since I read NVidia GPUs can cause many issues)

On modern Linux systems the way to do it is using PRIME render offload.

That way, the Intel (or AMD in my case) integrated GPU will be used normally, with the Nvidia GPU fully powered down (you need a new enough card for this). Then, when you need it, you can use a command or environment variable or graphical launcher to signal to use the dGPU for offloading.

The GPU will then power on and render to a virtual display, and the framebuffer will be copied to the framebuffer of the relevant application on-the-fly.

Once no more applications are using the NVidia GPU, it will power down.

This way, there is no need to use a KVM, or do PCI passthrough, or anything of the sort, it mostly "just works".

If the (very small) overhead of passing through the iGPU is too much and your laptop supports it, you can also using MUX graphics and restart the DM with a config that will allow the laptop to rewire the screen into the dGPU, but I have never found this necessary or helpful.

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen3 Review – with Linux

#360

Post by arminiusreturns »

ptsneves wrote: post #254
orangepurple wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

By not using Grub you lose the ability to fallback on a safe kernel. That may be quite dangerous depending on how reliable kernel update is for you. I have been saved by kernel fallbacks before. Double that for laptops whose ACPI drivers randomly break from version to version, as evidenced by your note on 5.17.x kernels. Regardless I sympathize, as I recently had a good deal of trouble updating from BIOS to UEFI. The…

This got me looking around at how one would load a luks or dm-crypt encrypted drive from efi without grub. I didn't find anything solid but I've used initram shims for stuff like that before so that might be an approach but at that point you might as well use grub which has some nice features built-in.

I guess I'm really curious what there is to gain by bypassing grub if anything?

Post reply on HN