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

261–270 of 492 posts

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen3 Review – with Linux

#261

Post by alluro2 »

I had to chime in that, if 14" vs 15.6" is not a deal breaker, P14s Gen 2 with Ryzen 5850U, 32GB RAM and integrated GPU is the most performant, silent, portable and generally capable laptop I ever had (and I've changed a lot).

I got greedy and switched to a MBP 14 with M1 Pro, which is also great, but almost everything (speakers and trackpad excepted) on P14s was either on par or even better (perf, ports, weight, noise, keyboard, build, screen, battery...). MBP is excellent, but I miss my Arch setup a lot and don't think I would miss anything from the MBP actually if I switched back.

I know Lenovo is going downwards with Thinkpad line, but P series seems to still hold well - for now at least :/

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen3 Review – with Linux

#262

Post by redundantly »

hackyhacky wrote: post #241
uxcolumbo wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been a Thinkpad user for the last 15 years. The body is extremely sturdy along with the hinges. It's not plastic - it's magnesium alloy. They are not flimsy or cheap. Have you ever used a trackpoint? It's extremely ergonomic and much better than a trackpad. It requires a bit of time to get used to it - but it's totally worth the time investment. And please don't make comments like 'Grandfather's laptop'. Just be…

TrackPoints are a fantastic feature and are one of the most important criteria keeping me on ThinkPads. The casual dismissal of TrackPoints in the grandparent comment shows that the author has never tried one.

> The casual dismissal of TrackPoints in the grandparent comment shows that the author has never tried one.

I've tried to use track points. A dozen or so times. Recently I got a new thinkpad from work and gave it another go, same result. I just don't like it.

Granted, the trackpad on my thinkpad is also garbage. I prefer my external trackball mouse.

Trackpoint fanatics don't seem to understand what works for them doesn't necessarily work for everyone. I find myself rolling my eyes a lot in threads like this.

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen3 Review – with Linux

#263

Post by NovemberWhiskey »

hackyhacky wrote: post #241
uxcolumbo wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been a Thinkpad user for the last 15 years. The body is extremely sturdy along with the hinges. It's not plastic - it's magnesium alloy. They are not flimsy or cheap. Have you ever used a trackpoint? It's extremely ergonomic and much better than a trackpad. It requires a bit of time to get used to it - but it's totally worth the time investment. And please don't make comments like 'Grandfather's laptop'. Just be…

TrackPoints are a fantastic feature and are one of the most important criteria keeping me on ThinkPads. The casual dismissal of TrackPoints in the grandparent comment shows that the author has never tried one.

I don't know - I have a long history of ThinkPads (and adjacent devices, including some oddities like the WorkPad z50) and I cannot imagine wanting to go back to a TrackPoint after experiencing a high-quality touchpad.

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen3 Review – with Linux

#264

Post by jeffbee »

gabereiser wrote: post #45

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…

Dropping a macbook on its stupid metal corner will total it. No thanks.

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen3 Review – with Linux

#265

Post by SailingCactus33 »

LeonM wrote: post #210
BeefWellington wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you used it without the dock? Because my experience with daily driving Linux at work for 10+ years with Thinkpads has been the complete opposite, with the exception of NVidia's driver garbage (which is just a problem with NVidia generally). My current work system is a P53 that has an Nvidia GPU though and it's been working very very well for me through updates and the like via dkms. The only other problem on tha…

> A bad dock can introduce a lot of problems. That's why I bought the $400 official Lenovo dock. Unfortunately, I can't do my daily work without the dock. (at least not without having to introduce numerous dongles and USB hubs, which may cause more issues)

I was unable to make the official dock work with my Lenovo (Fedora), but a usb-c dongle has been working without issues.

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen3 Review – with Linux

#266

Post by motiejus »

tommiegannert wrote: post #4

> 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. Who's still using this? I removed the red rubber because it was leaving residue on my screen.

I am. I use it so much that I buy lenovo external keyboards for my workstation.

Much easier to move the cursor "half a screen" while typing without moving hands off the keyboard.

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen3 Review – with Linux

#267

Post by bitL »

debacle wrote: post #231
augusto-moura wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most of the praise on Thinkpads comes from older versions, from IBM and the first Lenovos. I have an X220, and even though it's quite outdated hardware for today's world, it is still a very capable machine. The most recent laptops are very good, but their support of linux is lacking compared with the older ones. As a rule of thumb, I try to find the model page in arch wiki before any purchase, it should list…

The last ThinkPad I owned disintegrated in under a year. The chassis was so poorly made that it just crumbled with normal use. I have been buying Asus ever since. Not the prettiest machines but durable and reliable.

I have a Zephyrus G15 with 5800u/RTX3080/40GB/3TB and with the 5.15 kernel it works flawlessly on Linux Mint. I use it more often than MBP these days. The only drawback is no DisplayPort for VR.

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen3 Review – with Linux

#268

Post by hef19898 »

halotrope wrote: post #250
hef19898 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate non-dedicated GPUs with a vengeance. As a gamer, they never are up to par anyway, and never were. Even way back, Windows struggled balancing both. So you had to switch one of them off. I get that they are useful for non-GPU heavy use cases, in a gaming machine I can perfectly live with dGPUs. As a result, I never tried the Intel GPU under Ubuntu.

Yes agreed. But as a gamer a thin Thinkpad running Linux would not be my first choice anyways.

The X1E Gen 2 was a nice compromise between a business and a gaming laptop. For the first 2 years it ran Windows anyways, now it is dual boot. With some exceptions, mostly older games, it runs my complete Steam library just fine. And for those rare occasions it doesn't, I can still boot it in Windows.

Linux, well Ubuntu, is refreshing to use. First time I tried Linux, and it feels a lot more like an OS should feel. Not crap or bloat ware, no calling home, no cloud account.

The machine does get hot sometimes, getting some more air under it mitigates this all the time, the X1 doesn't have a lot of space under it.

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen3 Review – with Linux

#269

Post by alluro2 »

green7ea wrote: post #215
tazjin wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an AMD Thinkpad (X13 AMD 2nd gen) and it's one of the most frustrating devices I've had in years. Linux support is superficially fine, but in continuous use lots of tiny, annoying incompatibilities (and sometimes pretty significant impairments) show up. There's a set of known hardware issues (e.g. unable to resume from suspend, USB ports stop working until hardware reset is performed through the pinhole, ...)…

That's funny. I have a Thinkpad P14s for work and an HP x360 for personal use which are both running Linux with AMD. They have the best Linux support I've ever seen. The graphics drivers are especially nice, fast and bug free. I can't image ever going back to Intel. The only thing that bothers me is that lack of S3 sleep on the HP but that was a choice by HP and can the ACPI tables can be patched in the BIOS.

Same here! With Intel-based Thinkpads, especially X1 Yoga Gen 6, frequent issues in Linux. But Yoga Slim 7 with 4800U and afterwards P14s Gen 2 with 5850U, amazing experience, and the latter is the best laptop overall I ever had (including MPB 14 that I'm using now).

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen3 Review – with Linux

#270

Post by smoldesu »

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…

I mean, that's not entirely true. You can chroot into your box and change your kernel if something goes horrifically wrong, the situation isn't as unsalvageable as you paint it out to be.
Post reply on HN