Disclaimer: I am a Red Hatter. We get Thinkpads/Lenovos since years, we install RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) or Fedora on them. I started back a long time ago with a X31, after that a X40, an X220, a X230, X1 2nd gen and am now on a X1 carbon 7th gen. They have been rock solid for me, except the x220 which loved to bork the hard drive for unknown reasons every 4-6 months.
Lenovo has listened and acted on our requests in a very good way, the Linux support has become better and better over the years, IMHO and experience.
So no, this rant does notbresonate with me and my 16 years experience at all.
Oh, FTR, none of my laptops had nVidia graphics. Intel graphics has always been Good Enough(tm) for my use case (travelling evangelist who presents at conferences and wants enough oomph for some demos on the laptop itself with virtualisation and/or containers).
Nvidia graphics causing problems on laptops is a known issue that only Nvidia can fix by opening up more.
This has largely been my experience as well, also using Fedora but I doubt that matters much. I rarely have issues, in comparison to the endless stream of ACPI and other hurdles other people seem to be going through with their laptops. Also LVFS is a godsend, I wish every vendor ever participated. I get updates even for my thunderbolt dock.
Lenovo is very nice hardware to run Linux. As you say, they even care about updating firmware.
However, there are a few things that IMHO are holding them back:
* In EU, sales and support are outsourced (to Digital River Ireland Ltd). Support is a disgrace. Sales are also bad, as pricing is ridiculous compared to the US (often 1.5-2x more expensive than Apple) and most models are released late. Besides, they often sell open-box machines as brand new. If the want to compare to Apple, Lenovo should try to have unified global sales and guarantee.
* They sell way too many Thinkpad variants, so they often release some that are unpolished. Lenovo should consolidate their lineup into fewer models.
* They are lagging back with processor updates, compared to other PC manufacturers or non-Thinkpad Lenovos. Thinkpads are often sold with previous generation Intel CPUs. Models with AMD variants are seldomly available.
> In EU, sales and support are outsourced (to Digital River Ireland Ltd).
AMD happens to use this company for orders on their own site as well. If anyone wants to see how bad an e-commerce experience can be, I suggest they try to order something from AMD.com
It used to be even worse, but it seems they at least figured out that billing and shipping addresses can differ, and instead of ignoring most of the EU countries, they now ignore only about half of them.
The AMD subreddit also had a few threads about this.
Lenovo bought the x86 line, including all facilities and staff, from IBM, and produced last few generations of IBM branded devices.
The Thinkpad design team is still operating from the same ex-IBM facilities in Japan, iirc, even keeping some place-related naming in the internal codenames (X220/X230 and related T420/T430 were "Nozomi", iirc based on my spelunking in firmware)
My first Thinkpad was a T41P, in between a series from the Xs, then back to T now that the Ts are so easy to carry. I never used Windows on them, first a mix of different distros, then when Ubuntu was released, Ubuntu.
I never had any issues, only on the X220, the SD flash reader was borking my cards and I had to get an external flash reader.
I cannot imagine using something different. So my experience is a bit like yours, this for 20+ years.
Thanks for sharing your experience. As a distro maintainer, do you have access to the complete datasheets of the entire laptop in order to provide decent drivers? Maybe even the source code of the reference Windows drivers?
If so, maybe you could "pressure" your contacts over at Lenovo to get them published once and for all so systems/distros can provide decent support?
Most drivers are upstreamed anyways, nowadays. We get some early access and work with that, but the resulting code is always upstreamed and open source, so feel free to use that code at any time.
There's a difference between drivers being upstreamed to the Linux kernel, and a datasheet being available. The source code is not the datasheet, and if there are bugs in the driver, where is the datasheet to compare the implementation to?
When it comes to hardware, source code availability is not sufficient.
Other OS platforms can have different driver architectures, different kernel ABIs and other platform quirks in comparison to Linux, and having to reverse engineer a driver for another platform from a Linux kernel driver is not very open. And then there are licensing considerations to be taken into account as well.
Linux is not the only opensource operating system in existence :-/ And for a project like Haiku, we don't have the people-power to reverse engineer Linux drivers, and again, the question of the GPL also applies when our kernel & drivers are MIT licensed.
As a software maintainer/distributor, I don’t think we at Red Hat are the ones responsible to publish data sheets. That’s the job of the hardware manufacturer/vendor. When they decide to only offer it in non-public ways but allow us to help with getting the drivers upstream AND open source, it is a deal you might not like, but I, as a pragmatist can accept. We’re not the only Linux distributor working this way. Ubuntu/Canonical and SUSE don’t work that different from us on this. Again. You may not like it, and I understand that, but it has lead to making Linux a first class OS on Lenovo with an upstream first goal. I like it that way, even if it can become even better and more open.
> As a software maintainer/distributor, I don’t think we at Red Hat are the ones responsible to publish data sheets.
I don't think the parent commenter suggested you are responsible for publishing the material. However, it would be great to have vocal support from distro maintainers to encourage hardware manufacturers to publish them in order to provide better support across all systems. If only, to have more transparency about what parts of "supported hardware" are actually supported by the distro drivers, and what specific datasheet references could be requested through other venues (such as directly asking the manufacturer).
Of course not. It just gets more to the point of the original article. Whilst publishing and upstreaming driver source code for Linux is awesome, it's still only a half-measure in the overall picture of things being truly open, and we should try to demand more from hardware manufacturers. But we don't really have much sway in those regards, and it's disappointing as an OS-enthusiast, and a Haiku developer.
> the resulting code is always upstreamed and open source
Are you saying there is 0 binary blobs involved in running a modern Thinkpad? I find that hard to believe (although i would love it). I'm guessing there's a few blobs in the kernel tree itself, and even more firmware blobs the kernel doesn't even know about.
On the topic of how Linux deals very little with actual hardware on modern machines, i really enjoyed this talk called "It's time for operating systems to rediscover hardware" [0]
No. I specifically said drivers, not firmware blobs. As long as these blobs are freely redistributable, I personally have no problems with them. I understand some people do and that is understandable, but I don’t subscribe to that. This started at a time where non-volatile memory for firmware became a cost factor and companies decided to save a few bucks on the BoM and upload the blob as part of the initialisation/boot process. Which is fine with me.
I think it is quite possible there is few if any binary blobs. I have a Lenovo X1 and everything pretty much works out of the box on base Arch Linux (and Debian before that). I think it also helps that my X1 has Intel graphics, Intel Wi-Fi, etc which has very good support which I know is not a given for others (e.g. Broadcom Wi-Fi, Nvidia graphics, et al). It is easily the best Linux experience I've ever had.
> I have a Lenovo X1 and everything pretty much works out of the box on base Arch Linux
I'd be curious to know if it actually works well with linux-libre (Linux without the binary blobs). It's apparently not maintained as a distro package but is available on the AUR.
Moreover, I'm still curious if all hardware functions without its own binary blobs. For example, is the networking firmware really free and replaceable, or is the proprietary firmware interoperable with a FLOSS driver? Likewise, is the entire system libreboot-able?
Sorry for nitpicking, i'm just looking for precise answer to a topic that's not widely questioned/debated to my knowledge.
Correct, i'm slightly abusing semantics. I'm mixing them both under the category of "software that should be under user control", and interested about the FLOSS support for both.
When firmware was stored in ROM/EEPROM, most FOSS folks had no problem with it. It was considered part of the hardware, so not that relevant. But when these were moved out of non-volatile memory (mostly for cost reasons), that changed the picture for some. While the result, after booting, is effectively the same. So no, I am not on the side that sees firmware blobs as something that MUST be made open. It would be good if it were, definitely. But it’s not a deal breaker for me, as long as the blobs are freely redistributable, for example via fwupd. Again, that’s my personal opinion.
> While the result, after booting, is effectively the same.
I'm not sure it's exactly the same. First, because having embedded firmware formed an incentive for hardware manufacturers to test stuff and fix bugs before hitting the market. Second, because who gets to push updates to our machine has serious political/security implications. We have reached a situation where the OS we choose to run has less and less control over our computing, and i find that worrying.
> it’s not a deal breaker for me, as long as the blobs are freely redistributable
Thanks for your explanation. I can completely respect this position, although i personally disagree. If you ever get the chance to bring up the issue (libre firmware/drivers and librebooting), please spare a minute to raise our disenchantment and mention the possibility to work with other distros (such as Debian, who also has ties to Lenovo) hand-in-hand with hardware manufacturers to improve the situation for everyone.
I don't exactly have any hope for it, but having Lenovo publish its entire hardware specs and playing nice with maintainers to provide libre firmware would definitely inspire confidence in their hardware. For the moment, it seems only Librem and Pine64 (and a few others) are manufacturers that can be approached on that topic. But like the original author (mmu_man) suggested, software freedom should be for everyone, not just people investing in specific hardware... and i'm pretty sure he would be thrilled to work on Haiku support for his Lenovo hardware given proper documentation ;)
Lenovo laptops gave me the best Linux experience out of the box, my only problems have been with the NVidia graphic card, but as others have said that's a known issue and is not Lenovo's fault, even though it got better with time and right now I'm running Plasma+Wayland on Debian testing and apart some hit and miss with copy/paste, it worked great so far.
Same. I haven't tried that many different vendors, but Linux on Lenovo's is by far the most supported of all the Asus, HP, Sony, and random others I've tried. At least with onsite support the technical person understand and knows what they're working with.
I never understood how some people seem to not know that Lenovo and IBM are not the same company. When Lenovo, a completely different company, bought the rights to manufacture IBM products in 2005, the Think* brand was no longer IBM. The author states, eventually, his point being that Lenovo lost it’s mojo, but it never had any. The Thinkpads people remember with mojo were the IBM ones, and some Lenovo branded ones after the handoff, but that’s really just residual “mojo” from the old teams and processes. Lenovo was never good, and really isn’t now, and has a long record of bad behavior.
At this point I wouldn’t buy any non-Lenovo laptop.
I don’t know any other brand (excluding framework) that has a web page where I can enter the model number of my laptop and buy any part and order it and repair the laptop myself.
I will only buy a Lenovo laptop if it comes with a BSD and Linux friendly WiFi chipset. Most of their laptops are whitelist-only when it comes to WiFi cards, and tracking down the correct brand and revision of a specific compatible module is not worth the time invested. I have a stack of older Lenovo laptops that I've acquired in an attempt to reverse-engineer the BIOS/UEFI whitelists. Smarter people than me have been able to make it work on certain models, but overall Lenovo seems to detest the idea of a power user daring to switch to a better/more compatible WiFi module, despite their reputation for being "hacker's laptops".
It's for this reason the next, and probably last, laptop I buy will be the Framework.
I’ve had 3 so far. All upgrades the wifi from 5 to 6e and had no issues with ubuntu, manjaro, or windows with changing between Realtek?, killer, and ONK. Tho all are supporting amd/intel and windows/linux. Some Brand’s are intel only.
And yet you find very little information about the actual hardware in recent Lenovos. For example, i had the unpleasant surprise to discover that M.2 2242 in modern Thinkpads only supports wireless cards, and that i had just purchased a rare-to-find (in my area) 2242 SSD for nothing.
Don't even get me started on how ** the hardware is now to open and replace parts, compared to my previous T60. (soldered RAM? really?)
EDIT: I'm not at all claiming other mainstream vendors are any better. I've never found any decent hardware besides old Thinkpads and Macs.
I recently installed a Toshiba RC100 into my T480's WWAN slot. Are the newer models worse in this aspect? The T480 is not the newest, but still pretty modern.
HP also does it and they even have videos on youtube from hp support explaining how to replace each of the parts.
Lenovo has lost a lot of the quality in comparison. Typos in documentation and invoices, all kinds of support service nightmares even for people with most expensive support policies, X1 Extreme G4 shitty heatsink, thermal throttling to 800MHz, just take a look at forums.lenovo.com
Currently the only internal parts actually for sale are RAM, a subset of the SSDs, and the heatsink. I can't wait until I can buy some replacement parts for my framework laptop from their marketplace, but that day is definitely not here yet.
Not yet, no (though I'd love a different keyboard). But the slightly paraphrased conversation I'm replying to is:
"Framework laptop lets you buy parts"
"They don't sell parts yet though"
"Yes they do, see the marketplace"
When in fact the marketplace is almost entirely populated with placeholders, and they do not yet sell replacements for the vast majority of parts (including the battery, which to me is the "killer feature").
This is oversimplified if not wrong. You make it sound something like Lenovo bought the ThinkPad brand long after IBM stopped making them.
They bought all the know how, engineers, a full rnd lab iirc. The first couple generations of Lenovo ThinkPads were very similar if not indistinguishable from the IBM ones, and I agree with most people here that even current models are still among the best laptops you can get.
I dont know I used both IBM Thinkpads, and Lenovo ThinkPad's including current gen.
I do not find Lenovo ThinkPads to be any worse than the business offers from Dell, or HP. In some ways they are better, in some ways there are worse
I would avoid the non-Think* lines, as just like with the Consumer lines of Dell they suck...
They did introduce a Think branded L line recently, these I are approaching that consumer level branded as business line, but the T and P series are still very good IMO
> And let's not forget the excellent Linux support on the thinkpad line (partially thanks to Ubuntu?).
From what I heard, mostly thanks to thankless employees at Red Hat who get these machines for work and batter them into submission (by reverse-engineering the hardware and writing device drivers). Lenovo only deserves the middle finger here.
That relationship has become a lot better over the years. We get early access to new hardware, Lenovo did a lot to get fwupd integrated, etc.
No OEM preload necessary on the business line machines. RHEL/Fedora installs just fine OOTB. Some problems remain, especially with Thunderbolt (docking stations) but that’s not just Lenovos fault, IMHO.
It's not a monolithic solid entity, is it? As I see it, those doing actual work deserve praise and respect (Red Hat does a lot of kernel and low-level plumbing work), while management is… typical management. Same as Mozilla and some other companies.
Never had a P, but had my hands on recent Ts and Xs and they're definitely an order of magnitude worse than their respective ancestors. They're much harder to crack open and replace parts (some even have RAM soldered to the motherboard!), the shell is much more fragile, and there's so many tiny hardware failures that they're hard to list... my two favorites:
- something with the internal speakers/cables preventing it from making sound in a pseudo-random way (some positioning of the computer reliably triggers it, but there's no reliable position to have sound)
- lid detection sensor going crazy and putting systems to sleep because the screen has just moved a little... i can't explain to you how confused was the person who came to me with this problem that the laptop was going to sleep automatically and thought it was haunted or virused :) (and of course no BIOS option to disable the faulty sensor, we had to disable sleep mode on the OS)
Even the modern Ts (professional series) don't have a CDROM drive anymore. Being able to replace it with a second SSD/HDD was definitely a cool feature.
> Even the modern Ts (professional series) don't have a CDROM drive anymore.
Missing a DVD drive I * might* be able to understand, but CD-ROM? That ship has sailed, latest with universal support for USB boot or booting via network, IMHO.
This is all true, however my comments was comparing them to modern competitors on the market today, not the older ThinkPad which IMO is an unfair comparion and it unlikely IBM would have continued or been any different in the modern market as customers are demanding lighter, thinner laptops and have generally not rejected non-repairable non-upgradable options
Every major laptop vendor is going to the soldered ram, non-repairable, units. I dont like it, but to say "Lenovo is trash" because of that but then not acknowledge that Dell, HP,Apple, Microsoft, etc are all the same way is deceptive
Soldered RAM is smaller and cheaper. Optical drives are comparatively huge. These things are all reasonable trade-offs.
Also, you can still use a second drive; I have the NVME drive and added a 3.5" SSD I had lying around. Not all models have that obviously, but not all models had the UltraBay either.
The nice thing about the x220 at least when I got mine was that they where retired fleet laptops so you could get them dirt cheap and throw a few new components in them. I dread the day that the CPU and graphics are finally truly obsolete...
i think the fact that people associate Lenovo “thinkpads” with quality products says a lot about how much “mojo” the ibm “thinkpad” brand had. and in hindsight that ibm > lenovo deal was a bad deal for ibm.
I think it's an indicator of how bad other brands are. I bought my first Thinkpad in 2019 and (with the exception that its battery is internal) like it way more than my previous HP (1), Dell (1 personal/3 work), and Asus (2) laptops.
> in hindsight that ibm > lenovo deal was a bad deal for ibm.
IBM got out of an industry they didn't want to be in, but they still have a lot of positive brand feelings, and a large stake in Lenovo (not sure if they still hold that). Where's the bad for IBM?
They sold off their PC server line to Lenovo about a decade later, so clearly the first deal wasn't too bad.
IBM seems to want to focus on Enterprise, so getting rid of things that individuals use, while still having relationships to sell them (because individuals exist in the enterprise), seems to work for them. After IBM bought SoftLayer, Lenovo servers started showing up instead of SuperMicro.
There's a reason I went with an overpriced Clevo from System76. It has it's warts and the build quality really isn't there for how much I paid. But I turn it on, and everything works. I enjoyed compiling the kernel and chasing down little problems on desktop linux machines when I was a lot younger, but now I just want a laptop I can rely on and get things done with. Without knowing any specifics and not really caring, it was easy to glean that Lenovo had burned the ThinkPad's reputation some time ago when I was planning my last purchase... I'm having a hard time sympathizing with the author.
> The LCD. Ok, 3k was a bad idea, I hate not seeing individual pixels
This is sort of representative of TFA for me. He's whining too much.
I've been using a ThinkPad X1-Carbon that came with Linux pre-installed straight from Lenovo, and I've really had no major issues with it. If someone's looking for a solid Linux laptop experience, that's where I'd steer them these days.
Author appears to be complaining (among many other things) that attempting to retrofit machines that came pre-installed with Windows to run GNU/Linux doesn't work well, and... It never has. Not once. I can name zero experiences in my lifetime doing that where it was relatively painless. I perceive this to be not a "machines aren't flexible" problem, but a "machines come out of the factory with ten thousand complex configurations tuned to work correctly with each other, and when you rip out a piece as large as 'the operating system,' half those configurations are now tuned wrong (and the OS was holding another half of them)" problem.
On this ThinkPad, the only time I've run into issues is when I switched out the window manager. Turns out, the WM's configuration is implicitly tied to a half-dozen features (audio selection power management, etc.) that don't "just keep working" if you replace it. Should I be blaming Ubuntu for that, or should I accept that some pieces of the OS are big enough to be disruptive if you swap them out?
Nobody is optimizing for the "get some hardware and retrofit an entirely new OS into it" use case; that way will forever be a gravel-strewn road. If you want a smooth road, get the OS you want from the factory.
Just a few days ago I installed Arch Linux on a ThinkPad P15 Gen 1 with X Server and i3wm for wm, disk encryption, multiple displays and it works very well. Heck, even the touch screen is working OOB without any special configuration. I've always been installing Arch Linux on ThinkPads that came with Windows pre installed. There are minor issues at times with backlight control or sound system which is mostly due to my minimal setup but overall I don't feel that ThinkPads don't play well with Linux.
Running NixOS unstable on a ThinkPad X1 Carbon 7th gen. Sway tiling wm, Wayland, fractional scaling, damn long battery life, hardware acceleration on Firefox, fingerprint reader all work 100%.
I'm surprised how good this is, and I've been using ThinkPads for a long time. This model works way better even compared to the mighty X230 I still love and adore as a great product from the past.
I bought a ThinkPad X1 that came with Windows. Had no trouble changing that to a dual boot arrangement with Debian. Kept that for a few months until I realized I was going weeks without booting into Windows. Ended up making the switch to a full Arch Linux installation with no Windows. Has worked well. I have a fingerprint scanner but haven't bothered with it—that worked poorly under Windows anyway so never used even under Windows.
The most common problem I run into is power management. About 50% of the laptops I've installed Ubuntu on that were originally configured for Windows will correctly sleep or suspend when the lid is closed.
Of the distros I've used, Ubuntu is the one that works most reliably if I throw it on random PCs.
> Author appears to be complaining (among many other things) that attempting to retrofit machines that came pre-installed with Windows to run GNU/Linux doesn't work well, and... It never has. Not once. I can name zero experiences in my lifetime doing that where it was relatively painless.
As usual, YMMV, but I've been running Linux with almost no issues on an HP ProBook. The only thing that doesn't work is the fingerprint reader. Bluetooth, custom secure boot keys, Wi-Fi, great battery life [0], sleep, hibernation, etc. worked without any fiddling on Arch Linux.
As far as I know HP doesn't offer these computers with Linux. I'm not even sure you can get them without Windows.
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[0] Great as in "comparable to what Windows gets on the same hardware".
> GNU/Linux doesn't work well, and... It never has. Not once.
Those from the past didn't fall under a Linux certification program though. That seems to be a main point of the rant:
> And you take risks too. When you sell “certified” ThinkPads with Linux, do you understand you are actually certifying that this machine will run correctly with drivers written by people who had to guess how the hardware should be used because vendors like you didn’t properly document it in the first place? Isn’t this mind-boggling?
So this is a little funny, but I just got my Thinkpad X1 Carbon a few days ago with Fedora preinstalled. I booted it up to the Fedora installation, then the machine rebooted. After it rebooted, a Windows loading screen appeared, followed by a pop-up DOS prompt that entered some commands, followed by another reboot into the Fedora installation.
I haven't seen any evidence of Windows since, but that creeped me out. Can anyone explain what was going on, there?
Also, of course, I had to completely wipe the hard drive and install my own version of Fedora to be totally comfortable after that.
Exactly. Would you install macOS on a Lenovo and expect it to work? No? Then why are you doing the same with Linux? Buy hardware that your software supports.
That was the author's point. Hardware manufacturers should sell hardware and provide detailed specs. If they're not providing specs, they're failing their mission and just releasing crappy binary drivers for Windows which may or may not work in the future, and require reverse engineering for other systems to support.
Just respect standards and/or publish your datasheets. That should be a requirement to sell any kind of hardware. I can't believe it's legal for a company to sell a washing machine without schematics, even less so an entire computer!
If the hardware manufacturers don't publish docs/schematics, then systems can't support the hardware and we end up in this special hell-hole that IT hardware industry has been stuck in for about two decades now.
Ah, thanks so much! I was under the impression nobody got my point. Maybe because it was written under stress and emotion, or it's missing some arguments, I don't know.
Thank you so much for writing it. I could feel your pain, and it was really liberating for me to read it. Often i feel very disconnected from people's seemingly pleasant experiences with modern hardware, it's always reassuring to read other people's detailed thoughts and feelings about why everything is wrong and broken.
It was painless for me on an X201. True, I never got the resolution switch function keys to work properly, but an Lubuntu installation went just fine (my first one was in 2015 IIANM).
I can recommend that iPhone video he links to[1]. It shows the switching of the mainboard between two identical Apple phones and goes through all the somewhat surprising consequences, including them both claiming not to be using genuine Apple hardware anymore.
It's like that to protect consumers. If you want your phone to have cryptographic integrity, then all the parts have to share keys. Otherwise, if the police wanted to look inside your phone, they could easily bypass all the cryptography with a custom part that either extracts the keys from the other components or disables encryption entirely.
It's an unfortunately consequence of a secure device.
> It's an unfortunately consequence of a secure device.
No, that's bullshit, and it saddens me that on the day where everyone is finally coming up to learn that not only Google is evil but that even the stuff Google does "in the name of privacy" is still evil, people still give Apple a free pass for the very same shady behavior.
I can think of a million ways to make this "cryptographic integrity" that do not have the side effect of making repair impossible. For example, and even the video author mentions it, why not allow "pairing" the motherboard with the new components after a secure wipe of the data?
And that's just the first obvious thing. But even if it was completely impossible to do this "cryptographic integrity" without impacting repairability (which it isn't), which of these scenarios do you think worries the average iPhone customer more: an evil-maid replaces the $300 screen on their iPhone with a compromised one in order to get to their passcode; or: Apple trying to charge $800 in order to repair the same $300 screen which their toddler broke ?
Let's not give these companies a pass on their obviously anti-competitive behavior just because they claim to do in the name of "privacy" or "security".
All designs are trade-offs. The number of people that want to swap a logic board is pretty tiny. It would probably be pretty hard to justify the extra expanse based on customer benefit.
Apple seems to know what they are doing considering how happy their customers are.
> The number of people that want to swap a logic board is pretty tiny.
You misunderstand the implications of the video. It means you can't replace most of the parts. Swapping the mainboard is the same thing as swapping all the parts at the same time. What this means is that this phone is not repairable. Everyone wants to be able repair their phones.
The design is foolish from a security and ownership standpoint if it iss as you say it is and, yeah, the trade off to that is that you can't repair it, which as the video accuses may be the primary purpose of using the foolish design.
Indeed, this level of security is mostly needed for a very small percent of the user base, those concerned with being spyed upon.
That doesn't mean it shouldn't be address, but then repairability concerns many more people directly (and their pocket). There were other ways to achieve the same goal if it was solely for privacy.
For the people who need that security, it's often over something that could get them physically harmed or even killed. For example, there are a lot of places where simply being part of a homosexual relationship could mean death if discovered.
I don't mind paying a little bit more if it means people living under certain regimes have a better chance at survival.
People in this thread have repeatedly explained how the data could be wiped when regenerating the security keys. So Apple isn’t doing anything here but controlling everything to effectively lock out third party repairs.
But sure if they really want to remove all competition for security reasons, they could certainly show good faith by doing all repairs entirely at cost thereby removing any profit motive.
I personally gave up on Lenovo after trying several of their modern laptops and running into constant issues. The last one was a C940 specced out to the max, and for such a premium laptop costing nearly $2000 it was an embarrassment. Windows came with bloatware, I ran into several issues trying to run Linux, the battery life was so-so, and the performance wasn’t even that impressive.
I realized that modern Lenovos aren’t even that repairable or upgradeable (even the Thinkpad line) so hell… might as we’ll get a Mac right? I picked up a used M1 Macbook Air for $700 and have been absolutely blown away. Battery life, performance, display, speakers, the thing blows away any Thinkpad I’ve owned. Sure, impossible to repair or upgrade, but it’s not like you can change out the CPU/RAM/graphics on modern Thinkpads either.
That’s fair, some models do still have serviceable RAM. From picking random models on Lenovo’s site and googling them it seems to be the majority of advertised models that are non-upgradeable. That said, even if you can swap it out, a RAM upgrade only gets you so far. Your display, webcam, CPU, wifi, graphics etc all stay behind. In my opinion the age of upgrading laptops easily is behind us - for years, adding RAM and an SSD was the way to rejuvenate an old laptop, but even if a modern laptop is upgradeable I don’t see these things really helping much.
Truthfully, I found hard following the article. It seems many topics (hardware, software, ethics, Microsoft monopoly, smartphones, and others) smashed together. Most of them being generic commentary on current status quo (e.g. UEFI).
Then I wasn't clear enough because it's all linked together for me. The UEFI mention was not just for a commentary, but to back the discussion on the monopoly.
And I think you missed some conclusions I drew from all this that I don't recall reading anywhere else.
Well, if you're the author, it will be weird if it didn't made sense to you. The argument I'm making isn't that all this information is out of place, as indeed they all link together, but that many of those (specifically the things I mentioned) apply to every manufacturer. So it's kinda strange when the subject is about Lenovo and read all those which aren't specific to Lenovo.
Yes they apply to the others as well, but also to them, and fact is it's Lenovo machines I bought. And for once the lesson is not directed at Apple. But I understand it can be disconcerting.
I should probably try to rework this generic part into its own article someday.
> So yes, you can install GNU/Linux, but it’s far from an easy experience. All thanks to Microsoft. And to the companies writing those buggy firmwares.
Has he even tried installing Linux on it before publishing this rant?
It works OOB on pretty much all machines, even with secure boot turned on. Worst case scenario, you can just turn secure boot off.
I seriously don’t get why people are still making a big deal out of this, 10 years or more since this was first arriving as a concern.
As it turned out, there’s still nobody preventing us from installing Linux on our PCs. Instead we only have one extra option if we want to improve the security of our boot process.
Trying to cut through all the right to repair stuff to get to the actual ThinkPad issue... it seems that the GPU has Linux support issues because it uses PCIe in a way the Linux driver doesn't expect. But isn't that an Nvidia problem? Is Lenovo really going to work with Nvidia to make sure they have a working driver for Linux? That's asking a lot for a very small segment of thinkpad users.
They do have ThinkPads that are certified to work with Linux, ship with linux, and have Nivida Graphics
The W541 is not one of those models...
Lenovo has one of the best websites for looking up their models, and configuration. I am not aware of any other vendor that has anything like it. Pick a model, then filter by OS. The T15 as an example has plenty of models with Linux Support
Beyond the GNU/Linux debate [0], there's some interesting points in there.
[0] Today i learnt: Haiku should not be called GNU/Haiku because Haiku is the entire system and not just the kernel, and rms (to my surprise) approves this interpretation
Right, same as how the BSDs are just themselves (natively, that is; things like Debian kFreeBSD loop back to being GNU/kFreeBSD or so). Linux is actually pretty rare in being just the kernel.
Linux is the operating system. It manages hardware and provides system calls. It's possible to write software that Linux boots directly into, no user space at all.
This GNU/Linux stuff comes from POSIX's definition of operating system. That piece of paper says operating systems have all these little commands like cp, mv, etc. Therefore, GNU gets to be part of the operating system because it provides those commands. It doesn't have to be this way though, especially on Linux where one can just trash all the GNU stuff and obtain or write custom software directly on top of the kernel.
> But do you run a lot of software that works without glibc and other userland utilities?
Yes. I made a few of these utilities for my own use. I actually started developing a Linux system call library to facillitate this but then I discovered the kernel developers themselves already made one for their own tools.
People can include this awesome header file in a freestanding C project and enjoy making 100% dependency-free Linux binaries. No C standard library cruft anywhere. It's amazing. You could boot Linux directly into one of these things just by writing init=/my/program in the kernel command line. You'd need to do some init stuff like mounting procfs and sysfs but it's totally fine. I've even seen graphical software running this way with OpenGL ES on top of kernel interfaces for mode setting and buffer management, people could even make video games that run this way. I really want to get into this.
Hope to see more links on that topic popping up on HN. Are you aware, beyond "raw" OpenGL, of any GUI/TUI frameworks for Go/Rust that would work this way?
> Are you aware, beyond "raw" OpenGL, of any GUI/TUI frameworks for Go/Rust that would work this way?
I'd like to know as well. My most recent discovery was RetroArch, a really good frontend for many emulators. It's not freestanding but it does support OpenGL graphics with Linux kernel mode setting and generic buffer management.
>But do you run a lot of software that works without glibc and other userland utilities
More and more as time goes on. Most applications written in Go do not require libc. Some of my servers have nothing on them but a few Go applications, like influxdb + prometheus + grafana. Theoretically you can strip out everything but the kernel (and replace systemd with something extremely lightweight, maybe also written in Go), but mainstream distributions don't make this easy, and what's the point anyway.
If we go down this route, we might as well name everything installed in user space. I'm running an i3/GNU/systemd/custom Linux system on my laptop. When do we stop?
Sure, it's totally possible to install GNU software on other operating systems. You can install it on Linux, the BSDs, even Windows. They're just regular programs.
I believe "Debian GNOME", "Manjaro KDE", or "guix sway" are very valid answers to "what system are you running?", don't you? I wouldn't list all userspace components for sure, but some can be relevant to include.
"GNU/Linux" is a relevant label to me so i know we're talking about a system which has common POSIX-inspired utilities... "Linux" can be Android for all i know, which is a very different system.
I agree. It makes complete sense to mention the distribution you're using. Saying you use Debian is much better than saying GNU/Linux. People understand perfectly what sort of software Debian distributes, there is no need to mention anything else.
Mentioning that I use Arch Linux annoys people for some reason so I stopped doing that. I just say I use Linux.
I was pointing out that most definitions of operating system I've seen say it's a kernel plus a userspace, and that Linux, the kernel, is a replaceable component.
I know about that page. I've read it. I just don't agree with it. Just because it's written in a FAQ doesn't mean it automatically refutes arguments when cited. It just represents GNU's opinon on the matter, an opinion I don't agree with.
The percentage of Linux's contribution doesn't really matter. Operating systems manage hardware and support the execution of programs. That's what Linux does. To me, most of GNU is just wrappers around Linux system calls plus some additional logic. The most significant GNU program being GCC of course.
I think this way because I'm a programmer who likes working with small Linux systems. GNU takes the perspective of a user of POSIX-like systems.
> The percentage of Linux's contribution doesn't really matter.
I think all useful code should matter, not just that which you like more. GNU "wrappers" are used by people a lot, and to most people Linux would be totally useless without them.
Personally, unless you need discrete graphics, I would strongly recommend people who want to use Linux, Haiku-os etc to just get a Framework laptop. The manufacturer actually provides enough detail on their hardware to facilitate OS support. I have one and it's great. I've basically lost interest in every other PC manufacturer's laptops, but I will conceded I don't require larger screens or nVidia/AMD graphics.
Lenovo is a for-profit corporation which believes it will make more money by not supporting non-Windows OSes, particularly Linux-kernel-based operating systems, properly. "We need to talk" suggests Lenovo is somehow answerable to its users/customers; this is fundamentally not the case.
Anyway, the thing that annoys me the most is the terrible keyboards we've been getting, especially since X240. Keys need travel distance, and should not be ruined in order to make the laptop thinner. We use those things to work on, not to show off. ... and here I go myself, ranting as though Lenovo cares.
If laptops came with non-Windows OSes are cheaper, I think it will have its market share. In some markets, people just don't consider paying for Windows a thing.
I share the author's frustration with making graphics work on older machines with nvidia dGPUs. My Sandy Bridge thinkpad absolutely cannot boot without hanging and perpetually writing to disk since their major "additions" in 5.12 and later, no matter the dozen hours spent and configurations, kernel parameters setup; I've reached the conclusion it's impossible and put the problem to rest for now with an older version. Alas, this an industry problem, not limited to nu-lenovo by any means, from poor designing of the devices in question (on the Optimus implementation above: it's absolutely terrible and prone to all sorts of issues, because you can't just rip the damn nvidia chip off) to cutting corners. When producing these devices, do manufacturers often think, let alone care, if they will be used in the future after a decade or more? There's no stimuli to do so, after all, no gain from it.
I have a Lenovo Thinkpad L380 and it's the worst laptop I haver ever owned. When I put it on my lap and I hit the wrong spot, it freezes and only turning it off and on again fixes the issue.
I sent it to the Lenovo support center in HK once, but the problem has never been fixed.
Long story short, as a guy who moves a lot internationally, Apple and Lenovo are the only companies offering global warranty and after my horrible experience with Lenovo, I'll be back to Apple!
Thinkpad quality has been terrible after the sale to the China-based Lenovo.
Maybe my experience would have been better with the T or X series though.
I got one of their new linux supporting machins through their reseller, Digital River Ireland Ltd.
I set it up with dualboot since I hadn't run windows a while and needed a windows for a few things anyway.
Must say that windows 10 is not totally bad, but why must it be so blinky, and have an appstore with a front page of colourful games, and even autodownload candy crush?
anyways, the lenovo machine is greay with ubuntu, and the trackpoint work with both middle click as well as scroll, something I could only pick one of in wimdows.
A few day ago, I wondered if it would be possible to build a good Laptop around a Raspberry Pi? Not the best performance but modular, upgradable and well supported by the Linux kernel.
I have a Raspberry Pi 4. If you use the official distro, which includes all the hacks to make the hardware function, it works well yes but only barely. Try any other distro and it does not work very well since Linux itself doesn't actually have a lot of suppprt upstreamed. I have to use binary blobs, tweak lots of knobs etc to make simple things like video playback work. Some (all?) distros still recommend 32-bits due to limited support for 64-bits still.
Quite eye opening for me as i always thought support for Raspberry Pi was of a high standard. The reality couldnt be further than the truth. Ironically I have a Lenovo which works well out of the box with no blobs or weird hacks on Arch or Debian (despite no official support for my particular model that I know of). The latter is what I would describe as "well supported by the Linux kernel". Certaintly not Raspberry Pi.
Are you able to play videos on it? Arch Linux ARM struggles to play videos smoothly. The official distribution seems to be better only if you use their Desktop Environment and certain blessed apps—I switched to a different DE and all of a sudden my smooth video playback broke. Asked around regarding video playback on Arch and was told to stick with the 32-bits edition instead. Agree it's no daily driver. It's great as a Samba server though which I use to share files etc—currently using the official OS for this but my next project for it is to switch to Arch which I use for all my other Linux devices. Was hoping to use it as a driver for my TV but have decided to just use it as a file server instead and watch videos over the network.
You can just get the PineBook Pro. It's not exactly Raspberry but the support and modularity is as good and the board has far fewer problems (and there is a ready laptop).
There are a few tablet designs with PI3 CM but the performance is way below PI4.
I am only 41 and don't care about these articles anymore.
I was able to explain the problems this article raises, to a 20-year girl who knows almost nothing about technology, in a 15-minute conversation. And she agreed the current situation spells doom for future buyers and that she still wants to be able to buy a pink laptop and put whatever CPU, GPU and RAM she wants in it.
Quote from her: "Why must I buy a VAIO or Acer when I need some more colors? Why can't I buy a lime green ThinkPad and then replace the CPU?".
So look, we all get it just fine. Can you start doing something? This endless virtue signalling will not achieve anything, is this not glaringly obvious at this point?
You all really underestimate the unbridled relentless greed of the shareholders and their servants. They will NEVER stop.
If you want a change, pioneer it.
And to the general HN audience: please understand most devs and hardware guys here are almost literal slaves. A good chunk of you (especially Americans) are privileged beyond what like 80% of us here will ever have, in terms of income and job security.
Please start using your free bandwidth to do good! Patting yourself on the back like "hey, I can articulate the problems, I am helping!" is just you being a quiet accomplice in a future state of affairs where there will be no recourse.
Oh yeah, and I almost forgot: get off my lawn. :P
Seriously though, those articles don't help nothing. Awareness has been raised a long time ago. It's time for action.
Corporations only understand one thing: coercion. Especially if you hit them in the wallets. Everything else they ignore.
It's a niche market calling saying "I will give you money if you just make design decisions that made your computers great to work with in the past." How big is this market? What can really be expected from trying to sell to that market when computers are complex things to build?
If anything, there are companies out on the market trying to serve this niche market. System76 has been around for awhile now, for example (I bought a System76 laptop in 2013 and I hated it, but that's a different story.) I think a few of us would at least hope that these companies look at old ThinkPads and take a few notes. I think maybe that time is coming soon (I would hope :) )
What power do you think American software developers have here that they're not exercising? They should all quit their jobs and move into hardware design so they could band together and start a non-profit chip manufacturer to support some new laptop company? And in the meantime, not buy from any other corporation so we can "hit them in their wallets" and coerce them to... something? All so Apple might offer color options on their laptops?
I don't think most of them underestimate the relentless greed of corporations. If anything, HN is one of the forums I'm on that's the most anti-corporate while not being explicitly communist/anarchist.
You can dismiss the OP as simply complaining, but they're also literally writing an alternate OS for tips. Is that not "using their free bandwidth to do good"? Does it not count because it's not hardware? What about companies like System76 and Framework that are seemingly trying to do exactly what you're claiming people in the US aren't doing?
I generally agree with where you're trying to go, and the futility of just complaining, but you're painting with a really broad brush, assuming a lot of bad/ignorant intentions on the part of anyone you disagree with, and only proposing vague "go do something you ignorant privileged Americans" to solve it.
Truthfully, so far I am mostly recognizing only System 76 and Frame.Work as making a true difference.
As for your questions, they are fair. My main point was that lengthy rants against corporations will achieve nothing and are a distraction from more noble pursuits.
I am not saying "quit your job". I am saying however that many of those devs have the free time and energy bandwidth that many others don't, and maybe that should be used to put their wallet/actions where their mouth is.
My comment was however mostly a harsh criticism of the endless echo chamber that HN can be. Almost nobody cares what we here think though.
I agree that I painted this with a broad brush. It's something that's ticking me off and it gets really sad and frustrating seeing people just yammering their mouth endlessly. :| But sure, that's only my problem, I can easily concede that.
I appreciate the honesty - I guess from my side of this, I have an similar annoyance of people who have lengthy rants against corporations that boil down to "why won't someone else do something about this".
Which isn't to say that I think you're not well-intentioned, or not doing anything yourself, but that there's a streak on HN and in general of "why won't the government pass a law to fix X" or "why isn't everyone at (insert unethical company here) doing something about their employer".
Ultimately, the problem is a combination of things - some portion of devs just don't agree with you that this is a problem, another portion is radical to the point of only investing in a solution so pure as to be unworkable, and the remaining portion that may agree with you (myself included) isn't enough of the population to matter outside of doing something drastic like quitting their jobs en masse.
I recently purchased a Framework laptop. I'd imagine the overlap of people who own S76 or Framework computers and people who are on HN is pretty high. You're already grousing at a group of people who's most likely to be doing everything you think they should be doing, and it hasn't made things better, so out of frustration, we're all ranting to anyone who will listen about how we've done what we can and it's still not better.
> I have an similar annoyance of people who have lengthy rants against corporations that boil down to "why won't someone else do something about this".
That's completely fair and I get where you are coming from.
> Ultimately, the problem is a combination of things...
Sadly you are correct and that's one of the things I just can't make peace with -- a lot of liberties are not only at stake here, but they are being relentlessly attacked every day, yet people still choose to divide in camps and scream at each other, while the common enemy grows stronger every month... :(
> You're already grousing at a group of people who's most likely to be doing everything you think they should be doing...
Yes and no. I realize what you say about the hardware that some HN users are using might be true and I'll concede it immediately. There's another group though, same ones I kept talking about -- those that have the free time and energy, maybe even the resources, to try and improve things for everybody else, yet they chose not to do so.
As a guy with a streak of super sh_tty luck in the last ~18 months or so (changed several employers; of course not only their fault, mine too) who is just dreaming of having that free time and energy, it's honestly infuriating for me to sit helplessly on the side and fight furiously for stabilizing my life almost every day, while a lot of these (likely) hedonists just parrot ideal theories on a forum...
Sorry. As you can see, I am very jaded. Still, I prefer to express myself openly. I know it's offensive to some but I choose to believe that people can and will see through my being jaded and find my true motives and goals. Like you did.
But isn't that the issue? The people you see as having more power than you still don't have the power to accomplish what you want done more than they already are. You being disappointed in me and other people on HN is exactly as ineffective as you see OP's rant as being. Not to be mean about it, but aren't you doing the exact same thing you're accusing the OP of doing? Yelling at other people about ideal theories that you yourself can't make progress on? Is it possible that everyone is as jaded and upset as you are?
Sure, I have time and money that I'm not spending, but it's because no one, you and I seemingly included, has any good ideas for how to solve the situation. For most people the options are "complain on a forum" or "start an entire new company in a new industry". There's not that much in the middle of that which will solve the problems you're worried about. Part of the revulsion to your statements is that the people who may be able to follow your advice and solve the issues you want solved are like... Tim Cook and Jeff Bezos, and maybe 200 other wealthy people with a vision who might align, not any of the people who might read what you write.
I'm not choosing not to help. I'm helping wherever I feel like I can make any progress at all, but that's not many places, and it seems neither you nor I can point to other things we should be doing...
> And to the general HN audience: please understand most devs and hardware guys here are almost literal slaves. A good chunk of you (especially Americans) are privileged beyond what like 80% of us here will ever have, in terms of income and job security.
That's what I would recommend but nowadays I am worried this will impact thermals negatively, since many new laptops very heavily rely on chassis passive cooling and not only on the dedicated fans.
So I didn't tell her because I didn't want the poor girl to invest a month of income on a laptop, put a skin on it, and have it burn out promptly in 3-6 months.
I don't put them on the bottom or near the keyboard, I don't think being on the screen really matters. Maybe if your laptop can do 1000 nits or something.
Lenovo has listened and acted on our requests in a very good way, the Linux support has become better and better over the years, IMHO and experience.
So no, this rant does notbresonate with me and my 16 years experience at all.
No offence. Just a different experience.