Lenovo is joining Dell in the "OEM Linux Laptop" club:
It looks like Lenovo may upstage Dell as the big name in OEM Linux laptops—not counting specialty retailers like System76, of course. Red Hat and Lenovo are announcing pre-installed and factory-supported Fedora Workstation on several models of ThinkPad laptops at Red Hat Summit this week.
Dell's Linux support has generally been limited to one or two very specific laptops—first, the old Atom-powered netbooks and, more recently, the XPS 13 Developer Edition line. Lenovo is planning a significantly broader Linux footprint in its lineup.
Fedora Workstation will be a selectable option during purchase for the Thinkpad P1 Gen2, Thinkpad P53, and Thinkpad X1 Gen8 laptops—and Lenovo may offer even broader model support in the future. Lenovo Senior Linux Developer Mark Pearson, who will be the featured guest in the May 2020 Fedora Council Video Meeting, expresses the company's stance on forthcoming integration:
Lenovo is excited to become a part of the Fedora community. We want to ensure an optimal Linux experience on our products. We are committed to working with and learning from the open source community.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday April 28 2020, @04:30PM (9 children)
They are the world's largest personal computer vendor [wikipedia.org], and they already make Android and ChromeOS devices.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by DannyB on Tuesday April 28 2020, @04:34PM (8 children)
This means something else.
It means Lenovo thinks they are immune from pressure from Microsoft on Windows licenses.
A dozen years ago when Netbooks became "a thang", Microsoft managed to kill Netbooks by:
* resurrecting Windows XP, but only for Netbooks
* at a price (zero) that OEMs couldn't refuse
* with strings attached that limited how "good" the netbook hardware could be
* and something about limiting their Linux netbooks to the same crippled hardware
It would have been a natural thing for an OEM who ventured into the successful and cheap netbooks to gradually introduce higher end laptops with Linux.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 28 2020, @07:40PM (4 children)
No such thing.
Just because you have alternate markets does not mean that the M$ hegemony does not matter to your bottom line.
Now, the fact that Lenovo can market Chrome, Android and now Linux devices may indicate a weakening of Microsoft's bargaining position in the MS-Lenovo relationship, but immune? Far from it.
They're still pulling this shit with embedded windows 10 licenses, pay per core kind of stuff. The really raw deal in the net-top market was how the devices ran great on XP when they were delivered, but 3 years later XP was "updated" to make the net-top devices unusable (unless you went back to the original media and re-installed XP at the old version...) That's almost as shitty an episode as Apple tanking the iPad One with software updates - around about the same time, actually.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday April 28 2020, @09:10PM (3 children)
+1 Interesting
Good points.
Nonetheless, it's nice to see the weaking of Microsoft's power. OEMs once cowered in fear. That is why there never were any Linux desktops or laptops form mainstream players. The only way you could make Linux hardware (preloaded from factory) was to NOT make Windows (eg, System76, etc) or use Dell's trick of selling with an OS (eg, FreeDOS). Technically that is an OS. And is even interesting in some ways.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 28 2020, @10:15PM (2 children)
If it didn't happen, they deserved an AT&T style monopoly smackdown, not that it didn't take 40 years for AT&T to get theirs (I still can't get WKRP's Johnny Fever "phone cops" scene out of my head...)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTPzTG1Lx60 [youtube.com]
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday April 29 2020, @02:46PM (1 child)
IBM never did get their monopoly breakup.
The rise of Microcomputers ("PCs") made them lose a lot of their power. Even before the IBM PC, I remember stories about how a middle manager might need to wait six months for the mainframe people to install a terminal in his office, but it was within his own budget authority to go pick up an Apple II with VisiCalc. That had to hurt IBM. It is probably why they got the microcomputer religion. Then lost that market. Tried to steal it back with the PS/2 and MicroChannel -- while the rest of the industry just said No Thanks. We like our non-patented open interchangeable vendor neutral stuff just fine.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday April 29 2020, @05:22PM
They stumbled sufficiently to elicit sympathy.
I worked for a guy who thought he needed a supercomputer (turns out he just needed a C++ programmer to clean up his Matlab code but...) while still laboring under the delusion (2006), we entertained quotes from IBM for their current "value proposition" big iron systems. For our ersatz "needs" they didn't offer anything we couldn't get from a stack of contemporary MacPros for a similar price, but they did have a hellishly complicated "pay as needed" system that basically smoothed compute load costs to bill for actual usage and reassure everyone that "it will scale when needed, we're IBM we know what we're doing here." It didn't do anything for us because our load forecasting was very deterministic, but you could see how they were trying to appeal to the investment fueled startups who had no clue when, if ever, their big demand would hit.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by epitaxial on Tuesday April 28 2020, @09:48PM (2 children)
Netbooks killed themselves by using dead slow processors with minimal ram.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday April 29 2020, @02:49PM
True but misses the point.
The elephant in the room was the OEM price of a copy of Windows on a new laptop.
Netbooks showed that hardware was getting cheaper and cheaper. I remember in the Groklaw days, about 2007 ish, I wrote that in just a few years you would be able to get a tablet at Walmart, in a blister pack, on a peg for $99. Now you can get Android / Kindle / etc tablets for significantly less.
Hardware gets cheaper. Windows gets more expensive. Something was going to collide.
If Netbooks had slid under the radar, the next thing would be for the Netbook OEMs to start offering Linux in higher and higher priced laptops.
Now we have cheap disposable chromebooks. That run Linux.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Wednesday April 29 2020, @11:36PM
And the reason they did stuff like that is because if the processor was too good, or there was too much ram, the hardware didn't qualify for the cheap/free Windows XP license, and later, the cheap/free Windows 7 Starter license.
There were some premium netbooks with better specs. But between the cost of the improved hardware and now suddenly having to pay for a Windows Home Premium license, they were getting into low-end laptop territory pretty quick.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday April 28 2020, @04:30PM (2 children)
Year 2020 -- The Year Of The Linux Desktop!
<no-sarcasm>
What I'd really like to see is more competition between some major hardware brands on Linux computers.
It would be cool if Google could get into this game.
Google is working on Crostini on their Chromebooks. I think this may mature into something that results in a turnkey curated store of the best Linux applications on Chromebooks.
ChromeOS May Be The Future Of Desktop Linux: Linus Torvalds [youtube.com]
</no-sarcasm>
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 0, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 28 2020, @04:54PM (1 child)
>> Year 2020 -- The Year Of The Linux Desktop!
Nope. It's 2020 -- The Year That Systemd Led to Many Systems Being Returned to OEM Vendors to Have Windows Installed
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 28 2020, @06:08PM
oh stfu.
(Score: 1) by DECbot on Tuesday April 28 2020, @05:03PM (4 children)
I am personally waiting until a AMD ryzen 4000 series processor makes it into a laptop shipping with linux. I really hope System76 releases such a machine soon because I want to support what they're doing. Obviously for shipping Linux, though I also like how they are moving to coreboot on their products too.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday April 28 2020, @05:31PM
https://wccftech.com/amds-next-gen-cezanne-ryzen-5000-apus-detailed-rumored-to-feature-zen-3-cores-rdna2-navi-23-gpu/ [wccftech.com]
Looks like the 5000-series mobile APUs will switch from Vega graphics (the last gasp of GCN [wikipedia.org]) directly to RDNA2, so it will be interesting to see how that works out in terms of support.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Tuesday April 28 2020, @05:34PM
I agree. It's not that I think AMD is necessarily better, but I would like to see more competition in the processor market - diversity is good. You might even get chipsets/motherboards where you can tell the hardware not to trust the manufacturer.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday April 29 2020, @11:55AM (1 child)
Speaking of System76 we're in the market for a new laptop and I'm determined to get something like that instead of the usual suspects. Can anyone speak to their machines vs., say, Purism's? I mean, we can all look at specs, but I'm curious what the user experience has been.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1) by DECbot on Wednesday April 29 2020, @01:59PM
I can't say anything personal about it as I've only bought from the big vendors. However, the podcasts I listen to (mostly the linux shows from Jupiter Broadcasting) lead me to believe they are of similar or better quality than Purism's laptop and with a more solid company backing their product.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Tuesday April 28 2020, @05:32PM (3 children)
Was it that long since Thinkpad supported linux on laptop? Linux support was the reason I bought my first Thinkpad (and only 10 years ago or so).
(Score: 2) by tekk on Tuesday April 28 2020, @10:26PM (1 child)
Lenovo has officially supported Linux (centos in particular iirc) on their laptops for quite a while but as far as I know haven't let you, a normal person, just buy a laptop with Linux on it before.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Wednesday April 29 2020, @11:49AM
Ah, maybe I am confused - probably wiped windows on day 1 or bought without an OS and then forgot...
(Score: 2) by corey on Tuesday April 28 2020, @11:04PM
I've got Gentoo running really nicely on my ThinkPad Yoga X1. Everything works but screen rotation in KDE. And the touch screen sometimes doesn't work after waking from sleep.
Otherwise fast and very battery efficient.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Bot on Tuesday April 28 2020, @06:23PM
It's either checking a box on the list of potential markets, or a way to pressuring M$ in having a better deal. If they cared about Free Software they would have offered no OS or linux installed systems around 2005. By that year the linux desktop was better, so much better that the enemy had to start crippling it.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 3, Informative) by RamiK on Tuesday April 28 2020, @06:47PM (1 child)
Dell been selling Ubuntu-certified, OEM-supplied Vostro business models with i5s and i7s for half a decade now: https://certification.ubuntu.com/desktop/models?category=Laptop&vendors=Dell [ubuntu.com]
They even have recent models with AMD graphics, large screens, full keyboards (numpads) and VGA out circa $800. Pretty nice for the office considering you can get win 10 pro ESR licenses off ebay for $5...
Similarly, Lenovo had all manner of Ubuntu running laptops for ages including high performance portables. They're not as good as Dells when it come to hardware support though.
https://certification.ubuntu.com/desktop/models?category=Laptop&vendors=Lenovo [ubuntu.com]
https://certification.ubuntu.com/desktop/models?category=Laptop&vendors=Dell [ubuntu.com]
And this is just the "certified" stuff for government and contractors. There's plenty of Linux laptops on the Asian markets that don't bother with any of this.
compiling...
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2020, @03:44AM
My work bought me an XPS13 developer edition (it is one gen behind the latest). The tiny screen bezel is very nice. The keyboard has decent key travel for such a thin laptop, but the layout of the arrow/page up/down keys makes using them a bit frustrating. I'm running Debian Buster on it.
The biggest warts are poor battery life (I had to exclude certain power saving features including some c-states since the laptop would lock up hard when idle, so that isn't helping things), the fan is loud, and always runs unless relatively idle in a cool room, bluetooth stops working after return from suspend2ram until you reboot (reloading module, bluetooth, etc. has no effect; the factory ubuntu image had suspend2ram disabled in systemd). The wireless (soldered onto the board) works well with PSK, but it doesn't work properly with 802.1x (I'm using the same wpa_supplicant config as on my personal laptop that works fine there; the driver dev said the issue is in the binary blob firmware, and there is nothing he can do to fix it). And, the thing thermal throttles right on bootup (I'm using luks; On a cold power on, I get thermal throttling messages spamming the console before I even get a login prompt)-- maybe replacing the thermal pad it uses with a shim and heatsink compound would help. Due to the thermal throttling, the i7 in it could probably be switched for an i5 without noticing much, if any, difference. It also caps out at 16G (soldered on) ram; I'm currently using a few gigs of swap.
If I were spending my own money, I wouldn't buy the XPS-13. But, I would also avoid Lenovo as they and HP restrict the wireless cards you can install in the laptop to just a couple ones they rebrand, which may not be the best supported in linux-- of course, soldered on is even worse.