SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 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.