5 ms·

> Mainly, if I remain with the Pinebook Pro or switch to alternatives such as Purism 13, Galago Pro’s 14 or back to Thinkpad T series laptops I am currently on

> Mainly, if I remain with the Pinebook Pro or switch to alternatives such as Purism 13, Galago Pro’s 14 or back to Thinkpad T series laptops I am currently on my fourth Thinkpad in a row (T480s) and it's been a good streak, but this will be my last. The Thunderbolt firmware has had severe issues and requires reflashing to be practically usable. Despite Lenovo officially being part of LVFS[0], the only way I could get my laptop operational, after about a full work-day of working with fwupdmgr, digging around the internet for cab files, trying to extract them from the Windows-only releases, running Windows in a VM, etc, the only way I finally got it working was grabbing an old drive from the drawer, installing Windows and downloading their Windows releases just so I could get my controller in a working condition. This is for a laptop released in 2018 with the update shipping in late 2019. [0]: http://fwupd.org/ http://fwupd.org/

klohto 7y ago
Do not fear! I hated Lenovo after the T480s and sweared to never buy anything from then ever again. But I bought T490 to my new job and spent a day tweaking it to my liking (I come from mac) and was pleasantly surprised how well it runs. Compared to T480s the touchpad has better feel and the laptop is able to cool itself so I’m not facing the fan issue (it is still present when on AC but hardly noticeable) I’m running Fedora 31 with Cinnamon and with disabled Ethernet, Fingerprint and SD card reader in BIOS, the power consumption with 40 tabs on Firefox and brightness on 40% is around 3.5W which gets me ~10 hours. Pretty sure you could get it even lower with minimalistic Arch setup. Don’t get me wrong, I would love Macbook (2015) in the linux world with stelar touchpad, great battery life and out-of-the box setup, but this as close as it gets and I believe there is no other option right now.
- Legogris 7y ago
  It’s not this issue itself as much as the half-assed practical non-support for Linux, and the suspicious malware they push on you. At this rate one of the new contenders like Pine, Librem etc should hopefully be mature enough by the point I feel the need to upgrade in some years.. Or Clevo for that matter!

klohto 7y ago

Do not fear! I hated Lenovo after the T480s and sweared to never buy anything from then ever again. But I bought T490 to my new job and spent a day tweaking it to my liking (I come from mac) and was pleasantly surprised how well it runs. Compared to T480s the touchpad has better feel and the laptop is able to cool itself so I’m not facing the fan issue (it is still present when on AC but hardly noticeable) I’m running Fedora 31 with Cinnamon and with disabled Ethernet, Fingerprint and SD card reader in BIOS, the power consumption with 40 tabs on Firefox and brightness on 40% is around 3.5W which gets me ~10 hours. Pretty sure you could get it even lower with minimalistic Arch setup. Don’t get me wrong, I would love Macbook (2015) in the linux world with stelar touchpad, great battery life and out-of-the box setup, but this as close as it gets and I believe there is no other option right now.

Legogris 7y ago
It’s not this issue itself as much as the half-assed practical non-support for Linux, and the suspicious malware they push on you. At this rate one of the new contenders like Pine, Librem etc should hopefully be mature enough by the point I feel the need to upgrade in some years.. Or Clevo for that matter!