6 ms·

I am also running Linux on Thinkpad (Debian unstable on T440s). As to the battery life, this typically requires some work but I found it is generally possible

I am also running Linux on Thinkpad (Debian unstable on T440s). As to the battery life, this typically requires some work but I found it is generally possible to get good battery life. I am able to get my T440s to run for total 24 hours with the highest option 9-cell, the built in 3-cell and another 3-cell that came original with the laptop. This I did to be able to work on a long yacht cruise with no extra power and required to get backlight almost to minimum and to downclock CPU a little bit. Now, to get there there are tools that can tell you what is using up the battery and some howtos on the Internet. I don't remember details so it is best if you go look it up yourself. If you are using i3 you are generally well set up to easily get over 10h of operation. As to touchpad these are all disappointing on all ThinkPads but probably especially on T440s where it is something called "clickpad". The entire touchpad is a button and you need to press it and try to move your finger while pressing HARD to drag things, for example. Dunno who thought this is a good idea. I always travel with a mouse and a mouse pad to be able to work comfortably:) Still, it is easier to use built in keyboard and a mouse than the reverse, luscious touchpad but keyboard to replace miserable something shipped with Macbook. I don't like typing on something that feels like a solid pane of aluminum with some markings on it.

Krasnol 6y ago
You should try a trackball. I switched over to the logitech MX ergo after using a mouse for many years and the usuall pains started.
- danielbarla 6y ago
  I've been a happy user of trackballs for many years, and can also happily recommend the Kensington variety. It is also quite configurable, both in the traditional software sense, and in the sense that you can use it in a variety of different physical ways (thumb, forefingers, at a variety of angles, etc). This variety kind of helps reduce the "repetitive" part of RSI.
  - Galanwe 6y ago
    I always fancied switching to track balls but never dared to jump. Can you be as fast as with a mouse with it? As precise?
    - lmilcin 6y ago
      More precise but slower (at least in my case).
    - danielbarla 6y ago
      I've managed to play slow-paced FPS'es with the trackball (e.g. PUBG) and remain - well, not "competitive" exactly, but not total trash either. You can generally dial it in for great accuracy but slow turning, or less accuracy but fast turning. But not really both at the same time, unlike a mouse. (since there you can your elbow for large movements, and your wrists for smaller ones) With the latter option, you would not be able to hit small targets quickly. In terms of desktop use, you can generally find a balance where it can get across the screen in a single swipe, but you can still hit a button immediately, so it's an OK trade off for me.
      - lmilcin 6y ago
        So I just now remembered why I don't use trackball. I have two huge monitors side by side and jumping from the end of one to the end of other was really uncomfortable with trackball whereas it is a snap of the wrist with the mouse I move the width of the mouse to span two monitors yet I have no trouble clicking on a 4 dot cluster on 27inch 4k monitor (which would be equivalent of a single pixel on full HD). Now I am not sure I want to use regular mouse with a PC and trackball with a laptop. In my mind this is either or choice.
        Krasnol 6y ago
        You just have to set the speed higher. I work on 3 screens with it. For precision, the ergo has a small button near the ball which makes slow.
        6y ago
imglorp 6y ago
The T450 touchpad is compatible with the T440s and has real buttons. Should be a few bucks on ebay. See my question in this thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21316263 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21316263 ps, Love my T440s also. I would like two-finger horiz scroll to work better however, especially the swipe for "back" gesture. Somewhere a few months back was a comment about the XInput team comprising one overloaded guy needing help. I mess with stuff like "synclient HorizScrollDelta" but it really needs acceleration detection to trigger the gesture, not scroll. pps: it's libinput: https://bill.harding.blog/2020/06/22/linux-touchpad-project-update-progress-on-multitouch/ https://bill.harding.blog/2020/06/22/linux-touchpad-project-...
- lmilcin 6y ago
  Mine has long history. I had to hack the BIOS to get LTE working because original BIOS does not support any LTE cards and have already disassembled it completely to the last part twice after I got it wet. Once with hot, sweet latte and once completely drenched with sparkling water. I had no tools to open the laptop and power button stopped working so it was not possible to go to bios and disconnect power (the internal battery is always on). I had to stand it on its side like an open wet book to let the water drain and then went shopping for tools. The end was that I had to disassemble EVERYTHING including LCD panel where it had water between individual leaves. I never knew that panel has so many layers. Anyway, it still lives on. I curse it about once a week for being so tough preventing me from buying newer, better machine:)
  - abdullahkhalids 6y ago
    I have a T440s and a T470. Right now I am using the T440s, because there was record rainfall in my city, and it is humid as hell, and the T470 crashed soon after starting - I think because of humidity. It was working just fine last night after which I had to open all the windows because I lost power. The T440s doesn't even care.
    - lmilcin 6y ago
      My next laptop is going to get couple upgrades from the very start. One I am planning is to put conformal coating on major components and that includes entire motherboard.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jeffbee 6y ago
I find that I can tune the battery life on a ThinkPad to be pretty amazing, but it is hard to get my change to stick after a reboot or even a suspend/wake cycle. One of the things that seems to make a big impact is PCIe ASPM. But where do you change your config files so it's always on? At least on Ubuntu there are numerous config files that formerly controlled power management settings, are still referenced in Stack Overflow answers, still exist on the filesystem, but don't actually do one damn thing, which is infuriating. Used to be able to just drop commands into rc.local but now it's not as simple.
- lmilcin 6y ago
  I have a bunch of scripts that run on every start and wakeup. Some of those scripts do things like configure my machine depending on where I am (for example, detect presence of my home WiFi).
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    It doesn't seem like you'd be able to do that on wakeup. Don't you have to put those kinds of commands in a hook that runs after a wifi link state change?
    - lmilcin 6y ago
      I am not sure what you mean. As bad as it is, systemd actually supports running stuff on wakeup. One figures, it has support for everything.
      - jeffbee 6y ago
        What I mean is that when the machine wakes up, it's not associated with a wifi network until later, so isn't it a race if such a thing runs at wakeup?
        boring_twenties 6y ago
        OK so we sleep for 30 seconds and try again, maybe give up after 5 or 10 iterations of this. What's the problem?
squarefoot 6y ago
> The entire touchpad is a button and you need to press it and try to move your finger while pressing HARD to drag things, for example. Same here (X240) but it still has left and right buttons, although not shown. To drag things around, just keep pressed the lower left side of the pad (near the user's belly not the spacebar) then gently move the right finger around the pad. It works the same for selecting text.
- m4rtink 6y ago
  The x4x series has a flawed click pad design that travels too far down, avoid it like plague. The series before and after are thanfully fine.
- justtart 6y ago
  I have an x240 as well. The first thing I did was replace the clickpad with a 3 button trackpad which feels so much better to me
sidpatil 6y ago
> As to touchpad these are all disappointing on all ThinkPads but probably especially on T440s where it is something called "clickpad". The entire touchpad is a button and you need to press it and try to move your finger while pressing HARD to drag things, for example. My T440 also has the "clickpad", and I hate it for the exact same reason you described. It's another example of the modern design trend toward form-over-function "overminimalism" (e.g. lack of ports, too much focus on thinness, etc.), in my opinion Lenovo must have realized their screwup, because the later T-series editions went back to discrete mouse buttons.
- lmilcin 6y ago
  To be fair, there aren't many devices of any kind that don't have some kind of faults. You just take it as a whole package. I don't mind a bit of irritation as long as I decide that overall this is best option. I would like a laptop that is perfect but, while I can easily imagine one, there does not exist a laptop that is perfect. A perfect laptop for me would be a Macbook with LTE, ThinkPad keyboard, that would be serviceable by myself and that would not suck at running Docker.
- itsoktocry 6y ago
  >Lenovo must have realized their screwup, because the later T-series editions went back to discrete mouse buttons. I have a T431s and a T450s. The T431s was a sort of "special edition" which I believe was the first to offer the "clickpad". And I agree, it sucks. However, the T450s was already back to a classic trackpad. It doesn't compare to the MBP trackpad (nothing does), but I have no issue with it. So it sounds like the 440 series was the only Thinkpad with that clickpad?
- numpad0 6y ago
  X240 also had it. I swapped mine out with X250 parts(some pliers work required). E440 as well, probably all of 3-digit 40 series. I think the idea is as Lenovo not being IBM, they had to have ﾐ田 key and trackpad to get Windows license, while Apple is also praised of their huge clickpads, so the decision to integrate TrackPoint buttons and trackpad into single clickpad made sense on paper, except implementation sucked.
yaantc 6y ago
Getting excellent battery life on Linux nowadays should be as simple as installing the "tlp" (the laptop project) package. I can't compare to a Mac, but I use both Thinkpad and Latitude and on both get better battery life on Debian than colleagues on Windows 10 (also and related: much less fan noise...). Now he complains about battery life after one year. There is a Thinkpad feature that helps a lot: one can limit the charge level to a configurable value. And tlp does support this for Thinkpad. By just limiting the charge level to 90% for example, and making sure never to discharge the battery completely, one can greatly extend a laptop battery life. You can't use the range fully, but then the battery is much less stressed: Li-Ion batteries suffer at the extreme of the charge range. As the battery last enough for me (and charges quickly) I never found this range reduction to be a problem. And my 5 years TP battery is just fine. The Dell Latitude also supports this BTW, but it's in the BIOS and not integrated with tlp.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- scns 6y ago
  My Tuxedo allows setting max charge and other battery related settings via bios as well
Izkata 6y ago
> The entire touchpad is a button and you need to press it and try to move your finger while pressing HARD to drag things, for example. If you have it set up so a single-tap is treated as a click, you should be able to double-tap (single-finger twice, not two fingers) and keep the finger down on the second tap to drag without any clicking. Likewise, I have two-finger single-tap for right-click, and three-finger single-tap for middle-click. Pretty sure I only had to enable that last one (Ubuntu), all the others were there by default. I can't remember the last time I actually clicked the clickpad...
rv-de 6y ago
My T480's touchpad has none of the issue you describe.

Krasnol 6y ago

You should try a trackball. I switched over to the logitech MX ergo after using a mouse for many years and the usuall pains started.

danielbarla 6y ago
I've been a happy user of trackballs for many years, and can also happily recommend the Kensington variety. It is also quite configurable, both in the traditional software sense, and in the sense that you can use it in a variety of different physical ways (thumb, forefingers, at a variety of angles, etc). This variety kind of helps reduce the "repetitive" part of RSI.
- Galanwe 6y ago
  I always fancied switching to track balls but never dared to jump. Can you be as fast as with a mouse with it? As precise?
  - lmilcin 6y ago
    More precise but slower (at least in my case).
  - danielbarla 6y ago
    I've managed to play slow-paced FPS'es with the trackball (e.g. PUBG) and remain - well, not "competitive" exactly, but not total trash either. You can generally dial it in for great accuracy but slow turning, or less accuracy but fast turning. But not really both at the same time, unlike a mouse. (since there you can your elbow for large movements, and your wrists for smaller ones) With the latter option, you would not be able to hit small targets quickly. In terms of desktop use, you can generally find a balance where it can get across the screen in a single swipe, but you can still hit a button immediately, so it's an OK trade off for me.
    - lmilcin 6y ago
      So I just now remembered why I don't use trackball. I have two huge monitors side by side and jumping from the end of one to the end of other was really uncomfortable with trackball whereas it is a snap of the wrist with the mouse I move the width of the mouse to span two monitors yet I have no trouble clicking on a 4 dot cluster on 27inch 4k monitor (which would be equivalent of a single pixel on full HD). Now I am not sure I want to use regular mouse with a PC and trackball with a laptop. In my mind this is either or choice.
      - Krasnol 6y ago
        You just have to set the speed higher. I work on 3 screens with it. For precision, the ergo has a small button near the ball which makes slow.
      - 6y ago

imglorp 6y ago

The T450 touchpad is compatible with the T440s and has real buttons. Should be a few bucks on ebay. See my question in this thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21316263 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21316263 ps, Love my T440s also. I would like two-finger horiz scroll to work better however, especially the swipe for "back" gesture. Somewhere a few months back was a comment about the XInput team comprising one overloaded guy needing help. I mess with stuff like "synclient HorizScrollDelta" but it really needs acceleration detection to trigger the gesture, not scroll. pps: it's libinput: https://bill.harding.blog/2020/06/22/linux-touchpad-project-update-progress-on-multitouch/ https://bill.harding.blog/2020/06/22/linux-touchpad-project-...

lmilcin 6y ago
Mine has long history. I had to hack the BIOS to get LTE working because original BIOS does not support any LTE cards and have already disassembled it completely to the last part twice after I got it wet. Once with hot, sweet latte and once completely drenched with sparkling water. I had no tools to open the laptop and power button stopped working so it was not possible to go to bios and disconnect power (the internal battery is always on). I had to stand it on its side like an open wet book to let the water drain and then went shopping for tools. The end was that I had to disassemble EVERYTHING including LCD panel where it had water between individual leaves. I never knew that panel has so many layers. Anyway, it still lives on. I curse it about once a week for being so tough preventing me from buying newer, better machine:)
- abdullahkhalids 6y ago
  I have a T440s and a T470. Right now I am using the T440s, because there was record rainfall in my city, and it is humid as hell, and the T470 crashed soon after starting - I think because of humidity. It was working just fine last night after which I had to open all the windows because I lost power. The T440s doesn't even care.
  - lmilcin 6y ago
    My next laptop is going to get couple upgrades from the very start. One I am planning is to put conformal coating on major components and that includes entire motherboard.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

jeffbee 6y ago

I find that I can tune the battery life on a ThinkPad to be pretty amazing, but it is hard to get my change to stick after a reboot or even a suspend/wake cycle. One of the things that seems to make a big impact is PCIe ASPM. But where do you change your config files so it's always on? At least on Ubuntu there are numerous config files that formerly controlled power management settings, are still referenced in Stack Overflow answers, still exist on the filesystem, but don't actually do one damn thing, which is infuriating. Used to be able to just drop commands into rc.local but now it's not as simple.

lmilcin 6y ago
I have a bunch of scripts that run on every start and wakeup. Some of those scripts do things like configure my machine depending on where I am (for example, detect presence of my home WiFi).
- jeffbee 6y ago
  It doesn't seem like you'd be able to do that on wakeup. Don't you have to put those kinds of commands in a hook that runs after a wifi link state change?
  - lmilcin 6y ago
    I am not sure what you mean. As bad as it is, systemd actually supports running stuff on wakeup. One figures, it has support for everything.
    - jeffbee 6y ago
      What I mean is that when the machine wakes up, it's not associated with a wifi network until later, so isn't it a race if such a thing runs at wakeup?
      - boring_twenties 6y ago
        OK so we sleep for 30 seconds and try again, maybe give up after 5 or 10 iterations of this. What's the problem?

squarefoot 6y ago

> The entire touchpad is a button and you need to press it and try to move your finger while pressing HARD to drag things, for example. Same here (X240) but it still has left and right buttons, although not shown. To drag things around, just keep pressed the lower left side of the pad (near the user's belly not the spacebar) then gently move the right finger around the pad. It works the same for selecting text.

m4rtink 6y ago
The x4x series has a flawed click pad design that travels too far down, avoid it like plague. The series before and after are thanfully fine.
justtart 6y ago
I have an x240 as well. The first thing I did was replace the clickpad with a 3 button trackpad which feels so much better to me

sidpatil 6y ago

> As to touchpad these are all disappointing on all ThinkPads but probably especially on T440s where it is something called "clickpad". The entire touchpad is a button and you need to press it and try to move your finger while pressing HARD to drag things, for example. My T440 also has the "clickpad", and I hate it for the exact same reason you described. It's another example of the modern design trend toward form-over-function "overminimalism" (e.g. lack of ports, too much focus on thinness, etc.), in my opinion Lenovo must have realized their screwup, because the later T-series editions went back to discrete mouse buttons.

lmilcin 6y ago
To be fair, there aren't many devices of any kind that don't have some kind of faults. You just take it as a whole package. I don't mind a bit of irritation as long as I decide that overall this is best option. I would like a laptop that is perfect but, while I can easily imagine one, there does not exist a laptop that is perfect. A perfect laptop for me would be a Macbook with LTE, ThinkPad keyboard, that would be serviceable by myself and that would not suck at running Docker.
itsoktocry 6y ago
>Lenovo must have realized their screwup, because the later T-series editions went back to discrete mouse buttons. I have a T431s and a T450s. The T431s was a sort of "special edition" which I believe was the first to offer the "clickpad". And I agree, it sucks. However, the T450s was already back to a classic trackpad. It doesn't compare to the MBP trackpad (nothing does), but I have no issue with it. So it sounds like the 440 series was the only Thinkpad with that clickpad?
numpad0 6y ago
X240 also had it. I swapped mine out with X250 parts(some pliers work required). E440 as well, probably all of 3-digit 40 series. I think the idea is as Lenovo not being IBM, they had to have ﾐ田 key and trackpad to get Windows license, while Apple is also praised of their huge clickpads, so the decision to integrate TrackPoint buttons and trackpad into single clickpad made sense on paper, except implementation sucked.

yaantc 6y ago

Getting excellent battery life on Linux nowadays should be as simple as installing the "tlp" (the laptop project) package. I can't compare to a Mac, but I use both Thinkpad and Latitude and on both get better battery life on Debian than colleagues on Windows 10 (also and related: much less fan noise...). Now he complains about battery life after one year. There is a Thinkpad feature that helps a lot: one can limit the charge level to a configurable value. And tlp does support this for Thinkpad. By just limiting the charge level to 90% for example, and making sure never to discharge the battery completely, one can greatly extend a laptop battery life. You can't use the range fully, but then the battery is much less stressed: Li-Ion batteries suffer at the extreme of the charge range. As the battery last enough for me (and charges quickly) I never found this range reduction to be a problem. And my 5 years TP battery is just fine. The Dell Latitude also supports this BTW, but it's in the BIOS and not integrated with tlp.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
scns 6y ago
My Tuxedo allows setting max charge and other battery related settings via bios as well

Izkata 6y ago

> The entire touchpad is a button and you need to press it and try to move your finger while pressing HARD to drag things, for example. If you have it set up so a single-tap is treated as a click, you should be able to double-tap (single-finger twice, not two fingers) and keep the finger down on the second tap to drag without any clicking. Likewise, I have two-finger single-tap for right-click, and three-finger single-tap for middle-click. Pretty sure I only had to enable that last one (Ubuntu), all the others were there by default. I can't remember the last time I actually clicked the clickpad...

rv-de 6y ago

My T480's touchpad has none of the issue you describe.