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I would strongly recommend the following combination for beginners: Thinkpad + Fedora Fedora stays on the cutting edge of the kernel, which means that driver

I would strongly recommend the following combination for beginners: Thinkpad + Fedora Fedora stays on the cutting edge of the kernel, which means that driver support is quite good. Additionally, most of the Linux kernel developers use Thinkpads, so the drivers for Thinkpad are always good. I've never had to download drivers individually. Here's a list of things that just "worked" without me having to do anything: 1. My bluetooth noise cancelling headphones paired with no issues. 2. My desktop display with usb-c just works. 3. Old-style plugin iphone headphones worked as did their builtin mic. 4. Logitech camera plugging into my monitor and routing to the laptop via usb-c just works. 5. I have yet to find a printer (as long as its on the same wifi network) that I can't use (granted I barely print anything). 6. You can install and manage everything via the GUI. 7. Docker just works. Things that didn't work: 1. I had to install "gnome-tweaks" in order to remap my CapsLock key to Control. In my ten years of using Thinkpad+Fedora I've only encountered one issue and that was during the Wayland transition. The Zoom client (as in video chat) briefly didn't support screen sharing, but that was fixed several versions ago. Also, people saying that "M1" is a gamechanger: I totally get it for certain sectors, but for Software Engineers? Memory has always been my bottleneck. I don't think I've ever seen my CPU choke on a legitimate task.

busterarm 6y ago
Not just any thinkpad! Stick to the X, T & to some extent P series. Avoid nvidia graphics if you can. Arch Linux (and to some extent OpenBSD) probably has the best support/documentation/fixes for any ACPI/APM management issues you have. I have a top-end 2017 MBP and I just recently bought a brand new 7th Gen X1 Carbon for very cheaply (like $800) and it _screams_ in comparison to the Mac.
- Spivak 6y ago
  Avoid Nvidia Optimus (i.e. the W series). It’s so much worse than having a dedicated card because of the way it’s soldered on. It only kinda works. It still consumes power when “disabled”. You can’t use GPU passthrough. Stand-alone Nvidia GPUs are fine but on Fedora you have to do some work because the Mutter and Kwin devs are currently in a spat with Nvidia.
- cpursley 6y ago
  Thanks for bringing this up. Can folk's recommend specific thinkpads that play well with linux? I'm specifically interested in Ryzen versions.
  - busterarm 6y ago
    The T14s might work, but IIRC most of the Ryzen models are in the E series and hardware support there is spotty.
    - DeltaWhy 6y ago
      Just got a Ryzen T14 - only had it for a few days but it's working great. Arch works well out of the box, but Debian needs a kernel and some firmware packages from sid in order to get WiFi working.
    - mikeywazowski 6y ago
      I have an E490 (i7) running PopOS and the only thing that doesn't work is the fingerprint scanner. Everything worked out of the box; I haven't had to install any drivers myself. (That I can recall, anyway. Might have been such a simple process to install any missing drivers that I've forgotten.)
  - nextos 6y ago
    Some are Ubuntu certified. Those tend to work well. Also look at what Redhat or BSD developers use. Besides, try to avoid discrete GPUs if you can. An all Intel machine, or lately all AMD, usually works really well. Another good sign is the availability of EFI firmware updates that are OS independent.
  - ibraheemdev 6y ago
    I recently bought a t14 with a 4750u. Ubuntu worked great out of the box, but the battery lasted about 4 hours. I don't know if it was a hardware issue, but I tried everything and couldn't get it to last more than 5 hours. Everything else was great though. I was running Rust compiles on large projects without a sound from the fan, and it stayed cool throughout. Sucks that I had to return it because of the battery.
- pkaye 6y ago
  So X1 Carbon works well with Linux?
  - pxeboot 6y ago
    Zero issues for me. They even released a firmware update for the fingerprint scanner to add Linux support a few months ago. I have a 7th gen.
    - codecamper 6y ago
      ubuntu or fedora?
      - pxeboot 6y ago
        I have used Ubuntu and Arch on this laptop.
  - adiM 6y ago
    Yes! After using MacBook Pro for almost a decade, I moved back to Linux for my laptop two years ago. I installed the Manjaro i3 image and I was expecting that it will take almost a week to tweak the settings so that all the hardware works and was pleasantly surprised that everything worked out of the box (everything other than fingerprint scanner but that was a known limitation).
    - zwayhowder 6y ago
      I can second this with the addendum I'm on an X1 Yoga and the touchscreen works out of the box, it took me about 2 minutes to get the screen auto-rotating as well using this script. https://gist.github.com/mortie/e725d37a71779b18e8eaaf4f8a02bf5b https://gist.github.com/mortie/e725d37a71779b18e8eaaf4f8a02b...
  - busterarm 6y ago
    8th Gen might not be so hot yet from what I've heard. 7th Gen minor issues. 6th and prior are flawless.
- wayne 6y ago
  I setup a Thinkpad X-series with OpenBSD a few months ago and the hardware support was stellar. I researched ahead of time (lots of googling and reading HN and Reddit threads) and it seemed like the OpenBSD devs were using a handful of Thinkpad models so those worked perfectly. I've mostly used it to surf the web (Firefox) and code (Vim). No one would say it's as seamless as using a Macbook, but being able to tinker with and customize everything has been half the fun.
  - busterarm 6y ago
    I have a 7th Gen X1 Carbon & a Thinkpad X270 running OpenBSD and they're both flawless (bluetooth, hyperthreading, fingerprint reader all disabled). Being limited to 802.11n networking is fine.
    - dfgdghdf 6y ago
      I think we have different definitions of "flawless"
      - busterarm 6y ago
        All of the things that I don't have (except for 802.11ac) are things I would be turning off anyway and would buy the laptop without them if I could.
  - 1over137 6y ago
    Is there a good resource for Thinkpads for sale in 2020 that work well with OpenBSD/FreeBSD/linux? A lot of the suggested models I find are from several years ago.
- totony 6y ago
  Thinkpads all have soldered ram which is a pratice I can't support, is there a model I missed that has ram slots?
  - novok 6y ago
    I think soldered storage is the thing that matters more. RAM does not retain state, storage does.
    - totony 6y ago
      Except having a lot of RAM is vital for some workloads (like compilation, virtualization/containers). Sometimes you may think you're okay with 16GB or RAM, until you need one or two 8GB VM working and a local DB
  - jamesponddotco 6y ago
    The T models without the S usually have no soldered RAM, or only one soldered slot. The ThinkPad T480, for example, has two upgradable RAM slots and one or two NVMe slots. Heck, even the Wi-Fi card is removable. When talking about ThinkPads, I always recommend going with the T line and skipping anything with S at the end.
    - totony 6y ago
      Oh you're right, they seem to only have 1 slot soldered. They should advertise that more on their website. Seeing 8GB (soldered) + 1 expansion would be clearer
      - nix23 6y ago
        It's still BS, if you have a dual-channel CPU you are restricted to just upgrade the additional slot to the soldered one like 8GB+8GB and same speed.
      - jamesponddotco 6y ago
        Until the T495, which was the last generation before the T14 came along, it used to be that the T with an S at the end would have one soldered RAM stick and one available to upgrade, while the T without the S would have both available, hence why the T without the S was my recommended model. I would always recommend buying used with the minimal amount of RAM for cheap, and then upgrading everything manually, from RAM to NVMe to Wi-Fi card. With the T14, however, it seems Lenovo fucked up big time. No more extra removable battery, no more empty RAM slots. The one soldered does seem to be 3200MHz, so Ryzen benefits greatly once you fill the second RAM slot with another 3200MHz stick — since Ryzen, and especially the integrated graphics, love dual channel fast memory —, but if you choose wrong when you buy, you are stuck. That sucks and does create a problem for my future self. Right now I have a T495 and my wife has a T480 with an extra big battery, and we were going to upgrade both to the T14 for Ryzen 4000, but soldered RAM is a travesty. I wonder where we are going to go now. I mostly use desktop workstations because working from home for 11 years now, I learned that workstations help with work discipline, but a laptop always end up being needed. I hate Dell with a passion, the Asus Zephyrus G14 suffers from the same issues as the ThinkPad T14, and HP uses ugly fonts in their keyboards, which bugs me. The Pinebook Pro is nice, but mine hasn't arrived. Maybe the Slimbook from that German KDE shop? Hopefully it ships to Brazil.
- lokedhs 6y ago
  I'm using a T490, and with one exception everything has worked perfectly. Things like Thunderbolt connecting to a docking station with multiple monitors just works out of the box. That's not to say that it's been perfect. The touchpad on this thing isn't great. I've had issues with sporadic jumping of the pointer when touching it with two fingers. I replaced the touchpad which did not have any effect. The funny thing is that the problem has been slowing going away over the months. I have never tested it on Windows, so I wouldn't know if there is a hardware problem. The reason I was mentioning this is because I wanted to give some credit to Lenovo support. I fully expected them to tell me to test on Windows before replacing the touchpad but they were happy to tell me they supported Linux and me showing the issue in Arch Linux was enough for them to replace it.
1_player 6y ago
I had a really bad time with Fedora 32, used to Arch Linux: it always felt like RHEL unstable, with many breaking changes not documented (Fedora 32 needed some kernel and firewall hacks to work with Docker [1]) and have their own set of unstandard tools, still not very much documented. I spent 3 hours trying to understand how to compile a patched mainline kernel -- need to learn about dracut, koji, fedpkg, rpmbuild -- and none of these tools are documented clearly on a central, official place, but can be found through googling, reading mailing lists, piecing stuff together from deprecated wiki pages. COPR [2] is interesting, like PPA, with the worst user experience I've ever seen. The patched kernel I was interested about was already compiled by somebody, and available through COPR, but good luck finding which repo has an up-to-date version of the package you're interested. The whole Fedora COPR site is more than useless. I mean, the default experience was pretty good, but being the unstable branch of Red Hat means there's a lot of breakage, every release changes something big and you're constantly on the bleeding edge without the safety net of a top notch wiki like Arch Linux has. 1: https://fedoramagazine.org/docker-and-fedora-32/ https://fedoramagazine.org/docker-and-fedora-32/ 2: https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/ https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/
- drran 6y ago
  So, you figured out how to compile patched kernel in just 3 hours? Wow. (Create patch, install src.rpm, add patch to SOURCE directory, mention patch in .spec and add instruction to apply patch to %setup section, and then rpmbuild the .spec).
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- circularfoyers 6y ago
  The Fedora packaging guidelines is an official, pretty thorough guide to RPM packaging with lots of examples for specific languages[1]. The Fedora docs also cover creating a custom kernel too[2]. I recently moved over to Podman from Docker and found the documentation for it very good as well.[3] I do agree that the search functionality of Copr is extremely basic to the point of being useless for popular packages such as custom kernels, but I believe there is some effort to remedy this with upvoting Copr repos, but I'd argue this is still not enough. I found though as someone new to Copr that it was very easy to figure out as someone simply building my own packages. [1] https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/packaging-guidelines https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/packaging-guidelines [2] https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/kernel/build-custom-kernel https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/kernel/build... [3] https://docs.podman.io/en/latest https://docs.podman.io/en/latest
Aeolun 6y ago
For what it’s worth, I have the same experience with Pop OS! during the past year. Steam is also at a point where I can just install native windows games and run them with barely any trouble.
- IggleSniggle 6y ago
  Wait, what? Does Steam bake in some kind of automatic virtualization support for Windows games these days?
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    Jup, comes with a customized proton build, and the ability to select specific proton versions if you have them installed. I’d say 50% of games works out of the box. And 25% more after installing some video libraries that are for some reason not automatically installed.
    - circularfoyers 6y ago
      You can also get more precise and up to date numbers on what does and doesn't work from ProtonDB[1]. In the reports for each game you're able to see details like distro release, proton release and any other extra steps required (if any) to get the game working. [1] https://www.protondb.com https://www.protondb.com
      - ghthor 6y ago
        Proton DB is great, Donate to the maker!
    - IggleSniggle 6y ago
      Welp, especially with how infrequently I play games these days, there goes my last reason to ever install Windows on my home machines. Thanks for taking the time to give me a sense of how it looks “in reality” these days.
BodhiDude 6y ago
QUESTION: As a Mac Dude: Did you ever get the Apple Magic keyboard to work? I think it was the right mouse click that never worked. (I never used a Mac) If you look for a Laptop, Dell XPS are pretty good. If you buy one used, avoid the one which has the camera at the bottom of the screen. People look right up your nose in meetings I was told.
- adsteel_ 6y ago
  I bought a nose hair trimmer for this reason. Then I switched to a Thinkpad.
- mraza007 6y ago
  I have that same xps and it looks weird honestly that’s one of the reason I’m trying to switch to latest xps
- BodhiDude 6y ago
  I meant magic keypad.
- neurostimulant 6y ago
  Hmm, do you mean apple keyboard or magic mouse? For the keyboard, mine works but it took a while to connect after boot. I either has to wait several minutes before I can use the keyboard to login, or just use another keyboard until the apple bluetooth keyboard is finally connected. As for magic mouse, right clicks works, but it might be because I already configured the mouse to enable right click on my mac. The mouse seem to store that settings locally in the device itself. My only gripes is inertial scrolling doesn't seem to work. I'm using ubuntu 20.04 desktop. Edit: forgot to include the biggest annoyance related to using apple bluetooth keyboard on my linux desktop: for some reason, ubuntu seem to think the right half side of the keyboard is actually a numpad. I had to install numlockx and add `numlockx off` to gnome startup command list to fix this.
criddell 6y ago
I work in C++ and for compiling the CPU is definitely the bottleneck. My CPU will be pegged at 100% for several minutes and my two (SSD) drives just blip once ever few seconds.
- novok 6y ago
  At this point, I would be spinning up 96 core AWS build servers to retain sanity :)
  - wrmsr 6y ago
    Past some critical mass local dev indeed simply doesn't work, but the majority of codebases aren't ~that~ large. And until that point I feel there's an analogy between having a light laptop and remotely doing your heavy lifting with the whole working remote thing in general. In theory, on paper, and assuming reliable decent internet connectivity, with a little elbow grease there should be no discernable difference between thin client remote dev and an in-your-lap xeon, just like with high quality low latency video teleconferencing with a team that knows how to do it there should be nothing lost with physical distance. In practice though the overhead of doing any little thing, no matter how small the overhead may be optimized down to, is still real. Non-verbal communication is lost on zoom and the distance between you and your real UI grew by hundreds of miles and dozens of links, and the tradeoffs your environment makes when there's no such thing as a 'quick check' add up fast. But it's obviously not one dimensional, and there's probably irony in the weight shedding that offers you 20 hrs of battery life coming with a price tag of requiring reliable wifi to get any real work done.
vbezhenar 6y ago
What about mobile workstations like Dell Precision, HP Zbook, Thinkpad P53? Those workstations usually claim to support Linux officially, they are really powerful workhorses, they allow using of server-grade components (Xeons, ECC RAM, Quadro GPUs). Do people avoid them because they are expensive, bulky or do not run long on battery? If I would buy laptop today, I would look into those machines first, they seem to match my expectations perfectly.
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  Anything that supports linux officially will likely support the major distros just fine.
- bas3l1ne 6y ago
  The Dell Precision line has great linux support, and can be purchased with Ubuntu. Its been reliable, gets great battery life, and overall provides the best linux experience I’ve ever had on a laptop. So much so that i purchased a nearly identical xps15 for personal use
  - criddell 6y ago
    How often does your fan spin up?
- autocorr 6y ago
  The Dell Latitude series also have superb Linux hardware support too. You can often get the series cheap like-new/refurbished on the web because business IT departments frequently liquidate them on upgrades. I got this Dell Latitude 7290 for $650 USD refurbished off Amazon a couple years ago[1]. It's been great! [1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07P8C1PWY/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07P8C1PWY/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...
- tlavoie 6y ago
  My P50 is a couple years old, works great. It's exactly what I needed, with room to grow (and I can do it myself). Also, I have found a few things that seem to make a large difference on power/battery. Currently running i3 desktop, and a Firefox extension (auto tab discard) that unloads pages I've not been in recently.
jlgaddis 6y ago
> 1. I had to install "gnome-tweaks" in order to remap my CapsLock key to Control. $ cat ~/.config/autostart/map-caps-lock-to-ctrl.desktop [Desktop Entry] Encoding=UTF-8 Version=0.9.4 Type=Application Name=Map CAPS LOCK to CTRL Comment=Remaps the CAPS LOCK key to another CTRL key Exec=/usr/bin/setxkbmap -option 'ctrl:nocaps' OnlyShowIn=XFCE; StartupNotify=false Terminal=false Hidden=false
- m463 6y ago
  that is very helpful. I wish there was a drop-in file that did this at the console/keymap level. It seems every distribution does it a different way. I always have to make my own keymap for loadkeys
  - 1996 6y ago
    there are several solutions that work at the device level!
  - toyg 6y ago
    This is the sort of thing freedesktop.org was supposed to solve. It seems like the effort floundered when GNOME decided to go “postmodern” with their shell.
bnkamalesh 6y ago
I thought Ubuntu stayed on the cutting edge, at least when it comes to 3rd party packages. Not sure about the kernel.
bnkamalesh 6y ago
Oh and what about that pristine glass touchpad experience, is that available anywhere?

busterarm 6y ago

Not just any thinkpad! Stick to the X, T & to some extent P series. Avoid nvidia graphics if you can. Arch Linux (and to some extent OpenBSD) probably has the best support/documentation/fixes for any ACPI/APM management issues you have. I have a top-end 2017 MBP and I just recently bought a brand new 7th Gen X1 Carbon for very cheaply (like $800) and it _screams_ in comparison to the Mac.

Spivak 6y ago
Avoid Nvidia Optimus (i.e. the W series). It’s so much worse than having a dedicated card because of the way it’s soldered on. It only kinda works. It still consumes power when “disabled”. You can’t use GPU passthrough. Stand-alone Nvidia GPUs are fine but on Fedora you have to do some work because the Mutter and Kwin devs are currently in a spat with Nvidia.
cpursley 6y ago
Thanks for bringing this up. Can folk's recommend specific thinkpads that play well with linux? I'm specifically interested in Ryzen versions.
- busterarm 6y ago
  The T14s might work, but IIRC most of the Ryzen models are in the E series and hardware support there is spotty.
  - DeltaWhy 6y ago
    Just got a Ryzen T14 - only had it for a few days but it's working great. Arch works well out of the box, but Debian needs a kernel and some firmware packages from sid in order to get WiFi working.
  - mikeywazowski 6y ago
    I have an E490 (i7) running PopOS and the only thing that doesn't work is the fingerprint scanner. Everything worked out of the box; I haven't had to install any drivers myself. (That I can recall, anyway. Might have been such a simple process to install any missing drivers that I've forgotten.)
- nextos 6y ago
  Some are Ubuntu certified. Those tend to work well. Also look at what Redhat or BSD developers use. Besides, try to avoid discrete GPUs if you can. An all Intel machine, or lately all AMD, usually works really well. Another good sign is the availability of EFI firmware updates that are OS independent.
- ibraheemdev 6y ago
  I recently bought a t14 with a 4750u. Ubuntu worked great out of the box, but the battery lasted about 4 hours. I don't know if it was a hardware issue, but I tried everything and couldn't get it to last more than 5 hours. Everything else was great though. I was running Rust compiles on large projects without a sound from the fan, and it stayed cool throughout. Sucks that I had to return it because of the battery.
pkaye 6y ago
So X1 Carbon works well with Linux?
- pxeboot 6y ago
  Zero issues for me. They even released a firmware update for the fingerprint scanner to add Linux support a few months ago. I have a 7th gen.
  - codecamper 6y ago
    ubuntu or fedora?
    - pxeboot 6y ago
      I have used Ubuntu and Arch on this laptop.
- adiM 6y ago
  Yes! After using MacBook Pro for almost a decade, I moved back to Linux for my laptop two years ago. I installed the Manjaro i3 image and I was expecting that it will take almost a week to tweak the settings so that all the hardware works and was pleasantly surprised that everything worked out of the box (everything other than fingerprint scanner but that was a known limitation).
  - zwayhowder 6y ago
    I can second this with the addendum I'm on an X1 Yoga and the touchscreen works out of the box, it took me about 2 minutes to get the screen auto-rotating as well using this script. https://gist.github.com/mortie/e725d37a71779b18e8eaaf4f8a02bf5b https://gist.github.com/mortie/e725d37a71779b18e8eaaf4f8a02b...
- busterarm 6y ago
  8th Gen might not be so hot yet from what I've heard. 7th Gen minor issues. 6th and prior are flawless.
wayne 6y ago
I setup a Thinkpad X-series with OpenBSD a few months ago and the hardware support was stellar. I researched ahead of time (lots of googling and reading HN and Reddit threads) and it seemed like the OpenBSD devs were using a handful of Thinkpad models so those worked perfectly. I've mostly used it to surf the web (Firefox) and code (Vim). No one would say it's as seamless as using a Macbook, but being able to tinker with and customize everything has been half the fun.
- busterarm 6y ago
  I have a 7th Gen X1 Carbon & a Thinkpad X270 running OpenBSD and they're both flawless (bluetooth, hyperthreading, fingerprint reader all disabled). Being limited to 802.11n networking is fine.
  - dfgdghdf 6y ago
    I think we have different definitions of "flawless"
    - busterarm 6y ago
      All of the things that I don't have (except for 802.11ac) are things I would be turning off anyway and would buy the laptop without them if I could.
- 1over137 6y ago
  Is there a good resource for Thinkpads for sale in 2020 that work well with OpenBSD/FreeBSD/linux? A lot of the suggested models I find are from several years ago.
totony 6y ago
Thinkpads all have soldered ram which is a pratice I can't support, is there a model I missed that has ram slots?
- novok 6y ago
  I think soldered storage is the thing that matters more. RAM does not retain state, storage does.
  - totony 6y ago
    Except having a lot of RAM is vital for some workloads (like compilation, virtualization/containers). Sometimes you may think you're okay with 16GB or RAM, until you need one or two 8GB VM working and a local DB
- jamesponddotco 6y ago
  The T models without the S usually have no soldered RAM, or only one soldered slot. The ThinkPad T480, for example, has two upgradable RAM slots and one or two NVMe slots. Heck, even the Wi-Fi card is removable. When talking about ThinkPads, I always recommend going with the T line and skipping anything with S at the end.
  - totony 6y ago
    Oh you're right, they seem to only have 1 slot soldered. They should advertise that more on their website. Seeing 8GB (soldered) + 1 expansion would be clearer
    - nix23 6y ago
      It's still BS, if you have a dual-channel CPU you are restricted to just upgrade the additional slot to the soldered one like 8GB+8GB and same speed.
    - jamesponddotco 6y ago
      Until the T495, which was the last generation before the T14 came along, it used to be that the T with an S at the end would have one soldered RAM stick and one available to upgrade, while the T without the S would have both available, hence why the T without the S was my recommended model. I would always recommend buying used with the minimal amount of RAM for cheap, and then upgrading everything manually, from RAM to NVMe to Wi-Fi card. With the T14, however, it seems Lenovo fucked up big time. No more extra removable battery, no more empty RAM slots. The one soldered does seem to be 3200MHz, so Ryzen benefits greatly once you fill the second RAM slot with another 3200MHz stick — since Ryzen, and especially the integrated graphics, love dual channel fast memory —, but if you choose wrong when you buy, you are stuck. That sucks and does create a problem for my future self. Right now I have a T495 and my wife has a T480 with an extra big battery, and we were going to upgrade both to the T14 for Ryzen 4000, but soldered RAM is a travesty. I wonder where we are going to go now. I mostly use desktop workstations because working from home for 11 years now, I learned that workstations help with work discipline, but a laptop always end up being needed. I hate Dell with a passion, the Asus Zephyrus G14 suffers from the same issues as the ThinkPad T14, and HP uses ugly fonts in their keyboards, which bugs me. The Pinebook Pro is nice, but mine hasn't arrived. Maybe the Slimbook from that German KDE shop? Hopefully it ships to Brazil.
lokedhs 6y ago
I'm using a T490, and with one exception everything has worked perfectly. Things like Thunderbolt connecting to a docking station with multiple monitors just works out of the box. That's not to say that it's been perfect. The touchpad on this thing isn't great. I've had issues with sporadic jumping of the pointer when touching it with two fingers. I replaced the touchpad which did not have any effect. The funny thing is that the problem has been slowing going away over the months. I have never tested it on Windows, so I wouldn't know if there is a hardware problem. The reason I was mentioning this is because I wanted to give some credit to Lenovo support. I fully expected them to tell me to test on Windows before replacing the touchpad but they were happy to tell me they supported Linux and me showing the issue in Arch Linux was enough for them to replace it.

1_player 6y ago

I had a really bad time with Fedora 32, used to Arch Linux: it always felt like RHEL unstable, with many breaking changes not documented (Fedora 32 needed some kernel and firewall hacks to work with Docker [1]) and have their own set of unstandard tools, still not very much documented. I spent 3 hours trying to understand how to compile a patched mainline kernel -- need to learn about dracut, koji, fedpkg, rpmbuild -- and none of these tools are documented clearly on a central, official place, but can be found through googling, reading mailing lists, piecing stuff together from deprecated wiki pages. COPR [2] is interesting, like PPA, with the worst user experience I've ever seen. The patched kernel I was interested about was already compiled by somebody, and available through COPR, but good luck finding which repo has an up-to-date version of the package you're interested. The whole Fedora COPR site is more than useless. I mean, the default experience was pretty good, but being the unstable branch of Red Hat means there's a lot of breakage, every release changes something big and you're constantly on the bleeding edge without the safety net of a top notch wiki like Arch Linux has. 1: https://fedoramagazine.org/docker-and-fedora-32/ https://fedoramagazine.org/docker-and-fedora-32/ 2: https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/ https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/

drran 6y ago
So, you figured out how to compile patched kernel in just 3 hours? Wow. (Create patch, install src.rpm, add patch to SOURCE directory, mention patch in .spec and add instruction to apply patch to %setup section, and then rpmbuild the .spec).
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
circularfoyers 6y ago
The Fedora packaging guidelines is an official, pretty thorough guide to RPM packaging with lots of examples for specific languages[1]. The Fedora docs also cover creating a custom kernel too[2]. I recently moved over to Podman from Docker and found the documentation for it very good as well.[3] I do agree that the search functionality of Copr is extremely basic to the point of being useless for popular packages such as custom kernels, but I believe there is some effort to remedy this with upvoting Copr repos, but I'd argue this is still not enough. I found though as someone new to Copr that it was very easy to figure out as someone simply building my own packages. [1] https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/packaging-guidelines https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/packaging-guidelines [2] https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/kernel/build-custom-kernel https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/kernel/build... [3] https://docs.podman.io/en/latest https://docs.podman.io/en/latest

Aeolun 6y ago

For what it’s worth, I have the same experience with Pop OS! during the past year. Steam is also at a point where I can just install native windows games and run them with barely any trouble.

IggleSniggle 6y ago
Wait, what? Does Steam bake in some kind of automatic virtualization support for Windows games these days?
- Aeolun 6y ago
  Jup, comes with a customized proton build, and the ability to select specific proton versions if you have them installed. I’d say 50% of games works out of the box. And 25% more after installing some video libraries that are for some reason not automatically installed.
  - circularfoyers 6y ago
    You can also get more precise and up to date numbers on what does and doesn't work from ProtonDB[1]. In the reports for each game you're able to see details like distro release, proton release and any other extra steps required (if any) to get the game working. [1] https://www.protondb.com https://www.protondb.com
    - ghthor 6y ago
      Proton DB is great, Donate to the maker!
  - IggleSniggle 6y ago
    Welp, especially with how infrequently I play games these days, there goes my last reason to ever install Windows on my home machines. Thanks for taking the time to give me a sense of how it looks “in reality” these days.

BodhiDude 6y ago

QUESTION: As a Mac Dude: Did you ever get the Apple Magic keyboard to work? I think it was the right mouse click that never worked. (I never used a Mac) If you look for a Laptop, Dell XPS are pretty good. If you buy one used, avoid the one which has the camera at the bottom of the screen. People look right up your nose in meetings I was told.

adsteel_ 6y ago
I bought a nose hair trimmer for this reason. Then I switched to a Thinkpad.
mraza007 6y ago
I have that same xps and it looks weird honestly that’s one of the reason I’m trying to switch to latest xps
BodhiDude 6y ago
I meant magic keypad.
neurostimulant 6y ago
Hmm, do you mean apple keyboard or magic mouse? For the keyboard, mine works but it took a while to connect after boot. I either has to wait several minutes before I can use the keyboard to login, or just use another keyboard until the apple bluetooth keyboard is finally connected. As for magic mouse, right clicks works, but it might be because I already configured the mouse to enable right click on my mac. The mouse seem to store that settings locally in the device itself. My only gripes is inertial scrolling doesn't seem to work. I'm using ubuntu 20.04 desktop. Edit: forgot to include the biggest annoyance related to using apple bluetooth keyboard on my linux desktop: for some reason, ubuntu seem to think the right half side of the keyboard is actually a numpad. I had to install numlockx and add `numlockx off` to gnome startup command list to fix this.

criddell 6y ago

I work in C++ and for compiling the CPU is definitely the bottleneck. My CPU will be pegged at 100% for several minutes and my two (SSD) drives just blip once ever few seconds.

novok 6y ago
At this point, I would be spinning up 96 core AWS build servers to retain sanity :)
- wrmsr 6y ago
  Past some critical mass local dev indeed simply doesn't work, but the majority of codebases aren't ~that~ large. And until that point I feel there's an analogy between having a light laptop and remotely doing your heavy lifting with the whole working remote thing in general. In theory, on paper, and assuming reliable decent internet connectivity, with a little elbow grease there should be no discernable difference between thin client remote dev and an in-your-lap xeon, just like with high quality low latency video teleconferencing with a team that knows how to do it there should be nothing lost with physical distance. In practice though the overhead of doing any little thing, no matter how small the overhead may be optimized down to, is still real. Non-verbal communication is lost on zoom and the distance between you and your real UI grew by hundreds of miles and dozens of links, and the tradeoffs your environment makes when there's no such thing as a 'quick check' add up fast. But it's obviously not one dimensional, and there's probably irony in the weight shedding that offers you 20 hrs of battery life coming with a price tag of requiring reliable wifi to get any real work done.

vbezhenar 6y ago

What about mobile workstations like Dell Precision, HP Zbook, Thinkpad P53? Those workstations usually claim to support Linux officially, they are really powerful workhorses, they allow using of server-grade components (Xeons, ECC RAM, Quadro GPUs). Do people avoid them because they are expensive, bulky or do not run long on battery? If I would buy laptop today, I would look into those machines first, they seem to match my expectations perfectly.

stjohnswarts 6y ago
Anything that supports linux officially will likely support the major distros just fine.
bas3l1ne 6y ago
The Dell Precision line has great linux support, and can be purchased with Ubuntu. Its been reliable, gets great battery life, and overall provides the best linux experience I’ve ever had on a laptop. So much so that i purchased a nearly identical xps15 for personal use
- criddell 6y ago
  How often does your fan spin up?
autocorr 6y ago
The Dell Latitude series also have superb Linux hardware support too. You can often get the series cheap like-new/refurbished on the web because business IT departments frequently liquidate them on upgrades. I got this Dell Latitude 7290 for $650 USD refurbished off Amazon a couple years ago[1]. It's been great! [1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07P8C1PWY/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07P8C1PWY/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...
tlavoie 6y ago
My P50 is a couple years old, works great. It's exactly what I needed, with room to grow (and I can do it myself). Also, I have found a few things that seem to make a large difference on power/battery. Currently running i3 desktop, and a Firefox extension (auto tab discard) that unloads pages I've not been in recently.

jlgaddis 6y ago

> 1. I had to install "gnome-tweaks" in order to remap my CapsLock key to Control. $ cat ~/.config/autostart/map-caps-lock-to-ctrl.desktop [Desktop Entry] Encoding=UTF-8 Version=0.9.4 Type=Application Name=Map CAPS LOCK to CTRL Comment=Remaps the CAPS LOCK key to another CTRL key Exec=/usr/bin/setxkbmap -option 'ctrl:nocaps' OnlyShowIn=XFCE; StartupNotify=false Terminal=false Hidden=false

m463 6y ago
that is very helpful. I wish there was a drop-in file that did this at the console/keymap level. It seems every distribution does it a different way. I always have to make my own keymap for loadkeys
- 1996 6y ago
  there are several solutions that work at the device level!
- toyg 6y ago
  This is the sort of thing freedesktop.org was supposed to solve. It seems like the effort floundered when GNOME decided to go “postmodern” with their shell.

bnkamalesh 6y ago

I thought Ubuntu stayed on the cutting edge, at least when it comes to 3rd party packages. Not sure about the kernel.

bnkamalesh 6y ago

Oh and what about that pristine glass touchpad experience, is that available anywhere?