10 ms·

If you take a regular Lenovo laptop, everything likely works out of the box with an upstream kernel. This quite not the case yet with Asahi Linux which does not

If you take a regular Lenovo laptop, everything likely works out of the box with an upstream kernel. This quite not the case yet with Asahi Linux which does not support power management, no USB, no sound. There was a time where Apple laptops came with very good Linux support. It was the time were every bit of hardware support was present in Darwin (a 12" iBook G3 was working flawlessly with Linux for example). I think that at each generation, support gets worse because the hardware is closing down. This translates to far more time between release and having something usable with Linux.

avar 4y ago
I used an iBook G3/G4 for years as a primary development laptop running Linux, and I think your recollection here is a bit off. The state of it was that: - There were numerous laptops with near-full Linux support, the Apple hardware wasn't categorically better when it came to that. - The power usage of x86 CPUs was atrocious at the time compared to PPC. Now history is repeating with Apple's M[12] line. Therefore people put up with a lot to get 2-3x longer battery life. As I recall I got 3-4 hours of active use out of my iBook, but (going to conferences) it felt like people's x86s almost always had to be plugged in. - The Linux support for software suspend/hibernation was really flaky at the time, but it worked perfectly on Apple hardware, because all Linux had to do was to tell the hardware "do the suspend thing now" (IIRC by tweaking a file in /proc). The hardware did a slow "heartbeat" with a front LED hidden behind the plastic frame when suspended (a nice effect). When running Linux it would do the the exact same, as it was all done in hardware. - There were still edge cases in hardware support, just as with any other laptop vendor, it all came down to what individual components happened to have Linux drivers. Some of this was better on Apple's hardware, some of it was worse.
- protonbob 4y ago
  This is such a trip down memory lane. The iBook G4 was a bit of a pain to set up with ubuntu, but once you got it going it was pretty fool proof. I think I ran a machine on it until 12.04 where they stopped supporting PPC officially.
- bityard 4y ago
  > The Linux support for software suspend/hibernation was really flaky at the time, but it worked perfectly on Apple hardware, because all Linux had to do was to tell the hardware "do the suspend thing now" (IIRC by tweaking a file in /proc). That's interesting to read, because I ran Linux on a Macbook Pro for a few years around 2012 and the only thing on that machine that _never_ worked right was suspend and resume.
  - spectre3d 4y ago
    Pretty sure they were speaking of the PowerPC age, not Intel. The iBook and PowerBook G3 and G4, not the MacBook and MacBook Pro.
- rvdginste 4y ago
  I used an iBook G3/G4 12" for several years with linux. I remember the G3 was supported completely out of the box. I loved it: it was small, battery lasted pretty long (I did spend some time fine tuning laptop-mode-tools), suspend-to-ram was working flawlessly and from what I remember all hardware was supported, including 3d graphics (ati radeon). For the G4, I remember there were some issues to get the wireless card working when it came out (Broadcom hardware I think), but the rest of the hardware also worked out of the box.
pharmakom 4y ago
> If you take a regular Lenovo laptop, everything likely works out of the box with an upstream kernel. Never worked flawlessly in my experience.
- Loic 4y ago
  I suppose it depends on your Lenovo series. I have been using exclusively T and X laptop for the past 20+ years and it always worked perfectly. There was a time where the battery life was better with Windows, but maybe only 2 or 3 years "in-between". Nowadays, the hardware support is for me a non issue.
  - melesian 4y ago
    My experience, also using T and X series laptops matches yours. Some issues with resuming from sleep a long time ago and with firmware on a docking station once but otherwise only one gripe: I've never been entirely happy with the fan control. I found in the end with my T440s that leaving it to the OS worked well enough. Previously, with older X series machines, I had to both try to optimize and also ended up replacing fans.
  - microtonal 4y ago
    I had a T14 AMD for 8 months or so last years and it was death by a thousand paper cuts. Wake from (S3) sleep would not work well, e.g. the trackpad/point would often not come back up. Sometimes the GPU wouldn't wake properly. The fingerprint reader rarely worked. Bluetooth was very flaky. Battery life was much worse than Windows. I had a Lenovo USB-C dock. However, Linux configured the lanes wrong, making it impossible to use 4k@60Hz through the dock (worked fine on Windows).
    - jcelerier 4y ago
      > Wake from (S3) sleep would not work well, e.g. the trackpad/point would often not come back up. Sometimes the GPU wouldn't wake properly. The fingerprint reader rarely worked. Bluetooth was very flaky. except the fingerprint one because I don't have a fingerprint reader, I had all these issues on my windows laptop
RL_Quine 4y ago
Nonsense. The 10th gen X1 Carbon has basically nothing functional unless you are running master kernel, and even then it's not completely there. It's just an unusable paperweight at the moment, the OLED screen is pretty though.
- dm319 4y ago
  As a long-time Thinkpad user, it usually helps to not go for the latest/greatest, but even so, the time between release and 99% working linux is in the region of months with Thinkpads, whereas it can be years-never with Mac. I had some issues with my AMD X13 when getting it new - but they weren't show-stopping, just annoying, and they got ironed out over the next 6 months.
  - nicoburns 4y ago
    > whereas it can be years-never with Mac Notably the Asahi project got M2 laptops up to parity with the M1 family in ~48 hours of dev work. No doubt this won't always be the case (there's bound to be major hardware revisions at some point) but at the moment this is quite promising looking towards the future.
    - dm319 4y ago
      Yes, I think the difference this time is motivation (because M1!) and some money going this way.
  - rayiner 4y ago
    But that supports the point OP made above. Each generation of Lenovo laptop changes out lots of parts (presumably based on changing prices and supply contracts). Apple laptop hardware tends to be stable over time.
    - viraptor 4y ago
      > Apple laptop hardware tends to be stable over time. I'm confused where you got that idea. T2 chips changed a lot. The most recent Intel MBPs have a different wifi with a known-broken firmware for Linux. The sound handling has also changed and hasn't been reverse engineered yet since 2019. And that's before we even get to changing the entire architecture to M1. How is that less changes than lenovo?
ajsnigrutin 4y ago
> regular Lenovo laptop This is true for what we nerds call a "lenovo laptop" (so mostly T series). Install, everything works. Lenovo also sells a bunch of cheapish plasticky laptops that look like some random noname chinese OEM manufactured and lenovo just put a sticker on... well, linux support there is a bit hit and miss.
- nobleach 4y ago
  If it says "YOGA" or you can open it more than 180 degrees.....
- GekkePrutser 4y ago
  > Lenovo also sells a bunch of cheapish plasticky laptops that look like some random noname chinese OEM manufactured and lenovo just put a sticker on... well, linux support there is a bit hit and miss. They look like that because they basically are. There's really two companies called Lenovo. One of them makes the ThinkPad T, X, P and one of the budget lines (L or E, always forget which, we don't use either). And the ThinkStations. The other makes the IdeaPads and the other ThinkPad budget line which lacks the great keyboard and Linux compatibility, it just looks a bit like a ThinkPad. And the Legion gaming stuff etc. They're really two different companies with different factories. We have a global contract with Lenovo and we can't even order the consumer laptops. We wanted to get some Legions because some of our dev teams prefer the Legion with RTX over the ThinkPad P which come with Quadros. But they simply can't sell them to us. I think RTX came to the ThinkPad P since anyway, not sure because I'm not involved anymore. It seems one company because as a consumer you can buy all of them from Lenovo.com but that's not even really Lenovo, it's a third party reseller called DigitalRiver.
necovek 4y ago
While I am a devoted fan of Thinkpad laptops (they are better than Apple MacBooks because of — at least as an option — non-glare screens, keyboards and soft-touch non-wrist-cutting palmrest: two/three most important factors for a portable machine imho), that's only partially true, and rarely with a new generation of hardware. Eg. I remember getting Thinkpad X1 Carbon 6th gen early on in the cycle (I've also got 5th and 8th gen in the house, and X1 Yoga 6th gen which sucks with that metal finish), and the with the removal of "regular" S3 sleep, you close your laptop and it keeps running and potentially burning in your bag. It took Lenovo a year or so to add a "Linux sleep support" BIOS option, though it took community less than that to provide DSDT patches to re-enable S3 sleep. All I am saying is that Lenovo machines, esp Thinkpad line, are usually a great choice, but you can hit early-adopter hurdles just like with any other laptop. The good thing about them is that community is huge and great, and that they are the best laptops around as far as usability on the go goes (as in, actually typing on them and seeing what you type).
- bodge5000 4y ago
  Yeh same for me, I'm a big thinkpad fan (I own 5 of them, 7 if you include the ones I broke in attempts to do some outlandish mods), but I do occasionally find issues out the box, though that can be down to the distro you use as well. That being said, an imperfect out the box experience just gives me an excuse to get another (old) thinkpad, so every cloud
- addicted 4y ago
  The same thing happens to me with my company Thinkpad. Closing the cover does not put it to sleep, no matter what I do to the settings (admittedly it’s a very locked down device so there may be settings that are not available to me).
- nobleach 4y ago
  The whole S3 sleep fiasco is the stuff of nightmares. I have a gen 6 X1 Carbon too and I've gotten it sleeping very well. I also have a Dell XPS 15 that I love but... it's been 2 years since it was brand new and it's still stuck on S2 "idle". As I understand it, Microsoft wants it this way so they can maintain network connectivity. My major gripe with the Lenovo is the 16 gigs of RAM soldered on the board. It's so nice to be able to pop open my Dell and put up to 64 gigs in there, while replacing the SSD in one of the two M2 slots. Then again, I'm typing this on a 2019 Macbook Pro (Intel) that has nary a single replaceable part.
whalesalad 4y ago
I just wish other laptop hardware was on par with Apple. One can’t deny their attention to detail, fit and finish.
- xtracto 4y ago
  I just bought a Thinkpad because my home's other Windows machine died. The laptop is ok in general , and I love the mate screen, but the black plastic body is just horrible. It feels as if it's going to break just by opening the screen. Does apple have some kind of patent for the aluminium body?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - nicoburns 4y ago
    > Does apple have some kind of patent for the aluminium body? No, they just have an absolutely huge farm of CNC machines cutting them out which is expensive to maintain, not generally available from contract manufacturers in the volumes required, and would take a huge capital outlay from competitors who wanted to replicate it.
  - DJeuxg 4y ago
    Aluminium is heavy, cold, dents and expensive. Plastic is better in most ways for a laptop shell.
    - rowanG077 4y ago
      Aluminium has the best property. It conducts heat. Plastic laptops are saunas.
      - mbakke 4y ago
        Aluminium is also highly recycleable.
    - tekknik 4y ago

avar 4y ago

I used an iBook G3/G4 for years as a primary development laptop running Linux, and I think your recollection here is a bit off. The state of it was that: - There were numerous laptops with near-full Linux support, the Apple hardware wasn't categorically better when it came to that. - The power usage of x86 CPUs was atrocious at the time compared to PPC. Now history is repeating with Apple's M[12] line. Therefore people put up with a lot to get 2-3x longer battery life. As I recall I got 3-4 hours of active use out of my iBook, but (going to conferences) it felt like people's x86s almost always had to be plugged in. - The Linux support for software suspend/hibernation was really flaky at the time, but it worked perfectly on Apple hardware, because all Linux had to do was to tell the hardware "do the suspend thing now" (IIRC by tweaking a file in /proc). The hardware did a slow "heartbeat" with a front LED hidden behind the plastic frame when suspended (a nice effect). When running Linux it would do the the exact same, as it was all done in hardware. - There were still edge cases in hardware support, just as with any other laptop vendor, it all came down to what individual components happened to have Linux drivers. Some of this was better on Apple's hardware, some of it was worse.

protonbob 4y ago
This is such a trip down memory lane. The iBook G4 was a bit of a pain to set up with ubuntu, but once you got it going it was pretty fool proof. I think I ran a machine on it until 12.04 where they stopped supporting PPC officially.
bityard 4y ago
> The Linux support for software suspend/hibernation was really flaky at the time, but it worked perfectly on Apple hardware, because all Linux had to do was to tell the hardware "do the suspend thing now" (IIRC by tweaking a file in /proc). That's interesting to read, because I ran Linux on a Macbook Pro for a few years around 2012 and the only thing on that machine that _never_ worked right was suspend and resume.
- spectre3d 4y ago
  Pretty sure they were speaking of the PowerPC age, not Intel. The iBook and PowerBook G3 and G4, not the MacBook and MacBook Pro.
rvdginste 4y ago
I used an iBook G3/G4 12" for several years with linux. I remember the G3 was supported completely out of the box. I loved it: it was small, battery lasted pretty long (I did spend some time fine tuning laptop-mode-tools), suspend-to-ram was working flawlessly and from what I remember all hardware was supported, including 3d graphics (ati radeon). For the G4, I remember there were some issues to get the wireless card working when it came out (Broadcom hardware I think), but the rest of the hardware also worked out of the box.

pharmakom 4y ago

> If you take a regular Lenovo laptop, everything likely works out of the box with an upstream kernel. Never worked flawlessly in my experience.

Loic 4y ago
I suppose it depends on your Lenovo series. I have been using exclusively T and X laptop for the past 20+ years and it always worked perfectly. There was a time where the battery life was better with Windows, but maybe only 2 or 3 years "in-between". Nowadays, the hardware support is for me a non issue.
- melesian 4y ago
  My experience, also using T and X series laptops matches yours. Some issues with resuming from sleep a long time ago and with firmware on a docking station once but otherwise only one gripe: I've never been entirely happy with the fan control. I found in the end with my T440s that leaving it to the OS worked well enough. Previously, with older X series machines, I had to both try to optimize and also ended up replacing fans.
- microtonal 4y ago
  I had a T14 AMD for 8 months or so last years and it was death by a thousand paper cuts. Wake from (S3) sleep would not work well, e.g. the trackpad/point would often not come back up. Sometimes the GPU wouldn't wake properly. The fingerprint reader rarely worked. Bluetooth was very flaky. Battery life was much worse than Windows. I had a Lenovo USB-C dock. However, Linux configured the lanes wrong, making it impossible to use 4k@60Hz through the dock (worked fine on Windows).
  - jcelerier 4y ago
    > Wake from (S3) sleep would not work well, e.g. the trackpad/point would often not come back up. Sometimes the GPU wouldn't wake properly. The fingerprint reader rarely worked. Bluetooth was very flaky. except the fingerprint one because I don't have a fingerprint reader, I had all these issues on my windows laptop

RL_Quine 4y ago

Nonsense. The 10th gen X1 Carbon has basically nothing functional unless you are running master kernel, and even then it's not completely there. It's just an unusable paperweight at the moment, the OLED screen is pretty though.

dm319 4y ago
As a long-time Thinkpad user, it usually helps to not go for the latest/greatest, but even so, the time between release and 99% working linux is in the region of months with Thinkpads, whereas it can be years-never with Mac. I had some issues with my AMD X13 when getting it new - but they weren't show-stopping, just annoying, and they got ironed out over the next 6 months.
- nicoburns 4y ago
  > whereas it can be years-never with Mac Notably the Asahi project got M2 laptops up to parity with the M1 family in ~48 hours of dev work. No doubt this won't always be the case (there's bound to be major hardware revisions at some point) but at the moment this is quite promising looking towards the future.
  - dm319 4y ago
    Yes, I think the difference this time is motivation (because M1!) and some money going this way.
- rayiner 4y ago
  But that supports the point OP made above. Each generation of Lenovo laptop changes out lots of parts (presumably based on changing prices and supply contracts). Apple laptop hardware tends to be stable over time.
  - viraptor 4y ago
    > Apple laptop hardware tends to be stable over time. I'm confused where you got that idea. T2 chips changed a lot. The most recent Intel MBPs have a different wifi with a known-broken firmware for Linux. The sound handling has also changed and hasn't been reverse engineered yet since 2019. And that's before we even get to changing the entire architecture to M1. How is that less changes than lenovo?

ajsnigrutin 4y ago

> regular Lenovo laptop This is true for what we nerds call a "lenovo laptop" (so mostly T series). Install, everything works. Lenovo also sells a bunch of cheapish plasticky laptops that look like some random noname chinese OEM manufactured and lenovo just put a sticker on... well, linux support there is a bit hit and miss.

nobleach 4y ago
If it says "YOGA" or you can open it more than 180 degrees.....
GekkePrutser 4y ago
> Lenovo also sells a bunch of cheapish plasticky laptops that look like some random noname chinese OEM manufactured and lenovo just put a sticker on... well, linux support there is a bit hit and miss. They look like that because they basically are. There's really two companies called Lenovo. One of them makes the ThinkPad T, X, P and one of the budget lines (L or E, always forget which, we don't use either). And the ThinkStations. The other makes the IdeaPads and the other ThinkPad budget line which lacks the great keyboard and Linux compatibility, it just looks a bit like a ThinkPad. And the Legion gaming stuff etc. They're really two different companies with different factories. We have a global contract with Lenovo and we can't even order the consumer laptops. We wanted to get some Legions because some of our dev teams prefer the Legion with RTX over the ThinkPad P which come with Quadros. But they simply can't sell them to us. I think RTX came to the ThinkPad P since anyway, not sure because I'm not involved anymore. It seems one company because as a consumer you can buy all of them from Lenovo.com but that's not even really Lenovo, it's a third party reseller called DigitalRiver.

necovek 4y ago

While I am a devoted fan of Thinkpad laptops (they are better than Apple MacBooks because of — at least as an option — non-glare screens, keyboards and soft-touch non-wrist-cutting palmrest: two/three most important factors for a portable machine imho), that's only partially true, and rarely with a new generation of hardware. Eg. I remember getting Thinkpad X1 Carbon 6th gen early on in the cycle (I've also got 5th and 8th gen in the house, and X1 Yoga 6th gen which sucks with that metal finish), and the with the removal of "regular" S3 sleep, you close your laptop and it keeps running and potentially burning in your bag. It took Lenovo a year or so to add a "Linux sleep support" BIOS option, though it took community less than that to provide DSDT patches to re-enable S3 sleep. All I am saying is that Lenovo machines, esp Thinkpad line, are usually a great choice, but you can hit early-adopter hurdles just like with any other laptop. The good thing about them is that community is huge and great, and that they are the best laptops around as far as usability on the go goes (as in, actually typing on them and seeing what you type).

bodge5000 4y ago
Yeh same for me, I'm a big thinkpad fan (I own 5 of them, 7 if you include the ones I broke in attempts to do some outlandish mods), but I do occasionally find issues out the box, though that can be down to the distro you use as well. That being said, an imperfect out the box experience just gives me an excuse to get another (old) thinkpad, so every cloud
addicted 4y ago
The same thing happens to me with my company Thinkpad. Closing the cover does not put it to sleep, no matter what I do to the settings (admittedly it’s a very locked down device so there may be settings that are not available to me).
nobleach 4y ago
The whole S3 sleep fiasco is the stuff of nightmares. I have a gen 6 X1 Carbon too and I've gotten it sleeping very well. I also have a Dell XPS 15 that I love but... it's been 2 years since it was brand new and it's still stuck on S2 "idle". As I understand it, Microsoft wants it this way so they can maintain network connectivity. My major gripe with the Lenovo is the 16 gigs of RAM soldered on the board. It's so nice to be able to pop open my Dell and put up to 64 gigs in there, while replacing the SSD in one of the two M2 slots. Then again, I'm typing this on a 2019 Macbook Pro (Intel) that has nary a single replaceable part.

whalesalad 4y ago

I just wish other laptop hardware was on par with Apple. One can’t deny their attention to detail, fit and finish.

xtracto 4y ago
I just bought a Thinkpad because my home's other Windows machine died. The laptop is ok in general , and I love the mate screen, but the black plastic body is just horrible. It feels as if it's going to break just by opening the screen. Does apple have some kind of patent for the aluminium body?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- nicoburns 4y ago
  > Does apple have some kind of patent for the aluminium body? No, they just have an absolutely huge farm of CNC machines cutting them out which is expensive to maintain, not generally available from contract manufacturers in the volumes required, and would take a huge capital outlay from competitors who wanted to replicate it.
- DJeuxg 4y ago
  Aluminium is heavy, cold, dents and expensive. Plastic is better in most ways for a laptop shell.
  - rowanG077 4y ago
    Aluminium has the best property. It conducts heat. Plastic laptops are saunas.
    - mbakke 4y ago
      Aluminium is also highly recycleable.
  - tekknik 4y ago