4 ms·
How has Lenovo made Thinkpads less Linux-friendly?
by SamReidHughes 11y ago
How has Lenovo made Thinkpads less Linux-friendly?
- WizzleKake 11y agoYou can brick certain ThinkPads with BIOS older than 2.08 by installing Linux on them. Not Linux-related, but the keyboard transition (happened between W520 and W530) was unfortunate and pissed a lot of people off. I'm sure the new keyboard design has its merits, but the fact that they changed it over the objection of their most loyal users speaks volumes about the direction Lenovo is taking the ThinkPad brand.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- robertfw 11y agoPurely anecdotal but the driver support for wifi on my T540p has given me no end of problems
- SamReidHughes 11y agoDo you have one of the Intel wifi cards?
- robertfw 11y agono, it's a Realtek. When I got the laptop, it wasn't working due to a kernal bug. I was able to get Wifi going using an external dongle. Then a kernal update fixed the bug and the internal worked. Since then something has changed and now neither work. I'm using Arch Linux... I used to have time to spend keeping things running and I enjoyed the slimmed down nature.. but these days I don't and I'm considering going back to Ubuntu.
- SamReidHughes 11y agoThat's pretty typical then. The advice for Thinkpads has long been to get an Intel wifi card, if you want to run Linux on it. In particular because it's the only name-brand known-quantity option you have at configuration.