Lenovo will start offering ThinkPads with Linux pre-installed

[nanoguy]

In context: The world's biggest PC company in terms of shipments has decided to offer a few select models with Linux pre-installed. In doing so, it joins the existing club that includes Dell and other smaller players like Purism, ZaReason, and System76.

If Linux has a special place in your heart, you will want to know Lenovo is partnering with the Fedora Project to give you your dream machine in the form of ThinkPad laptops that make it easy even for a newcomer to get started with Fedora.

This is supposed to be a pilot program dubbed Linux Community Series - Fedora Edition, which will include the ThinkPad P1 Gen2, ThinkPad X1 Gen8, ThinkPad P53, with the possibility that the company will expand the selection in the near future if it sees enough demand. These models will come with the newly released Fedora 32 Workstation Linux pre-installed, and will presumably be certified to play nice with it while only using first party repositories.

That means the ThinkPad P53 and ThinkPad P1 Gen2 won't come with Nvidia drivers installed by default. However, that's easy to fix by downloading them from proprietary sources.

We would have thought that Ubuntu would be a prime candidate at this point, given that Dell already has had a lot of success with its XPS 13 "Developer Edition" over the last few years. Lenovo's announcement does seem to hint at that possibility, and the main advantage of going that route is that Canonical offers a separate, long-term support (LTS) version that is refreshed every two years and supported for five years after release, which is about as much as the average laptop lifespan.

Still, there's a strong smell of missed opportunity here, especially since we know nothing about price and availability for these 'fedorized' ThinkPads.

AMD has shown it can pack a lot of power into a mobile CPU with its Ryzen 4000 series, and it would have been interesting to see Lenovo announce at least one fedorized ThinkPad with something like a Ryzen 4800H, which is an excellent APU for productivity.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/85020-lenovo-start-offering-thinkpads-linux-pre-installed.html

 

[Red999]

That's great to reduce price as users can utilize their old windows licenses if they want to.

Although the Linux desktop is "unusable" for regular users because chrome and firefox disable gpu's video hardware acceleration.
Playing a youtube video consumes a whole cpu core.
They don't even give the video hardware acceleration as a beta option.

 

[yRaz]

That's great to reduce price as users can utilize their old windows licenses if they want to.

Although the Linux desktop is "unusable" for regular users because chrome and firefox disable gpu's video hardware acceleration.
Playing a youtube video consumes a whole cpu core.
They don't even give the video hardware acceleration as a beta option.

https://www.linuxuprising.com/2018/08/how-to-enable-hardware-accelerated.html

seems like that problem is coming to an end. I never knew that was an issue for the 3ish years, but my main computer is a 1700x.

 

[Red999]

https://www.linuxuprising.com/2018/08/how-to-enable-hardware-accelerated.html

seems like that problem is coming to an end. I never knew that was an issue for the 3ish years, but my main computer is a 1700x.

But that chromium release is third party release, which surely didn't exist in distro's official repositories.
I actually researched about Linux browser video acceleration last year.
I also tried to circumvent it by making the ffmpeg plugin to use hardware acceleration by default.
But I couldn't continue because my laptop uses Intel haswell. Ffmpeg's Intel gpu accelerated video decoding is only available for media sdk supported platforms, I.e. Broadwell and newer ones.

 

[ivicaivica]

Although the Linux desktop is "unusable" for regular users because chrome and firefox disable gpu's video hardware acceleration.
Playing a youtube video consumes a whole cpu core.

Starting with firefox 76 that problem will be solved!

 

[jpuroila]

That's great to reduce price as users can utilize their old windows licenses if they want to.

Although the Linux desktop is "unusable" for regular users because chrome and firefox disable gpu's video hardware acceleration.
Playing a youtube video consumes a whole cpu core.
They don't even give the video hardware acceleration as a beta option.

OEM's Windows licensing fees are already low, and further subsidised by all the crapware they put in, so I doubt it'll be cheaper.

 

[kmo911]

https://www.prisjakt.nu/produkt.php?e=5339053
nice price too. https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserR...dXXM1opH3Dt2tH8WweKj5eFFARo_Do9f7WyzlIyGbNSvk MSI GF65 Thin 9SEXR-261XPL got the last one. 6 gb vram and a nice i5-10300h cpu 8 th core just to remember this is not a desktop its a laptop. for carrying with you on train boat everywhere (moon) wolfenstein youngblood still needs a hlll alot of vram to play. tryed it on 4 gb vram 6 gb vram in 4k. it tell s me it must downgrade. so go for more then 16-128 gb ram modules latest BIOS 507 Drivers firmware 101 from www.MSI.com

a good pc laptop with carry.


upd youtube offline. just use 4kdownloader or idm internet download manager and download LINKS. add-on needed Firefox chrome edge new versin ie11 and so on web surfers.
upd
unbutu live dvd can be used too. but take out ssd drive and put inside a new ssd drive and install. linuix are not the only one os. free linuix just take a search fro os and system requirements. free os es make cheaper pces but no need not getting a windows 10 os inside for gameplay. try out macos bootcamp too.

 

[toooooot]

People who want linux on it most likely know how to install it.

 

[docbill]

What sucks though, is even corporate builds which are sold to a company like Red Hat for the express usage of Linux only, as soon as you have a single issue, you MUST install Windows to upgrade the firmware. Lenovo laptops no longer have anyway to upgrade firmware. And what is worse, due to the Intel CPU bugs and constant fixes, you can expect your new laptop will start to have tech support issues within months, unless you keep upgrading that firmware regularly with the windows Lenovo tool.

I would far prefer to have Windows pre-installed, than Fedora. I can install Fedora extremely quickly. But resizing my encrypted volumes to install Windows was a HUGE pain in the neck.

BTW. As soon as I installed Windows, it self activated. So it seems Lenovo is paying for an OEM license for all their laptops, regardless if they are shipped with Windows on them.

 

[Red999]

What sucks though, is even corporate builds which are sold to a company like Red Hat for the express usage of Linux only, as soon as you have a single issue, you MUST install Windows to upgrade the firmware. Lenovo laptops no longer have anyway to upgrade firmware. And what is worse, due to the Intel CPU bugs and constant fixes, you can expect your new laptop will start to have tech support issues within months, unless you keep upgrading that firmware regularly with the windows Lenovo tool.

I would far prefer to have Windows pre-installed, than Fedora. I can install Fedora extremely quickly. But resizing my encrypted volumes to install Windows was a HUGE pain in the neck.

BTW. As soon as I installed Windows, it self activated. So it seems Lenovo is paying for an OEM license for all their laptops, regardless if they are shipped with Windows on them.

Doesn't manufacturer usually provide iso free dos version of firmware update?

 

[deemon]

That's great to reduce price as users can utilize their old windows licenses if they want to.

Although the Linux desktop is "unusable" for regular users because chrome and firefox disable gpu's video hardware acceleration.
Playing a youtube video consumes a whole cpu core.
They don't even give the video hardware acceleration as a beta option.

Don't know what you are talking about. Never had this issue with my linux. Then again, I don't run Ubuntu either... BTW!

 

[Red999]

Don't know what you are talking about. Never had this issue with my linux. Then again, I don't run Ubuntu either... BTW!

You simply can try play a youtube video in browser and see the cpu usage

 

[deemon]

You simply can try play a youtube video in browser and see the cpu usage

~about 6% when watching 1440p 60Hz video from youtube in firefox when I have intentionally turned OFF hardware acceleration - to not f**k with my gaming experience in the main display and do it's thing in underused CPU.

When I turn ON hardware acceleration it drops to ~2% for the browser, so it does work I assume, if I want it to... but usually I don't even.

 

[docbill]

Doesn't manufacturer usually provide iso free dos version of firmware update?

The used to. In fact they probably still do for their older laptops. But there newer versions doesn't support free dos. I spent an hour with Premium support trying to get some other solution from them. They have none to offer. The best we could come up with was to place Windows on an external disk instead of the internal drive, so I didn't have to move all my data to make space for a windows partition. Sadly though, my external drive proved unsuitable for the task...

I have also noticed I see Fedora updates labelled as firmware updates. But it never matches what the firmware tool under windows reports I need to install. And unless you have that latest firmware installed, the ticket isn't going further than a phone call.

I think they abandoned the Freedos version when Microsoft decided to allow downloading and installing Windows without a license key.