Every time I hear about mobile Linux releases I get excited just for the chance to get away from Android and iOS, then I get disappointed to find that the list of things that don't work includes like half the phone
That was a bit ironic, indeed, but at least the USB-A works!
For what it's worth, the majority of mechanical RGB keyboards and mice are USB-A anyways, so, if you're fine with a very powerful machine that wouldn't have an internal keyboard support for a few weeks, sounds like a good advice anyways!
I'm unsure what RGB or a keyboard being mechanical has to do with it being USB-A, or what the relevance is, but yes, there are many USB-A peripherals available.
An ARM64 is "a very powerful computer"? The whole promise with ARM is better thermals and long battery life, not screaming performance. With the thermals/cpu not working, we don't even get that.
That makes sense. If you have working USB-A, then any USB ethernet adapter supported by FreeBSD should work right?
That’s actually a pretty big escape hatch for early development. It explains how you’d be able to get past having a nonfunctional keyboard pretty easily, for example.
If you prefer your usual (external) keyboard and mouse, which plenty of people (myself included) do, the rest of the list is kinda 'meh' as restrictions go.
Honestly when my current Helix 2 finally starts to die on me I'll be looking for a tablet or hybrid replacement since I neither want nor need an attached keyboard+mouse anyway, in my normal usage they're mostly just something that takes up desk space.
Obviously there are also plenty of people with preferences entirely incompatible with this approach, but so it goes.
Ubuntu has an experimental installation image for this laptop at https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-24-10-concept-snapdrag... . Everything works except for audio and screen brightness control (I saw a patch for audio upcoming on LKML. I don't know about the brightness control, but it is stuck on high. Nevertheless, it still reports 12+ hours of battery with a bright screen.). It is a nice laptop, if you like the Lenovo T series.
Not buying anything Lenovo made ever again. T14 G1 was the worst computer I've ever had the displeasure of using. Extremely spotty USB C connection, throttling to 0.2 Ghz for no reason with no fix, and just terribly slow all around. Shame since I loved the T450s dearly.
I'm using an X1 Carbon Gen 11, and for my purposes at least, it's an improvement over every previous generation.
I'd love to switch to a Framework one day, but I'm not willing to use a laptop without mouse buttons. (I don't care about the TrackPoint at all; I do care about having physical mouse buttons.)
I switched a couple years ago from X1 after I spent months without a working mic and had to get my screen replaced twice and it still didn't work.
I went with the ASUS Zenbook. It's not perfect in terms of Linux drivers or support but they are built solidly. I would pick them again over Dell, HP or the Chinese rebrands.
I have a P14s G4 AMD that I am very pleased with. My only issue is the Qualcomm-made Wi-Fi that still doesn't work properly after a year because Qualcomm engineers can't figure out how to write a driver.
I rewrote part of their camera stack once to find that they hadn't managed cache coherence for the MIPI DMA, and didn't connect the coherency domains to handle it in hardware. Ticket probably still not being worked in their support portal.
Very rarely I see a little horizontal strip of corruption in my camera photos and roll my eyes.
Lenovo makes many laptops; some are good, some are bad.
This applies to pretty much ever manufacturer. Worked in a computer store for many years, and every manufacturer had some models with high return rates, but also models with low/normal return rates.
Saying "I will never buy $x because I had a bad experience with a bad model" is almost always a mistake IMHO.
What does matter is how they deal with the bad models. Some brands were definitely a lot better than others, and I generally advised customers based on that.
Sorry to hear that. I actually cheaped out and for the first time went for the L-series, L14 G4, but with Ryzen. Very happy overall, pretty much no issues whatsoever, running Debian. I miss the old keyboard, though.
I upgraded from a 10-year-old Lenovo to a MacBook Pro M1 w/Asahi Linux for a while recently. It convinced me that we're not ready for ARM Linux desktops for general-purpose, regular-person use.
Besides all the crappy Linux desktop software today (I have been trying multiple recent distros out on multiple new laptops... all the Linux desktop stuff now is buggy, features are gone that were there 10 years ago... it's annoying as hell). The ARM experience is one of being a second-class citizen. A ton of apps are released as AppImages or Snaps/Flatpaks. But they have to be built for both X86_64 and ARM64, and extremely few are built for the latter. Even when they are built for it, they have their own bugs to be worked around, and there's fewer users, so you wait longer for a bugfix. The end result is you have fewer choices, compatibility and support.
I love the idea of an ARM desktop. But it's going to cause fragmentation of available developer (and corporate/3rd-party) resources. ARM devices individually are even more unique than X86_64 gear is, so each one requires more integration. I'm sticking to X86_64 so I don't have to deal with another set of problems.
One hopeful note: the developers for the Snapdragon X Elite are active on the kernel mailing list, and they are supplying patches for specific laptops, including the T14s. Now I run Debian, so i don't use AppImages or Snaps or Flatpaks, but I expect to have a fully functional T14s Gen 6 running Trixie when it is released as stable next year, assuming Trixie uses kernel 6.12 or (hopefully) 6.13.
they also butchered their entire dev kit rollouts and didn't launch with any sort of (promised) Linux support, I'm pretty sure time wise macran had Linux booting on M1s faster than Qualcom got any sort of Linux movement going on their own hardware.
Counterpoint: I've been on an M2 Macbook running NixOS-via-Asahi-installer for about a year, and I've run into maybe 2 applications that I cannot find in the Nix repos or flathub. I have a stable, fast, long-lasting machine running Hyprland and all the productivity software I've needed. I'm currently missing an internal microphone and, I believe, Thunderbolt (USB-C works fine) but this machine is faster than and as stable as it was when it had macOS on it.
I am as general purpose, regular person as you're going to find, in this world at least. I stare at a sentence like "In a functional programming language, everything is a function" and just blink. But a few months of blood and suffering to learn Nix/NixOS and I am managing the family's computers from a single repository and working faster than ever.
It's interesting to see the arm building issues still mentioned. I've been patching many packages in nixpkgs for apple silicon, and I can remember only one which had any kind of arm-related problem rather than darwin-specific. Snap/appimage packages have their issues of maintainers needing to spend the extra time. But sources? Not in my experience - I'd be interested to hear some examples.
I sadly am inclined to agree a bit about the Linux desktop stuff, I've been trying to get a nice simple XFCE linux desktop on a used thinkpad I recently picked up, so far tried Debian and Mint and they both have some issues with the keyboard mute button (it flickers on/off rapidly when I press it the first time, and the keyboard doesn't respond to input until I press the mute toggle again). There's other stuff like just weird quirks, like you can't have a key command like Super-R and then also a key command of just Super, because when you try to press Super-R it just instantly triggers the key command you assigned to just Super! Like, while I'm still holding it down! Is it not a modifier?! Or then there's something unmuting my speakers and mic every time the machine wakes from sleep/lock, and I think it's due to wireplumber, but Debian stable's wireplumber version is literally a year old (wtf?), so I can't find documentation on how I can alter this default behaviour (especially because this version of wireplumber uses lua for configuration? also wtf?) … No clue. (Also why does so much Linux software lack man pages?) … haha, that went on a tangent but it's been a surprisingly frustrating experience!
can you tell me about the battery life? I seriously need a new laptop to run linux and I need decent battery life. Don't want to buy a Mac just to have more than 3 hours of battery life
As I was working in Denmark, we had a lot of Lenovo resellers providing better offers than the normal list prices. This was a couple of years ago, maybe this is still the case.
I just checked and the laptop can be had for $1036 USD or €1809 (includes 21% VAT), and the configurator doesn't even allow adding more than the soldered-on base 16GB of RAM. You can save yourself €500 and get 768GB of additional SSD storage by going HP, or save yourself €400 and get a 32GB model.
What an absolute shitshow. I'm surprised Lenovo sells laptops in Europe with these prices.
Readit News
—————
What does not work: Keyboard, mouse, TB & USB-C ports, thermal/freq mgt.
Conclusion: Highly recommended
For what it's worth, the majority of mechanical RGB keyboards and mice are USB-A anyways, so, if you're fine with a very powerful machine that wouldn't have an internal keyboard support for a few weeks, sounds like a good advice anyways!
That’s actually a pretty big escape hatch for early development. It explains how you’d be able to get past having a nonfunctional keyboard pretty easily, for example.
Honestly when my current Helix 2 finally starts to die on me I'll be looking for a tablet or hybrid replacement since I neither want nor need an attached keyboard+mouse anyway, in my normal usage they're mostly just something that takes up desk space.
Obviously there are also plenty of people with preferences entirely incompatible with this approach, but so it goes.
A bit more works on the T14s Gen 6 too, such as the keyboard! ;-)
https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=172925590407875&w=2
I'm using an X1 Carbon Gen 11, and for my purposes at least, it's an improvement over every previous generation.
I'd love to switch to a Framework one day, but I'm not willing to use a laptop without mouse buttons. (I don't care about the TrackPoint at all; I do care about having physical mouse buttons.)
I went with the ASUS Zenbook. It's not perfect in terms of Linux drivers or support but they are built solidly. I would pick them again over Dell, HP or the Chinese rebrands.
The X1C6 had the potential to be a great laptop, except it was plagued by charging issues from the beginning and was limited to 16GB of RAM.
The X1Y6 is perfect; I can't find a single issue with it.
I rewrote part of their camera stack once to find that they hadn't managed cache coherence for the MIPI DMA, and didn't connect the coherency domains to handle it in hardware. Ticket probably still not being worked in their support portal.
Very rarely I see a little horizontal strip of corruption in my camera photos and roll my eyes.
This applies to pretty much ever manufacturer. Worked in a computer store for many years, and every manufacturer had some models with high return rates, but also models with low/normal return rates.
Saying "I will never buy $x because I had a bad experience with a bad model" is almost always a mistake IMHO.
What does matter is how they deal with the bad models. Some brands were definitely a lot better than others, and I generally advised customers based on that.
Was planning on getting one.
Besides all the crappy Linux desktop software today (I have been trying multiple recent distros out on multiple new laptops... all the Linux desktop stuff now is buggy, features are gone that were there 10 years ago... it's annoying as hell). The ARM experience is one of being a second-class citizen. A ton of apps are released as AppImages or Snaps/Flatpaks. But they have to be built for both X86_64 and ARM64, and extremely few are built for the latter. Even when they are built for it, they have their own bugs to be worked around, and there's fewer users, so you wait longer for a bugfix. The end result is you have fewer choices, compatibility and support.
I love the idea of an ARM desktop. But it's going to cause fragmentation of available developer (and corporate/3rd-party) resources. ARM devices individually are even more unique than X86_64 gear is, so each one requires more integration. I'm sticking to X86_64 so I don't have to deal with another set of problems.
I am as general purpose, regular person as you're going to find, in this world at least. I stare at a sentence like "In a functional programming language, everything is a function" and just blink. But a few months of blood and suffering to learn Nix/NixOS and I am managing the family's computers from a single repository and working faster than ever.
Eventually I moved into VMWare Workstation, for GNU/Linux stuff on the desktop, with an aging Asus netbook on the side.
Nowadays, the netbook is dead, its used replaced by tablet, and my desktops are Windows/WSL (for Linux containers only, started on demand).
At work our workstations are a mix of Windows and macOS, leaving GNU/Linux on the servers.
Not even x86 is 100% usable on laptops, meaning supporting every single feature, and late nights to fix stuff eventually gets old.
I wonder where Poul-Henning, who is based in Denmark, got that price. Perhaps he managed to get US pricing.
Lenovo EU are notorious for charging a ton of money for new models with limited supply. And poor after-market support, as everything is outsourced.
What an absolute shitshow. I'm surprised Lenovo sells laptops in Europe with these prices.
When VAT incentivises people to essentially take their holidays outside the EU - not even incentivises, subsidises(!) - VAT's too high.