As a nice win for open source, hardware vendor Lenovo are going to begin offering Fedora Linux on their ThinkPad line. This was announced today over on the Fedora Magazine by Red Hat's Matthew Miller.
You will be able to select Fedora Workstation as your operating system when customizing a Lenovo ThinkPad, as part of a pilot in Lenovo’s Linux Community Series. They're going to be starting with the ThinkPad P1 Gen2, ThinkPad P53, and ThinkPad X1 Gen8 laptops and if it's a success likely more. Sounds like it's been a good partnership too, as Miller said Lenovo has been "following our existing trademark guidelines and respects our open source principles" with it shipping exactly as the Fedora team want.
In the post they included this teaser video:
Direct Link
As Mark Pearson, Sr. Linux Developer, from Lenovo said, "Lenovo is excited to become a part of the Fedora community. We want to ensure an optimal Linux experience on our products. We are committed to working with and learning from the open source community."
This is great, and it's really needed that we have more well-known hardware vendors put Linux as an option (and actually advertise it) for Linux adoption rates to increase. It's one of the biggest barriers.
More details about this will be coming soon closer to launch.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Last edited by Shmerl on 24 April 2020 at 8:01 pm UTC
If you buy one to put another distribution on I suggest you make an image of the existing installation, in case you have to return it to service.
There could be some features only available under windows, but they should not be listed when buying it with Linux.
Check if any extra kernel parameters are used in grub with
cat /proc/cmdline
and if any special repositories are used, before nuking the preinstalled one.
I bought a Dell G5 15 5587 1.5 years ago with Ubuntu 16.04 installed. I put a modern Linux on it and it just works except for the fingerprint reader from Goodix, which was not listed in the specifications when buying it as a Linux laptop, so I knew and that was ok then.
HendrinMckay Apr 24, 2020
Quoting: wvstolzingI wonder what that implies about codecs that come only on the rpmfusion repos. Perhaps those will be enabled by default (you kind of have to, for an all-purpose desktop installation).No, it's supposed to be stock Fedora.
I mean, nothing against Fedora, but wouldn't Ubuntu generally result in a better experience for users due to more widespread support of pretty much anything?
There's a ton of stuff readily available for Ubuntu (or rather, as .deb) which is not impossible to get on Fedora but you have to jump through some hoops.
Quoting: TheSHEEEPWhy Fedora, though?
I mean, nothing against Fedora, but wouldn't Ubuntu generally result in a better experience for users due to more widespread support of pretty much anything?
Because Fedora project worked with Lenovo on it? No one stops others working with them if they want to. You can always install any distro yourself. The main point is that they are doing heavy lifting of testing the hardware and Lenovo also offers you an option without the Windows tax. That's a huge win.
Also, Ubuntu is not the most popular distro these days anymore. So I can ask the same question, why Ubuntu?
Last edited by Shmerl on 24 April 2020 at 8:57 pm UTC
Quoting: TheSHEEEPWhy Fedora, though?
I mean, nothing against Fedora, but wouldn't Ubuntu generally result in a better experience for users due to more widespread support of pretty much anything?
There's a ton of stuff readily available for Ubuntu (or rather, as .deb) which is not impossible to get on Fedora but you have to jump through some hoops.
But to get anything on Ubuntu you need to add a bunch of PPA's, which is less convenient than using RPM Fusion on Fedora.
QuoteOur installer aims to make the complicated process of installing Fedora to replace another operating system as easy as possible, but it’s still a barrier even for tech-literate people
Wait what?
Quoting: ShmerlAlso, Ubuntu is not the most popular distro these days anymore. So I can ask the same question, why Ubuntu?Eh...
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam?platform=linux
Ubuntu makes up 30% (+7% if you count Linux Mint as it is Ubuntu-based). The next-big one is Arch (11% Manjaro + "pure" 10% Arch).
Don't look at numbers that come from "number of downloads" - these numbers say little to nothing about actual usage. Stuff like distrowatch shows different numbers of which distro is "most popular" every few weeks, it is useless for this purpose.
Only look at sources that check based on actual usage. Unfortunately, Steam hardware survey is one of the only relevant source I know - most others just show Linux vs Windows or focus on server technology (in which Ubuntu also usually ranks highest).
But Steam is highly relevant to our case here, so...
Wait, don't we have such a statistic on gamingonlinux itself? Can't find it right now...
Either way, my question "why Fedora" was answered: Because the Fedora project worked with Lenovo to do this.
Makes sense.
Last edited by TheSHEEEP on 25 April 2020 at 6:31 am UTC
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