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.
Hopefully they'll start to actually support their devices with Fedora on them.
Quoting: CSharpI've had a rather bad experience trying to get Fedora running on my Lenovo Thinkpad Tablet, at least from the Lenovo side of things. All the response we've been getting on the Lenovo forum for issues related to this machine with Fedora is "This device is not supported".Well, yeah. We're talking actual supported and tested devices here. Totally different.
Hopefully they'll start to actually support their devices with Fedora on them.
I know for a fact that in case of Dell, even after a few years of stating "officially supporting Ubuntu" on their models they had some serious issues. There was a case where the pre-installed system had a buggy extra package added to support wireless (which actually worked without it) and this made the whole package managing system fail and become unfixable after the first update. Another case was audio simply not working because the kernel didn't have it at that time (nor was it even planned) and Dell didn't notice or care later. An independent guy made a lot of contributions to hasten the development.
As I heard nowadays Dell laptops are much more Ubuntu friendly (even I have one), but I wanted to highlight that publicly stating to support an OS can be very far from actually testing it and supporting the people who are using it on an end product.
Last edited by tuxintuxedo on 24 April 2020 at 5:02 pm UTC
QuoteSounds 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.
I 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).
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