After being announced by the Fedora Linux team back in April, the rollout of Fedora across Lenovo laptops appears to have begun along with a sale.
The first model appearing with Fedora as an option is the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 8. Not only has it rolled out with Fedora, it's right there on the store and you can't miss it as it shows up first, as it's also the cheapest option for this model available right now. Just look at how visible it is:
You can't miss that!
As the Fedora team mentioned in the original announcement, it's coming without any bloat as they said Lenovo "respects our open source principles". The only software they will have is from the included repositories, no extra fluff.
Currently it seems to have only rolled out to the US, hopefully other markets to follow.
What Lenovo are doing here is just the beginning. We also know from what's already been said, to expect Fedora Linux to be rolled out to the ThinkPad P1 Gen2 and ThinkPad P53. On top of that, they also announced back in June that they would be taking much bigger steps with Ubuntu and Red Hat across more lines. It seems they hit a few snags with Ubuntu but that's coming soon to the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 8 and other systems.
This is exciting and needed. While we do have dedicated Linux vendors like System76, TUXEDO and a few others, it's the much more well-known vendors we need on board. Linux being proper advertised by hardware vendors is one of the keys to a wider market.
Quoting: TuxeeQuoting: emphyGreat; now we will likely also get lenovo bloat- and spyware for linux, including that one that gets reinstalled on a fresh os install ...
What would hinder you to re-install a pristine distribution on the machine? The same I did with my X13 I bought a few weeks ago. Took me 15 minutes to have the machine up and running.
Would depend on whether there is some sort of vulnerability/feature that could be abused by lenovo, like they did with the "Windows Platform Binary Table" to have the bios install adware on fresh windows installs.
Last edited by emphy on 31 August 2020 at 9:59 am UTC
Quoting: emphyQuoting: TuxeeQuoting: emphyGreat; now we will likely also get lenovo bloat- and spyware for linux, including that one that gets reinstalled on a fresh os install ...
What would hinder you to re-install a pristine distribution on the machine? The same I did with my X13 I bought a few weeks ago. Took me 15 minutes to have the machine up and running.
Would depend on whether there is some sort of vulnerability/feature that could be abused by lenovo, like they did with the "Windows Platform Binary Table" to have the bios install adware on fresh windows installs.
When was that? Which models? (Hardly the "pro" X or T series I assume.) What did the adware advertise? (Would they advertise Linux software?)
That said, they would be in for a lot of work. Which distro should this effort target? Which desktop environment? And we haven't even talked about the deployment... This is my third Lenovo laptop - 2 came without Windows and got an Ubuntu, a third one came with then Windows 7 - they were all, well, boring. Pretty much everything worked out of the box.
Quoting: TuxeeI know, where's the fun in that? I mean to have everything just work? Bah, I like messing with things to get them to work!Quoting: emphyQuoting: TuxeeQuoting: emphyGreat; now we will likely also get lenovo bloat- and spyware for linux, including that one that gets reinstalled on a fresh os install ...
What would hinder you to re-install a pristine distribution on the machine? The same I did with my X13 I bought a few weeks ago. Took me 15 minutes to have the machine up and running.
Would depend on whether there is some sort of vulnerability/feature that could be abused by lenovo, like they did with the "Windows Platform Binary Table" to have the bios install adware on fresh windows installs.
When was that? Which models? (Hardly the "pro" X or T series I assume.) What did the adware advertise? (Would they advertise Linux software?)
That said, they would be in for a lot of work. Which distro should this effort target? Which desktop environment? And we haven't even talked about the deployment... This is my third Lenovo laptop - 2 came without Windows and got an Ubuntu, a third one came with then Windows 7 - they were all, well, boring. Pretty much everything worked out of the box.
Actually a little more seriously, I did forget one other thing that Linux doesn't like on my P52, for some reason the built in sdcard reader doesn't work right. I thought it did on Debian when I had that on there, but neither RHEL8 or Pop_OS! seems to like it.
By the way, I only have actual RedHat on there as I bought a desktop license for access to their very important knowledge base and figured I should install it 'somewhere'. It makes a pretty decent desktop these days though!
Quoting: slaapliedjeQuoting: jensUh nice, I'm thinking about a new laptop for various reasons, this will be a serious option. I know roughly how an eGPU setup is supposed to work. Lets say one would combine this machine with a Razer eGPU box with a NVidia card. Does this setup (hotplugging, extend desktop, launch software on the eGPU on the external display, ...) works on Linux?I have an eGPU, I didn't have much luck with getting it to work last time I tried, but it's probably been a year.
One thing about Thunderbolt ports, is that they properly require authorization first under Linux, whereas Windows seems to treat them more just like USB devices... I'll have to give the eUSB a test again to see if they've gotten that fixed.
Oh, that would be nice, thanks a lot!
Quoting: jensSo far it doesn't seem to work on the P52. Not sure if it's because it already has an nvidia in it, or what. I'll have to test more on my tablet that I bought the eGPU for in the first place (for some dumb reason one of my usb flash sticks didn't want to actually load the Fedora image I copied onto it.Quoting: slaapliedjeQuoting: jensUh nice, I'm thinking about a new laptop for various reasons, this will be a serious option. I know roughly how an eGPU setup is supposed to work. Lets say one would combine this machine with a Razer eGPU box with a NVidia card. Does this setup (hotplugging, extend desktop, launch software on the eGPU on the external display, ...) works on Linux?I have an eGPU, I didn't have much luck with getting it to work last time I tried, but it's probably been a year.
One thing about Thunderbolt ports, is that they properly require authorization first under Linux, whereas Windows seems to treat them more just like USB devices... I'll have to give the eUSB a test again to see if they've gotten that fixed.
Oh, that would be nice, thanks a lot!
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