Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Linux

Lenovo Will Start Offering ThinkPads With Linux Pre-Installed (techspot.com) 93

The world's biggest PC company (in terms of shipments) now offers 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. From a report: 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.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Lenovo Will Start Offering ThinkPads With Linux Pre-Installed

Comments Filter:
  • Is this news? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by cachimaster ( 127194 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2020 @02:23PM (#60004942)

    Ubuntu and Redhat are certified to work and shipped on Thinkpads since...I don't know, 2005-2006 pehaps.

    • by jmccue ( 834797 )

      Well nice RHEL is certified, but these certs really do not mean much. Here at work, P52 Thinkpads were certified for RHEL. Lots of issues with Xorg freezing the system due to its graphics. There was no way to disable the Nvidia Chip like past Thinkpads had. For those we had to install proprietary driver. Even then issues continued for some people.

      So, my guess, at least for RHEL, the certification is only valid for server use, if using it as a desktop you are on your own

      I heard P53 Thinkpads are having

    • Re:Is this news? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by GbrDead ( 702506 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2020 @04:23PM (#60005420)
      With the exception of a few models of the E series, Thinkpads cannot be bought without Windows where I live.

      In this situation, the certification has no value to me. I ain't giving money to Microsoft, no matter whether I am going to use their sorry excuse for an OS or not.
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Presumably these will be cheaper because you don't have to pay for Windows.

      Might get some Lenovo utilities for things like the fingerprint reader too.

      • Don't Windows computers come with payola-ware that more than offsets the cost? You should be paying a premium to not have Windows.

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          ThinkPads don't usually come with much crapware.

          • My last thinkpad was a few years ago now, but I remember clearly having to clean up a shitton of stuff from it and in the end gave up and simply nuked it. They were still ranked as the vendor with the most bloatware, think that would have been 2015 or 2016, can't imagine they have changed much since.
            • by redback ( 15527 )

              thinkpads arent that bad. They have some of their own stuff that will hassle you to update drivers and a few other bits of nonsense, but its nothing like what you get on a consumer HP.

            • ...thinkpad ... were still ranked as the vendor with the most bloatware

              You're just lying.

            • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

              Was it a Thinkpad or just a Lenovo consumer grade laptop?

              Thinkpads come with a load of Lenovo software you might not want, basically features that you don't use or which you don't need the fancy UI for. But random bloatware crap like trials of McAfee or 900 hours of AOL? They don't usually have that stuff.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • This certainly is news since it clearly marks 2020 as the year of the Linux desktop! Rejoice!
  • Open hardware (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mars-nl ( 2777323 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2020 @02:30PM (#60004976)

    If all hardware manufacturers would just open up their hardware and publish the specs, there would be no need for them to put effort in making this one model work with this one distro. Instead the community will make it just work on any OS/distro.

    • Re:Open hardware (Score:5, Interesting)

      by AleRunner ( 4556245 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2020 @05:35PM (#60005696)

      It's really not that simple. On one of my XPS-13s I had a hardware fault which was fixed with a replacement card. Although the hardware replacement was fine, it turned out that the firmware on the card had been upgraded for some Windows compatibility bug. This broke the compatibility with the Linux driver. The local Dell guy actually diagnosed and fixed this by looking through a compatibility list and then finding a card which hadn't been upgraded.

      Checking each firmware version for each card you have doesn't break compatibility with each operating system version you are supporting is a pain. Making sure that your field organisation actually understands how to check for problems like that is a nightmare. Getting a company that's actually willing to do that properly is something I'm willing to pay for.

      Yes, if they would publish their firmware source code and build instructions reliably this would be a big improvement. No, it wouldn't make the problem go away.

      • They should just include quality hardware that doesn't have bullshit problems like that.

        I have a Dell XPS 15, and the majority of the issues I had with it were directly related to the cheap bullshit "Killer" wireless that it shipped with. I ripped that piece of shit out and replaced it with an Intel wireless adapter (which was the same wireless that Dell ships on the vPro configuration of the same laptop) for $20 and it's been as solid as any computer I've ever worked with since.

        I just wish there was a fun

      • There would also be an incredible amount of industry resistance to opening up firmware source code. OEM's have a lot of "secret sauce" in there and having the source to firmware can tell you a lot about the hardware itself. They don't want those trade secrets to get out for perfectly valid business reasons.

    • All hardware manufacturers might be a little bit of a reach. What if one manufacturer of every kind of laptop hardware component did this and also did a competent job of making the hardware component. Even as OpenWRT routers have found a niche in the market, so might other hardware.
  • Not buying it.
    • IBM owns almost 20% of Lenovo. And 100% of Red Hat.
      • Re:Chinese Company (Score:4, Informative)

        by K. S. Kyosuke ( 729550 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2020 @03:45PM (#60005266)
        IBM owned 19% of Lenovo...in 2005. In 2008 IBM-owned Lenovo stocks fell below the 5% reporting threshold. Do you have any information that in the past 12 years they purchased significant amount of Lenovo stocks?
      • Ok so IBM owns 20% of the shares of Lenovo. Doesn't change the fact that Lenovo is now designed and built in China, including firmware and software installation.

        • by ELCouz ( 1338259 )
          What gives? All major hardware company are either from China/Taiwan region... Supermicro,Asus, Gigabyte,Clevo, ASRock, MSI...
          Compal, Quanta, Inventec , Pegatron , Foxconn and others Taiwan makes HP/Dell laptops.
    • by ELCouz ( 1338259 )
      Like the rest of hardware company? MSI, Gigabyte, Asus, ASRock either China or Taiwan ... such hypocritical comment.
      • by piojo ( 995934 )

        MSI, Gigabyte, Asus, ASRock either China or Taiwan ... such hypocritical comment.

        Why not lump in some other areas to make your point sound even stronger? Let's add Vietnam and Thailand, and list a few more manufacturers! [/sarcasm]

        Taiwan is run by a different government than China (like Hong Kong). China has no authority over Taiwan (unlike Hong Kong). It is a different country.

        • If you believe China has no ties with Taiwan (One China Principle) ...I have a bridge to sell.
          • by piojo ( 995934 )

            If you believe China has no ties with Taiwan (One China Principle) ...I have a bridge to sell.

            I will explain simply. "One China" is PRC's principle (Mainland China). It has no significance in Taiwan. Taiwan is a sovereign state with a military and a president. They do not answer to anyone except themselves and their people. If you declared yourself the leader of Taiwan, it wouldn't influence anybody except you.

          • Please explain how the Shanghai Communique at all changes the fact that the Republic of China is not the same as the People's Republic of China.

            Here's a hint: the government of the People's Republic of China claims many of their neighboring countries are part of "one China" but those neighboring countries strongly disagree.

            Taiwan buys a shitload of military hardware in order to keep the distinction. The Republic of China was formed on Taiwan as a last bastion holdout of the opposition to the communist rev

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2020 @02:35PM (#60004992)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • by ahodgson ( 74077 )

      Lenovo has serious sales 2-3 times a year (40% or more off). That's the only time it's worth buying one.

      At least they'll actually sell you some machines without Windows on them now. That's better than yesterday.

      • Buying off-lease Lenovo systems is almost always one hell of a deal.

        • That goes for desktop systems too. I picked up a workstation with 64gb of ram and a weak Xeon quad core cpu for like $150. Picked up a hex core for like $40 to upgrade it. It will accept up to a 12 core E5 v2 Xeon. Not the fastest desktop today but you can't beat that price.

        • I just bought a 5-yr-old Lenovo notebook off eBay. I chose that one because it would accept RAM upgrade to 16GB and HD upgrade limited by drive thickness. Don't know how much you can swap parts in today's Thinkpads. I consider myself fortunate all around this purchase.
      • by redback ( 15527 )

        lenovo has sales often enough that you never pay "normal" price.

    • System76 doesn't sell any machines in the same form factor as the XPS 13. You're making a terrible comparison here.

    • by sconeu ( 64226 )

      My XPS Developer edition came with 16GB. WTF are you talking about?

      The 2020 model is here https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/dell-laptops-and-notebooks/new-xps-13-developer-edition/spd/xps-13-9300-laptop/ctox13w10p1c2200u [dell.com], though for some reason, they dropped the SSD from 512 to 256.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Linux is getting more popular because it's used in the cloud a lot. Microsoft's own cloud is more than 50% Linux. Many people are getting familiar with it from their job now.

    • heartbleed was an OpenSSL bug, nothing to do with Intel or Microsoft. Microsoft can't give them more payola as the OEM agreements they were forced into by the government says they must treat all OEM's the same regardless of what other OS or jdevices they ship, so no I doubt it has anything to do with payola from MS as MS can't legally do anything.
  • What's the point? All the models they chose stink.
  • Is Superfish [wikipedia.org] still included? Or is it "JustVisual.com for Linux" now?
  • Why trust Lenovo? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by katz ( 36161 ) <Email? What e-mail?> on Wednesday April 29, 2020 @02:55PM (#60005058)

    Lenovo is headquartered in Beijing and is subject to Communist China's whims. On what basis can I trust that their hardware won't spy on me or provide backdoor access for a remote attacker? How can I trust the OS they pre-loaded it with?

    • You can always reformat the system with a clean Windows 10 download from Microsoft once you link the installed instance to your Microsoft account.

      • That may not be enough, thanks to the Windows Platform Binary Table. They've been caught using it in the past to install malware via BIOS, which won't go away with a clean installation (and will even be reinstalled with a reboot). https://www.techdirt.com/artic... [techdirt.com]

      • That fresh install of Windows isn't really going to help you if they put that Chinese government mandated top secret security hole in the firmware.

        I'd imagine that the tough part would be to make it look accidental if it's found by a security researcher. But, hey, Intel has had a few sketchy looking security holes in their BIOS and remote system management firmware in the past and they survived it without too much negative press.

      • by redback ( 15527 )

        no need to do any sign in, or even boot the factory OS.

        You can just wipe the thing straight up, as the OS licence is stored in the bios.

    • by Xenolith0 ( 808358 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2020 @03:39PM (#60005244)

      If you're worried about state-sponsored hackers, unless you yourself are a state, you are fucked. When your adversary can quite literally send ninja-in-helicopters at you, installing a firewall isn't going to help.

      Besides, it's already widely know the five-eyes governments [wikipedia.org] have hardware backdoors in Intel (through the IME [wikipedia.org]) and AMD (through the PSP [wikipedia.org]) processors. So why worry about one-more-government watching you?

      Personally, as a U.S. citizen, I'd rather have the Chinese spying on me, since there's very little they can do to harm me (besides releasing a biological weapon (but what are the chances of that?)), rather than having the U.S. Gov. spy on me, since they can totally destroy my life. -- Well to clarify that statement, I'd rather have no one spy on me, but I don't really get a say in the matter.

      • by piojo ( 995934 )

        If you're worried about state-sponsored hackers, unless you yourself are a state, you are fucked.

        As far as I understand the situation, that is absolute nonsense since each time they spend vulnerabilities in an attack, there is a very real chance they will be discovered and patched. To orchestrate an attack that accomplishes its goal without detection then cleans itself up takes significant work (budget). Can APTs do this? Of course they can. Are they gonna do it for something small? No.

    • by ELCouz ( 1338259 )
      What gives? All major hardware company are either from China/Taiwan region... Supermicro,Asus, Gigabyte,Clevo, ASRock, MSI... Compal, Quanta, Inventec , Pegatron , Foxconn and others Taiwan makes HP/Dell laptops.

      Even better what makes you trust Taiwan either?
  • all the web devs I know are on Macs right now, but Apple's moving to their own processor. I wonder if this is in response to Apple's switch.
    • Yes because text editors work much better on macs. *rolls eyes*
      • He said web devs.
        Having worked in that particular business...
        It's usually: A joint in one hand. Mouse in the other. Selecting code on StackExchange, copying and pasting it, using one the mouse and that one hand.
        The keyboard is only ever used, to introduce bugs. ;)

      • by tepples ( 727027 )

        You can't spell Emacs without macs.

  • by RazorSharp ( 1418697 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2020 @03:03PM (#60005086)

    I wonder how much Lenovo has to pay Microsoft in royalties to ship a device with Linux installed on it.

  • Nvidia drivers (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Hizonner ( 38491 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2020 @03:38PM (#60005240)

    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.

    If they were even a little bit serious about Linux support, they would not be including nvidia hardware.

    • by hackus ( 159037 )

      Yeah, AMD needs to work on the compute side. OpenGL stuff and Vulkan is already pretty good. If they can finish the work in the compute side we can just kill off cuda and proprietary nonsense that Nvidia offers.

      That way we can run the latest kernels when required or the RHEL certified ones with no extra administrative headaches.

    • by laffer1 ( 701823 )

      One man's problem is another man's feature. NVIDIA binary blobs are available for linux and freebsd. AMD won't even support freebsd.

      AMD GPUs do have better defaults in UEFI systems if you're stuck on the frame buffer though.

      • by Hizonner ( 38491 )

        I don't know whether AMD even has any viable laptop GPUS at all. I don't pay much attention.

        Personally I'm perfectly happy with Intel integrated graphics on a laptop. I'm not using it as a compute server, and life is too short to waste it on video games.

        But the nvidia chips actively interfere with your machine staying up and stable under Linux even if you DO use their binary drivers. Which are also an enormous fucking pain in the ass if you're trying to keep up to date with your upstream distro. Even if you

        • Then you haven't tried AMD integrated graphics. They are not Intel's GPU alibi. They are actual proper GPUs.
          And their long term goal is to make them so powerful that you do not need a dedicated GPU. Which is not hard with chiplet designs. Thermal management is the only hindrance.

          Yeah, it really sucks that they haven't gotten their drivers right in two decades.

        • I don't know whether AMD even has any viable laptop GPUS at all. I don't pay much attention.

          From looking at AMD's web site, you wouldn't think they produce laptop graphics cards at all. Here's a partial list of some from a comparison at NotebookCheck.net. I don't expect that everything on the list is still in production, but I expect that some of them are.
          Radeon RX 5600M
          Radeon RX 5500M
          Radeon Pro 5500M
          Radeon RX 580X
          Radeon RX 580
          Radeon Pro 5300M
          Radeon RX 5300M
          Radeon Pro WX 7100
          Radeon RX 570X
          Radeon RX 570
          Radeon RX 470
          Radeon Pro Vega 20
          Radeon R9 M395X
          Radeon Pro Vega 16
          Radeon R9 M485X

  • by BrendaEM ( 871664 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2020 @03:47PM (#60005274) Homepage
    Mint with Cinnamon is the best Linux desktop, right now. Does anyone even care about Fedora, anymore, now that Redhat is Oldhat?
    • ewww, not everyone likes that.

      Mint with MATE is the best Linux desktop.

    • by WallyL ( 4154209 )
      Fedora appeals to the corporate types, and so do the Thinkpad laptops. It makes sense to start with Fedora. But what should work for Fedora should work for other mainline distros, right?
  • Any cheaper? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    So do I get a lower price because I'm not paying for Windows?

    If not, well, I can install whatever OS I damned well please and be just as well off. Most Linux users are going to want to do that anyway, because they'll be looking for different partitioning or a different distro or a different choice of packages or whatever.

    It's not like the hardware is actually any different or better supported.

    • Well, as long as the money isn't still going to MS, I'd still accept it, even if at the same price.

      I would need a signed certificate saying that though, with the ability to sue and win for damages, to trust that.

  • is a laptop that comes with two drives: one linux, one Windows. and a switch to determine which one is the boot drive so I can alternate when I want.
    • Use extended partitions, and make a bootable backup. That's handy anyway.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Why even go that way... I run windows and linux on top of MacOS using vmware... it works flawlessly and I get to use all 3 of them at the same time.
        • by tepples ( 727027 )

          Why even go that way... I run windows and linux on top of MacOS using vmware

          Until very recently, MacBook keyboards were absolute [expletive] to type on.

  • Lemme guess...

    It's also gonna come with some pre-loaded software that will do things like sending browsing history, surfing habits to Lenovo for "quality assurance" and "feature development and research" purpose.
  • Sounds to me like it's the year of Linux on the laptop!

    This is arguably better than Linux on the Desktop, because of how portable laptops are: unlike a desktop PC, a laptop's screen and keyboard and main hardware are all in one convenient folding piece, so you can take it anywhere! :-)

An authority is a person who can tell you more about something than you really care to know.

Working...