Lenovo Will Pre-load Ubuntu and Red Hat on All Its Workstations (forbes.com) 50
TechRepublic calls it "a tectonic shift in the landscape... a massive company showing serious support for both Ubuntu Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux."
Forbes reports: Beginning this month, Lenovo will certify its ThinkStation PCs and ThinkPad P Series laptops for both Ubuntu LTS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Every single model, every single configuration across the entire workstation portfolio. [ZDNet adds that the two Linux distros will also be preloaded.]
And it doesn't end there. "Going beyond the box, this also includes full web support, dedicated Linux forums, configuration guidance and more," says Rob Herman, General Manager, Executive Director Workstation & Client AI Group at Lenovo. We're not talking about just hardware certification, either. Lenovo will offer both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ubuntu LTS distributions pre-installed...
"What's more, Lenovo will also upstream device drivers directly to the Linux kernel, to help maintain stability and compatibility throughout the life of the workstation," says Herman. Lenovo and Fedora are already working together to enable fingerprint sensor support on select ThinkPads, and send that support upstream to benefit all Linux distributions (including firmware being available through LVFS). When I spoke to Mark Pearson, the Senior Linux Software Engineer even mentioned porting certain Windows-only PC management tools to Linux to aid in the overall effort.
TechRepublic notes the news "comes on the heels of a number of new Linux desktop support news. This year we've seen the rise of Purism, Tuxedo Computers, Pine64, Juno Computers, Vikings, Dell's continued support with the XPS Dev edition laptop and the Precision line, and now Lenovo."
They also argue for continued support for the smaller vendors of Linux hardware. "Companies like System76 are a big reason why desktop Linux continued climbing up that steep mountain called 'Acceptance.'" But their article concludes that "No matter which path you take, you now (as a Linux user) have more options."
Forbes reports: Beginning this month, Lenovo will certify its ThinkStation PCs and ThinkPad P Series laptops for both Ubuntu LTS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Every single model, every single configuration across the entire workstation portfolio. [ZDNet adds that the two Linux distros will also be preloaded.]
And it doesn't end there. "Going beyond the box, this also includes full web support, dedicated Linux forums, configuration guidance and more," says Rob Herman, General Manager, Executive Director Workstation & Client AI Group at Lenovo. We're not talking about just hardware certification, either. Lenovo will offer both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ubuntu LTS distributions pre-installed...
"What's more, Lenovo will also upstream device drivers directly to the Linux kernel, to help maintain stability and compatibility throughout the life of the workstation," says Herman. Lenovo and Fedora are already working together to enable fingerprint sensor support on select ThinkPads, and send that support upstream to benefit all Linux distributions (including firmware being available through LVFS). When I spoke to Mark Pearson, the Senior Linux Software Engineer even mentioned porting certain Windows-only PC management tools to Linux to aid in the overall effort.
TechRepublic notes the news "comes on the heels of a number of new Linux desktop support news. This year we've seen the rise of Purism, Tuxedo Computers, Pine64, Juno Computers, Vikings, Dell's continued support with the XPS Dev edition laptop and the Precision line, and now Lenovo."
They also argue for continued support for the smaller vendors of Linux hardware. "Companies like System76 are a big reason why desktop Linux continued climbing up that steep mountain called 'Acceptance.'" But their article concludes that "No matter which path you take, you now (as a Linux user) have more options."
You mean "on any of its workstations"? (Score:2)
Or is Lenovo going to ship even Windows machines with a Linux partition? Now THAT would be a shift.
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Ah yes. Once more I'm on the leading edge. <grin>
Just bought a refurbed Lenovo laptop. Doubled its RAM. Quadrupled its HD. Added Ubuntu Focal onto the new disk portion.
It's a wee bit slower than I anticipated. The AMD CPUs don't have quite enough horsepower. But for $500 total, a great system.
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Which model did you get?
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Thickness and weight matter to many.
My cellphone is many times more powerful than my first ten or so computers combined. And I did useful work on them.
With that said, my lady is still using a Fujitsu convertible from more than five years ago because I followed that same advice. Though the trackpad died, proving that even business class hardware is not infallible
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Re:You mean "on any of its workstations"? (Score:4, Interesting)
and MS will make an rule that stops them from doing that.
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Lenovo is a company out of Mainland China. When Trump shut off Huawei, it was inevitable the Government of China would work hard to remove all US tech dominance from China, hardware, software, internet, kill it's dominance, kill it with fire. As far as the government of China is concerned, a Chinese Linux distribution, WILL, dominate the desktop in China, for the rest of the world, they will push modern west Linux Distribution, they will be compatible with the Chinese Linux Distribution to ensure applicatio
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It is almost guaranteed to be "any," as they already provide the choice on select systems.
I can't imagine using a hand-me-down linux distro, though. That's like borrowing a car to drive to the mailbox.
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Nor I, but if they offer it then there must be driver support, so I'm always glad to see an OEM offer Linux.
Re:You mean "on any of its workstations"? (Score:5, Interesting)
Unless it turns out that they are going down the path of maintaining a ghastly proprietary blob BSP for all workstation models and both Ubuntu and Redhat; willingness to preload strongly suggests that the distribution you actually want will work, so long as you aren't targeting a kernel too far behind the one they are using.
I'd honestly be a bit surprised if too many workstation-class systems shipped with Windows end up being used with the vendor preload, rather than a company image or an even-slightly-techy-user scratch install(now that the dark days of it being like pulling teeth to get a clean Windows install medium for an OEM system are over doing a clean install is pretty trivial); so the preload is closer to being a statement of compatibility than actually mattering as a tool.
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I can't imagine using a hand-me-down linux distro, though. That's like borrowing a car to drive to the mailbox.
By "hand-me-down linux distro" I assume you mean whatever Lenovo supplies. If so, then I hear you - but consider this: at least you'll have some assurance that whatever distro you DO chose will likely just work, or can be made to work with minimal tweaking. For laptop computers, that's a BIG plus in my book.
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Yeah, but that is already true of nearly all computers these days, but definitely it is true of most Lenovo.
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That's like borrowing a car to drive to the mailbox.
Or like borrowing a car to drive half a block away to a Wendy's restaurant because Wendy's has made a business decision not to serve pedestrians or cyclists. Drive-thru is for motorists only, and curbside pickup is not offered (I called).
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I was thinking the same thing. Imagine windows users trying to find out where to put the money in to get it all to work.
I'm really surprised that foreign countries don't (Score:1)
Microsoft Marketing vs Development Spending (Score:5, Informative)
You do realize there there is this document which outlines Microsoft's spending and should be a fairly accurate reference? It's called the yearly financial report and you can see it here: https://www.microsoft.com/inve... [microsoft.com] for 2019 and has the information you're looking for.
In 2019, Microsoft spent $18.2B on Marketing and $16.9B on Development with the amounts growing over the past three years but the percentages staying fairly constant.
So, I think it's accurate to say that Microsoft spends more on marketing and lobbying (which I guess is under another bucket) than on products.
Linux critical mass is close. (Score:5, Insightful)
I didn't use Windows since Windows2K and used it again roughly a year ago when I joined a company that was an all-out microsoft shop. Office365, MS Teams, Migration to the Azure Cloud, the whole 9 yards was going on and as a webdev they put me together with the IT crew and a guy that knew more about computers than our fellow coworkers - that's the best place they could find.
Using Windows (10) for the first time in 15+ years was a strange experience, even more eye-opening was observing the hoops and hassle our IT guy had to go through to get even the simplest of things done with proprietary licensed MS solutions. By and large the regular MS setups are so far behind contemporary Linux it is, IMHO, only a matter of time until critical mass is reached and we might even see MS switch to the Kernel. People and especially the IT folks are just to damn exhausted by the constant MS chain-yanking. This Lenovo move reflects that IMHO.
My 10 month stint into the MS world definitely confirmed my decision 9 years ago, to never again to anything mission-critical with technologies that are not FOSS.
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It feels like it's too late for this victory to matter. We're in a time where people care more about what phone OS you use than what desktop OS you use. A significant amount of what regular people use on a computer is tied to the web browser, where the phone world still uses "apps" for a majority of the software.
Re:Linux critical mass is close. (Score:4, Interesting)
It feels like it's too late for this victory to matter. We're in a time where people care more about what phone OS you use than what desktop OS you use. A significant amount of what regular people use on a computer is tied to the web browser, where the phone world still uses "apps" for a majority of the software.
Well wouldn't it be better to actually win at something "small" instead of constantly chasing the next big thing. It's 20 years later and I'm still using Outlook and MS Office at work. Photoshop is still the industry standard for photography and digital art. Sometime around Windows 8 the open source community drank way too much of the same kool-aid Microsoft was drinking and decided screw the desktop, touch and tablets are the future and the old stuff wasn't sexy no more. The result was a generation of software (Unity, KDE 4, Gnome 3) that could have kicked Microsoft in the nuts but instead chased the same rabbit hole they eventually had to back out of "unradicalizing" Win10 and pulling out of mobile. Open source is not nimble, developing software on a "scratch itch" schedule is slow. You're not going to get there first, more like the glacier slowly but surely pushing closed source out of the market. Embrace that and open source would be so much better off.
Re:Linux critical mass is close. (Score:4, Interesting)
What seems to be driving Linux popularity now is Microsoft. Oh the irony, but Azure cloud servers running Linux mean a lot of devs have become familiar with it.
Windows Subsystem for Linux helps too, they learn how to use Linux and then it's the next logical step to ditch Windows. After all VS Code runs on Linux, all the browsers do...
Cross platform apps with decent UIs are finally a thing, as well as games, so the OS is mattering less and less.
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it seems like the last 10-15 years linux has been always been getting closer. Here's the thing if you are developing in a corporate environment thats NOT M$ then the importance of linux is not new. I've been doing Java and python with Unix Linux as development target for 20 years almost .. the UI is browser based. We've been using VM player or Virtual Box to setup Solaris and now Linux to develop on because that was the deployment target. Solaris faded away and now it's just Linux. With the rise of the
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Remember Steve Ballmer's weird "Developers" chant?
Win32 app development is fast becoming like COBOL development -- still critical for many organizations and it's not going away anytime soon, but it's got rapidly contracting mindshare.
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There are high level libraries for any sort of app development though, you don't need platform knowledge unless you have a technical reason. Which is unlikely.
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I agree that many people's whole life revolves around their phone.
As an author, I shudder to think how long it would have taken for me to write the one million words I've published over the last 10 years if my only computing device was my phone.
With the lockdown, my output has gone up. I've penned two novels this year already and I'm working on the third. That's another 325K words. Hopefully, they will be published before the end of the year.
I use a CentOS desktop and a Macbook Pro for all my work.
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I have a mechanical bluetooth keyboard, theoretically I could write on an iPad or Surface or whatever and be pretty OK. Mostly I use an AlphaSmart Dana for writing, when I'm not scrawling a ideas on paper a few paragraphs at a time. I have another friend who swears on running an old text editor in DOSbox. My wife prefers a mix of notepad and TTS software. I think authors are a bit like carpenters, they like to put together their own set of preferred tools. I suspect such details have little bearing on the f
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As close as the "Year of the Linux Desktop"?
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People and especially the IT folks are just to damn exhausted by the constant MS chain-yanking.
Of course, a lot depends on how much anyone cares that the IT folks are miserable.
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My 10 month stint into the MS world definitely confirmed my decision 9 years ago, to never again to anything mission-critical with technologies that are not FOSS.
Every couple years I end up having to use a windows computer for a few minutes. In the late 90s, regardless of OS most computers worked about the same. You could just sit down at a strange computer and use it. And then the Macs became foreign and cryptic, but everything else was the same. Until Windows 8. Then Windows was also cryptic. And many OSS desktop programmers wanted to be cryptic, too.
I never stopped using an old-style GUI; pre-desktop. No icons. A menu, a bottom bar with launchers, windows, and to
A Welcome Move (Score:2)
It's always great to see vendors offer clients what the clients want to buy, not what the vendor wants to sell. Usually there's some part of the venn diagram where the two intersect, and it's awesome when that does.
Linux adoption rate is around 2.7% but that includes desktops (primarily Windows) and laptops (a lot more Linux).
System76 is making a killing and their hardware is not cheap. Dell's developer edition is also making a killing... also not cheap.
People are beginning to realize that if you value yo
Now if they would just do the T series (Score:1)
Chinesium (Score:1, Troll)
https://malwaretips.com/thread... [malwaretips.com]
Re:Chinesium (Score:5, Interesting)
Given what happened to huawei, i doubt lenovo want to remain completely dependent on microsoft...
Re:Chinesium (Score:4, Informative)
Lenovo has always been a Chinese company. There's no more or less reason to trust them than there ever was. Lenovo is one of the best and most transparently run companies in China. It's also got an excellent track record of respecting American IP.
In any case, the situation is more complicated than you think. If you buy an HP or Dell, because those are "American companies", it was not necessarily designed and certainly was not built by that company. It was made by an Original Design Manufacturer [wikipedia.org] (ODM) firm, most likely located in... China. Sometimes Taiwan. Same goes for every other brand of laptop or desktop computer.
If you've bought a computer recently, chances are it was manufactured by a company you've never heard of, like Quanta, Compal, Wistron, Inventec, Pegatron, or Flextronics. Chances are the only one of these ODM's you've heard of is Foxconn, which in addition to manufacturing iPhones, makes laptops for Asus, Toshiba, Apple, Dell, and Acer.
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>>There's no more or less reason to trust them than there ever was.
Superfish would like to have a word with you.
Finally (Score:3)
Re:Finally (Score:5, Funny)
2020 has been bad enough already.
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systemd has been running the desktop for a decade already, with great success.
Is there a 16:10 (or 3:2) P-series laptop w/ AMD? (Score:3)
I'm waiting for a model with Ryzen 4000 series, tall screen (16:10 at least) and AMD (for its OSS drivers) for both APU and dGPU.
Can I hope Lenovo to provide such a model next year?
Pleasant surprise (Score:1)
I was pleasantly surprised when buying a used ex-business Dell desktop on ebay, the vendor offered it with a choice of Windows *or* one of five different Linux distros pre-installed. I didn't need it because I was swapping in the hard drives from my old PC, but it was nice to see, and meant I could test it all worked with Linux before swapping the drives over.
Linux will never win the corporate desktop (Score:2)
Why are they doing this? (Score:2)
Don't get me wrong - I think it's terrific. But the primary motive isn't likely to be that they've gotten religion - it's to boost sales in a slumping PC market. Also, maybe they'll save money? There's a lot of community support for Linux - that might reduce internal support costs. And with no OS license fees, if the pricing is the same as for units pre-loaded with Windows, then Lenovo gets to keep all of the Windows tax for themselves. Plus, the timing of this is suspiciously close to Microsoft's announcem
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I presume that China is finally ditching Windows and they want Linux on their Lenovos. Might as well use it to sell to westerners too.
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It's probably because Lenovo is a Chinese company, and they saw what happened to Huawei. If they get cut off from being able to preload Windows onto their systems, being able to load Linux would be the backup plan.