Comment by jonahbenton

4 years ago

Get a Thinkpad, P-series, lots of options. Run Fedora on it. Great machines, great keyboard, 4k screens, good color, goot battery life, lightweight. Everything works. Mac-level price, and worth it.

21 comments

jonahbenton

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eatingCake  4 years ago

I would like to get a thinkpad, but I'm not sure Lenovo can be trusted any more than Apple can, especially since Apple atleast pretends to care about customer security.

https://slate.com/technology/2015/02/lenovo-superfish-scanda...

  • ornornor  4 years ago

    Lenovo is junk for anything but business class laptops. That the thinkpads X P W and T. The rest is the disposable, unrepairable, bloated junk you’d expect from consumer level products.

    • aidenn0  4 years ago

      "Disposable, unrepairable, bloated junk" describes pretty much all non-business laptops these days. I don't think Lenovo is special (and the Yoga often reviews as "good for the price")

    • entropea  4 years ago

      I work with thousands of their business class Thinkpads and they are also junk. They seem made for corporations to just churn through. I see harware/bios bugs that carry through generations.

      1 reply →

  • joe_the_user  4 years ago

    Well, if you immediately overwrite the hard drive of the machine with some Linux variant (as I think the GP implie), I think it will solve a lot of problems like this from any manufacturer.

    • tatersolid  4 years ago

      No it doesn’t. If memory serves, Lenovo rootkits have been in the UEFI firmware which auto-install hooks into the OS after boot.

      Linux is not magically immune to this attack. One could argue it is more susceptible than other OS due to lack of binary signature checks on executables at runtime (at least by default).

  • ngcc_hk  4 years ago

    That would be a worry. At least the people using Apple cares and tell you. And observe them very closely.

ornornor  4 years ago

How is 4K support and fractional scaling? Does it work well?

  • crwll  4 years ago

    In my experience, fractional scaling and 4k support is finally fine on at least whatever GNOME and Wayland Ubuntu 20.04 ships with, with two major caveats:

    * Chromium-based applications (the browser and Electron apps like VS Code) still don't know how to render themselves with fractional scaling and end up ever so slightly blurry (but correct sized) on fractionally scaled displays. Think like very old applications (like Control Panel) on Windows 10. I use Firefox so it doesn't bother me that much. There's a issue in Chromium bug tracker following this, but I can't find it right now.

    * Screen sharing full screen or other windows than browser tabs doesn't work on Google Meet / MS Teams. This is and has been an issue in Wayland since forever.

    • _-___________-_  4 years ago

      > Chromium-based applications (the browser and Electron apps like VS Code)

      This is most likely because they don't support Wayland. The scaling with XWayland doesn't really work great a lot of the time.

      I don't use scaling for my 4K monitor, and just set text sizes larger. It feels a bit weird for a while but eventually it's actually quite a nice balance where the content is relatively larger vs. the chrome.

    • vetinari  4 years ago

      > * Screen sharing full screen or other windows than browser tabs doesn't work on Google Meet / MS Teams. This is and has been an issue in Wayland since forever.

      Chrome has experimental Pipewire support; enable it in here: chrome://flags/#enable-webrtc-pipewire-capturer

      Firefox (at least on Fedora) has enabled it out of the box.

    • ornornor  4 years ago

      Cool, I don’t use chrome or VSCode or chromium apps. And no ms teams or google meet either. Sounds like limitations I could live with.

978e4721a  4 years ago

Good battery life? You must be joking? Less then 4 hours of light usage on x1 carbon gen 8. No hibernation.

jolux  4 years ago

Aren’t those all huge?

  • ryukafalz  4 years ago

    P1 Gen 3 is 0.72" x 14.24" x 9.67", compared to the 2019 15" MBP which is 0.61" x 13.75" x 9.48". Slightly larger? Sure, but I wouldn't call it "huge" if the 15" MBP is what you're used to. It's only 0.11" thicker than the MBP and half an inch longer. (And it weighs less.)