Almost every larger company these days has done something bad like that. Lenovo had superfish, HP had a keylogger, Dell had its own superfish, Acer still installs search toolbars and browser hijackers, depending on how far back you want to go Sony had the BMG rootkit and a camera backdoor, ... Who are you going to get your laptop from now of you ignore all of those - especially if you're going to reinstall your OS immediately anyway?
> Who are you going to get your laptop from now of you ignore all of those - especially if you're going to reinstall your OS immediately anyway?
Clevo. They are a whitebox laptop manufacturer so you will find they are OEM for several smaller brands like MSI, Sager, and others. Yes they are Chinese market, but every laptop is made in China these days, even the big American names, so that part is unavoidable. If that truly is an issue you can't get around, you'll be happy to know that System76 is moving towards producing its devices in house in the United States[1], though I have no idea if the recent tariff wars have affected that situation.
Clevo's hardware is not that great though. I've known several people get System76 Clevo systems and they've all been disappointed. I'm hopeful for System76's new systems, that they will up the quality significantly and make them compare-able to Thinkpads.
Yes, I had a Clevo-produced System76 model and I've had multiple hardware issues with it -- for starters, it failed to POST just days after receiving it, and System76 support did repair it, but they were not very accommodating about it, saying there was no way for them to provide a shipping method faster than ground even if I paid for it, etc. I want to like System76, but the truth is that my experience with them was disappointing.
According to https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/8912714/Apple-i... "An unpatched security flaw in Apple’s iTunes software allowed intelligence agencies and police to hack into users’ computers for more than three years" which sounds serious to me if you're an iTunes user (as I guess many Mac and Windows users are).
But I think the real culprit is that all of the organizations the grandparent poster listed distribute proprietary software which is untrustworthy to begin with. Proprietary malware isn't hard to find (see https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/ for an organized set of links) whether it came with the OS pre-installed on the computer or installed later. So long as it adversely affects the user and leaves the user with no permission to inspect, alter, and share the software (only permission to run the malware) the situation is bad.
Get any laptop and clean the shit out of it, mod the BIOS if you want to. I'm still on Elitebooks (8770w), they're tanks, and Intel hasn't made noticeable improvement in CPU performance since Ivy Bridge.
Zbooks seem to continue the tradition. Dell's Precisions are great, too.
Haven't had experience with the newer Thinkpads, the design, materials and being owned by a Chinese megacorp kind of drove me away.
HP's "keylogger" doesn't belong in this discussion. It was a debug trace to a driver. I've left similar traces as part of debugging. It wasn't even their driver but belonged to Synaptics.
As recently as 2016, Windows Thinkpads were documented to be sending daily usage data to Lenovo. The app is easily disabled, but users may not be aware of the telemetry. You agreed to this in the EULA.
If you're tech saavy it's a bit less important. Scamming average consumers is sad, but ThinkPads to me are IBM, not Lenovo, so they have different boxes in my mind. The hardware is good, linux runs nice on it. Case closed.
You should take into consideration that for both IdeaPad (the superfish one) and ThinkPad Lenovo is not much more than brand. These two lines are designed and manufactured by completely separate corporations. What is somewhat funny in this regard is that the real maker of modern ThinkPads (probably at least since introduction of the letter-number nomenclature) is Acer/Wistron with Acer as a brand being mostly known for having sub-par quality. IdeaPads are AFAIK mostly made by Compal.
I was completely unaware that Acer made ThinkPads, and that blows my mind. A quick google was not able to confirm that, which is not unexpected since that sort of rebranding is usually hushed. Do you have a source? Not saying you need one, but wondering if you already have one. Would be interested to read more. I've had a really bad opinion of Acers since buying one a decade ago, and currently have a high opinion of Thinkpads (and am typing on a 2018 model right now).
2) Wistron is a spinoff of Acer. Specifically the Manufacturing/R&D wing of Acer. However, that spinoff happened in 2000, so there really isn't a connection between Acer and Wistron anymore:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wistron
You checked the Windows Platform Binary Table in the BIOS/UEFI? That was how they delivered their crapware before. Even a clean install with your own media would inject a Lenovo exe into Windows directly from the BIOS with no way to disable it. Scary stuff.
Yup. Luckily i've got a friend who knows BIOS stuff like I could never do (Hi Greg) - nothing in there. Besides, it gets Fedora 28 installed and Windows is only used for doing firmware updates.
Which tbf Lenovo cocked up a couple of weeks ago and hosed the SSD firmware so it didn't boot. Luckily i'm not a moron so everything was backed up, they sent a new SSD and they picked up the old one to recover, which I assume will be a hardware firmware flash. I don't need the backup, but I am looking forward to Lenovo spending the money for the pickup/flash/delivery to make sure it costs them as much money as possible so they don't do this again.
I think you either missed or ignored the point the parent comment made regarding their reasons for avoiding Lenovo as a company, rather than strictly wishing to avoid spyware in one's own laptop.
I didn't miss it. Don't have any care or skin in the game when it comes to Lenovo, but their Thinkpads have never had this crap in there. When they do, i'm out. HP have crap in their installs, so do Dell. Hell, even Microsoft put Candy Crush in there and telemetry I can't uninstall.
Good for you. Same goes for every box you use that you don't personally inspect the firmware source code for the NIC, ME, graphics card, USB, Thunderbolt controller, etc. Personally i'll stand on the shoulder of giants (people who do actually inspect this, I don't have the skills) and monitor the shit out of my network instead of worrying about it, because I can actually do that bit.
I don’t use windows. There could be one for Linux but I can’t spent my life worrying about what could be. Gotta get work done eventually and I’ve got encrypted boot and data volume with secureboot.
If you have a larger tinfoil hat you can always libreboot an x220.
In 2015, Lenovo (who currently owns the Thinkpad brand) got caught installing adware and certificates into the Windows root certificate store. This is known as Superfish:
It's the difference between recommending the consumer line and business line, they are not related technically. Lenovo's consumer line is Ideapad, their business line is Thinkpad. If they tried something similar on a business line, they would go bankrupt because they would never get another contract again. It would fall under Industrial Espionage which is illegal. That's why governments and large corporations still buy Thinkpad.
You sound awfully confident. This sort of distinction, where you declare something about the world to be certain as a consequence of a certain arbitrary categorization, I have an urge to call "nominative determinism" (although the phrase is generally used differently)
My advice as well – I'm running Arch Linux on a ThinkPad. Debian (unstable) or a recent Ubuntu version might work pretty well too. CentOS follows RedHat Enterprise Linux and has way too old software for modern desktop use (unless they have a branch hidden somewhere I'm not aware of).
Running old Linux versions on new laptops is going to be a frustrating experience; ideally all the device drivers you need are mainlined into the kernel of your distribution so you won't have to mess with those yourself.
Fedora is definitely better on my X1. Stock Fedora 28, rawhide kernel, TLP and iuvolt runs better than Windows 10. Best Dev machine I've ever had and the keyboard is superb.
The X1 is nice but the T480 is only a little bigger, handles heat a lot better, and has (mine does, at least) about 16 hours of battery life under Fedora.
It's hard to really recommend the X1 (or T480s) as a developer machine, IMO.
I had an X1 Carbon and had so many issues I returned it for a refund after 2 months. I had two replacements and they both had quality control issues. Then the engineer who came to fix it broke the screen, twice! How you ask? Unfortunately with the X1 being so thin the display bezel is a piece of sticky plastic which is a nightmare to align on-site (really should be done in a factory with an alignment machine) and when the engineer tried to remove it to align it again he pulled the polarising film off the screen. Shocking.
Thank god for strong EU consumer laws that I got my money back.
Also the fact Lenovo refuse to offer an option to switch between S3 and S0i3 sleep in the BIOS is very frustrating on a business laptop. They only support S0i3 which doesn't even play well with Microsoft's own Modern Standby so is almost pointless for me. Almost daily I would open my bag up to a super hot laptop and almost zero battery as it didn't actually go to sleep like expected.
I bought a 2018 15" MBP which so far has been superb. I wish there was a Windows laptop which worked this well. IMHO it is unacceptable that Microsoft's own Surface Book 2 has so many issues. I have not tried a Surface Laptop, perhaps that is better as it is a "normal" laptop and not an over-engineered mess like the Surface Book. I will most likely pick up a Surface Laptop when they are updated to give it a try as I love the 3:2 screen (much how I love the 16:10 screen on the MBP). I am not a fan of the fabric keyboard though :/
Apple or Samsung laptops for me. Dell has had constant issues with their stuff for 30 years, if they haven't started making a good laptop in 30 years, they aren't going to start now. There's reports that the brand new XPS STILL has stability issues. Just unacceptable.
It’s been a while since I even have a laptop (just a gaming desktop PC with Windows), but I’m glad people recommend Arch Linux.
It certainly was the best I worked with until two years ago, for several years. Sure, it’s got its quirks, but they help you a lot to learn new stuff, and after that, it’s much easier to set it up again in case you needed (I only needed it once every two years or so).
I can't ever go back to CentOS/RHEL or Debian/Ubuntu for my personal machine after having seen the flexibility that Arch provides.
Don't get me wrong, technically you can make Ubuntu just as flexible but you have to try to configure it that way. All the conveniences they brought into these distros for simple package management actually sets you up for failure when you are doing larger upgrades. Not to mention that the packages in their repos are often out of date.
I never had my Arch box fail me across upgrades, allowing me to actually be current in the code I run.
It's a healthy middle between Gentoo and CentOS if you don't want to build it all from source but yet still be current.
Even opkg and some IPAs are better than the package manager experience I had with apt-get or yum/dnf.
You're never going to run Arch in production, so developing against "current" software means "hire a team of sysadmins to package all of these future-versions in to the conservative distro that we have in prod".
With luck it will be less than $1M/yr.
This is why people don't use homebrew anymore, either. If you're running a Mac you dev in a Docker container that reflects your production environment.
My Debian Unstable laptop installation is over ten years old (and on its third laptop), and the packages are pretty recent, since Unstable is a rolling version.
And despite the name, it's pretty solid, I don't remember the last issue I had with it.
Yup. Used to be that the Ubuntu forums were awesome, but there was something about the Arch forums that weeded all the crap out, i've no idea what. I need to add them to the OSS projects I contribute to this year.
I guess as Linux got more popular, more people who didn't really know what they were doing joined in, usually on Ubuntu. The quality of answers dropped as a result.
I think a higher bar to entry often keeps things better quality (coming from the dev world I am thinking about Django deployment versus PHP deployment). Arch was too much of a pain for me to install last time I checked, and its going to be way too much effort for anyone relatively new to Linux.
CentOS is an option, but the hardware will perform better under Fedora due to a newer kernel build to support newer hardware. Feature wise, the only difference you really need to know is that Fedora ditched Yum and switched to DNF. Same command structure, and you can still install yum.
fun fact. Fedora is what RedHat uses to test and flesh out all the fancy features coming in CentOS 8 & RHEL 8. I think Fedora 25 or 26 is what those OSs are being build from.
