I recently acquired a ThinkBook 16p Gen 2, and while a different machine entirely to the ThinkPad, I must say that this is an _absolute beast_ of a machine. It's a total joy to use.
It's the most fun I have had using a laptop since my first MacBook. Moving from the MBP to the ThinkBook has made me realize how... boring MacBooks are - not saying that's a bad thing. MacBooks do 'just work'.
But the ThinkBook? The machine is fantastic. Sure, it has some soldered on RAM, but half of it is upgrade-able. The disk is a standard M.2 drive - easily replaced. It blows the M1 MacBook I use for work out of the water in almost every single number, except battery life. It was $100 more than a MacBook.
It's got double the RAM (16GB vs 8GB on the Mac), double the storage (1TB vs. 512GB), the NVidia 3060 seems to work a little better with OpenGL apps then the M1's GPU. More importantly, you can use two 4k monitors at the same time -which is impossible with the M1 MacBook Pro.
The Windows install was vanilla - not really anything additional installed. Maybe a Lenovo support app? Easy to remove from the control panel. Pretty much everything with the Lenovo machine was supported without too much fiddling around after installing Arch Linux.
According to the official documentation [1], the 13" M1 MacBook Pro also has this limitation:
> If you're using a Mac with the M1 chip:
>
> On iMac, Mac mini, MacBook Air, and 13-inch MacBook Pro, you can connect one external display using either of the Thunderbolt / USB 4 ports.
To be fair, several of my work laptops had a similar sentence in their user handbook, but two monitors were possible if you connected the wires before booting the laptop.
Really strange limitation, as it never scaled with bandwidth - so 4k 90+Hz was doable, but 2x 1080p60hz wasn't.
Some intel laptops (Ivybridge chips definitely, sandy Bridge probably) had such warnings because officially the chip couldn't support running three displays due lacking enough clock generators. Given the almost-analog nature of HDMI and naive LVDS, this meant trouble.
Thing is, Display Port has much more different physical layer derived from PCIE, and so connecting two displays by DP and running internal screen with LVDS worked just fine.
Yep, though that's really more of a question of chip: the M1 only supports two displays, for the laptop that includes the internal one (the Mini only supports two displays, and one only 4K via HDMI).
You could do 2x 4K displays with compression over a DisplayLink dock. Probably fine for UI stuff, maybe for video, not great for gaming.
The newer 14" and 16" models would drive them natively (or 2x 6K + 1x 4K with the higher end SoC) but then it's not much of a fair comparison by price. The single external display limit is only on the basic "M1" processor and not any of the Pro/Max/Ultra followups.
The latency on DisplayLink drives me crazy. Completely unusable for me, unfortunately, it's become difficult to find docks which don't use DisplayLink :/
Display link as far as I can tell is a weak video card on a usb connector. Does anyone else make something like that?
I used one with a white plastic MacBook to get 2 displays. I have a new on for my Linux notebook. It works well, but there is a little latency. For writing code/ web browsing it’s fine for me.
Not that I have noticed. Currently running 5.17.3-arch1-1.
I don't usually push this machine too hard - maybe the most that I do is recompiling ffmpeg a few times a day, so it might just be a result of my usage patterns? I'll get back to you with more solid figures later tonight.
EDIT: Just had a play around with sysbench running a few prime number tests while compiling a kernel or two. The k10temp-pci-00c3 (CPU temperature under lm_sensors) seems to stick around at a crispy +64.1°C for a good few minutes, before rising to +65.6°C. It seems to drop back down to +64.2°C. The fan is pretty noisy. The CPU drops down to +50.0°C within 60 seconds of the sysbench benchmark stopping, and the fan noise is completely gone after 90 seconds. Temp is +36.9°C. Idle temp looks like it's around +34.4°C. Not sure how I can measure the db level of the fans? I do have a recorder, so I might be able to do it that way.
Not sure what a good way to actually benchmark the machine would be - it hasn't really come up as a necessity. Maybe I can use the Phoronix Test Suite?
Regarding the edit, that would make sense. I have the same laptop and first tried to run Ubuntu LTS, had some problems with the thermals, even though it was definitely usable.
Tried Arch (with the 5.17 kernel, from Ubuntu LTS's 5.4 kernel) and the thermals were more or less identical to Windows, including the fan behavior.
> maybe the most that I do is recompiling ffmpeg a few times a day, so it might just be a result of my usage patterns?
Maybe. If you compile in short bursts it's probably not going to affect you as much. With 4K screens and compiling a tiny bit of Rust, it starts being noticeable rather quick.
I did notice that newer kernel versions do behave a bit better, but still require a bit of help to keep consistent performance plugged in.
From June last year until February this year, I was running the stock Kubuntu 20.04 kernel on a ThinkPad T14 with no thermal throttling or power limits. I would often have a few Docker containers running, a JetBrains editor (Java, shudder), Firefox with some addons and well over 100 open tabs, Chrome with the devtools open, MS Teams, Thunderbird, and some smaller apps such as Keepass, Telegram, Anki, a dozen terminals, and Emacs running. Never had a problem with memory (I think only 8 GiB, actually) or CPU (I don't even remember which Intel CPU it had). It was also connected to a docking station with two external monitors and an external keyboard.
It was the smoothest Laptop I've ever used with Linux, which I've been doing since 2008. Everything worked out of the box, including external displays, wifi, printing. I'm sure that a major portion of that experience was using a Kubuntu LTS release.
> RAM (I think only 8 GiB, actually) or CPU (I don't even remember which Intel CPU it had
Sounds like you had one of the cheaper T14's, it's likely you didn't run into any power limits due to that. 1080p screen as well, I presume?
Kubuntu 20.04 and its kernel version certainly throttle power on the higher-end T14's I've seen. If that's lifted then they throttle thermally, unless you manually force both cooling and power limits higher. Windows handles it all tad better, but the battery life is nothing to be amazed of.
I do believe that is was a 1080 screen. I almost never used it without an auxiliary monitor (mostly two aux monitors), I would have been just as happy with a desktop. Alas, the company only provided laptops.
These issues were caused by buggy intel software back in T460-T480 era - lenovo considered the problem big enough to consider not using Intel thermal management code in future designs
I don't want to sound too snarky, but I don't think you got the point of my post.
I love the M1, it's a great work machine, I have very few complaints about it. I hardly ever hit 100% memory usage, and if I do - it's thanks to either Chrome/Spotify/Teams/Slack/Discord.
I think - and this might be a bit controversial - the ThinkBook is better... because it is. The M1 is a great chip, awesome thermals (no fan!), but the laptop booted into Windows is faster.
Hey, maybe it's the memory, who knows! It doesn't swap, so I don't think it is.
You can read my parent post for my reasons. You can't quite run Windows or a stable Linux on a MacBook now, can you? Can't quite remove a 4GB stick and replace it with a 32GB stick, right?
To each their own. I'd have spec'ed that MacBook Pro out to 16GB though. I don't do Windows and I have on-prem cloud VMs (config'd for 32GB) for Linux. I don't need a Linux desktop (shudder!) either. I'm sure your THinkBook is great, but I prefer the Apple ecosystem and the "shit just works" of my Mac (although I'm still on an i9).
100% my flow too after a lot of experimentation. I have had several clunker lenovo machines and have run linux as a daily driver on and off for several years (I always wanted it to work, it was just infuriating with random glitches and the verbosity required to get a sane setup stable).
M1 MacBooks are legit, the Pro is the best machine I have ever owned by a long shot (several X1's, T Series etc) the screens are beautiful and I can get on and do whatever I need without worrying about glitches. I run commodity cloud linux VM's on things I need to deploy/monitor, its FAR easier (imo) to write the software on my Mac and then move it out.
I also thought you were talking about the Air and had made a mistake when you said “pro”. I just totally forgot about that model until you doubled down.
Generally great machines for Linux. Just a PSA from a X1E gen2 owner: Do NOT get the NVidia GPU, do NOT get the fastest CPU and most importantly: do NOT opt for the 4k screen.
With 1080p and Intel GPU it is a good, even great laptop with ok battery life (if you can look over the touchpad). Wonderful keyboard, good Linux support (even fingerprint reader works).
But just as with the last Intel macbook, the GPU, 10th gen CPU on 14nm and thermally constrained chassis will make this a hot mess with 2 hours battery life , fans always spinning and poor framerates on desktop.
That being said, Ubuntu has come a long way and in general. Not sure if I would go for a M1 mbp, or another Thinkpad today.
> and most importantly: do NOT opt for the 4k screen
Good advice for any laptop purchase. You will burn through battery driving that and the pixel density is much higher than necessary. Yes, 1920x1080/1200 is slightly too low when it comes to pixel density at 15", but it's still very reasonable and with decent eyesight you won't have to worry about any of the mess of DPI scaling.
> > and most importantly: do NOT opt for the 4k screen
> Good advice for any laptop purchase. You will burn through battery driving that and the pixel density is much higher than necessary.
Hard disagree. I use my thinkpads on AC most of the time, at home.
The crisp fonts in a terminal is a game changer. That has spoiled me: the bare minimum I can work with now is 2k.
Likewise for OLED: except the X1 nano which I use in the daytime, I can't see myself ever using a non OLED screen, so much that I would be ready to pay a huge premium for OLED in a Thinkpad with the X1 nano form factor.
Given you said you use 1440p monitors yourself, I think there is a misunderstanding somewhere here, because 2K is just a less commonly used term for 1440p. And 1440p is definitely a bit more than just "a few more pixels" compared to 1080p (iirc around 78% more).
Since when is 2K used to mean 1440p? 1440p 16:9 gives a horizontal resolution of 2560px. That's more than what is considered 2K, which is generally either 1920px or 2048px.
No idea, since I haven't seen the term 2K being used much at all in the wild. So I simply googled that term, and it seems to be overwhelmingly used to refer to 2560x1440.
It's safe to say that never again will I buy a laptop with a display which can't scale properly to integers (2 or higher). If it's a 15 inch laptop, 4K is the absolute minimum resolution I'm going for.
Even after using a 27 inch 4K display with an abhorrent 163 PPI , I can't imagine using a display with lesser PPI. No matter what tricks (anti aliasing) you use, the fonts will look like shit compared to fonts on a retina display.
Note that the newer P1/X1E Gen 4 have a much upgraded cooling system if you configure it with an Nvidia 3070 or higher. I don't experience any heat issues, even during heavy compilation and integration test work. The exception is if I run games at 4k resolution on an external monitor, then the GPU appears to overheat, resulting in the screen randomly going black.
Not the person you asked to, but heavy Fedora and Thinkpad user here. I know that already as of Fedora 33, for many users, the fingerprint reader worked out of the box with the T490.
It seems the T490 can have different models of fingerprint reader and maybe
not all are supported.
You should start by identifying your model with something like this
sudo lsusb or # lsusb
then look for the details of the line corresponding to the fingerprint reader model.
Also make sure you have all the latest bios updates for the Thinkpad.
If this would be a fresh install, even when wanting to use Fedora 35 :-)
I normally try with previous versions of Fedora or another Linux, like
Ubuntu just to confirm it's not a hardware issue before anything else. :-)
While still on Fedora 35 you should also check, and taking on the suggestion from
@JustFinishedBSG
I'm using Pop_OS (Ubuntu-based), but they also have instructions for Fedora.
One thing I found on Pop_OS is that I didn't need to use `fprintd-enroll` because after installing the package I was able to use the GUI in my user account settings to enrol my fingerprints.
on my carbon x1 I had to use fwupdmgr to update the Prometheus fingerprint device firmware. Additionally the firmware that was "current" in the repo didn't work and I had to allow using the beta or experimental version. can't remember exactly the steps I took to enable the beta firmware, this was almost 2 years ago as well, so it could be that that version is the now the correct latest version in the repo. after that I just installed fprintd and followed those instructions. But for sure it didn't work for me until I updated the firmware. good luck.
Hmm... I have the model with the NVidia GPU. By default I have it turned off (using no extra power) and I have a simple script that I use to turn it on when I want to.
ThinkFan works well to control the fans too.
Lastly I found that the SD card reader prevented the CPU package from entering C10.
With all that I find that in idle mode my laptop (X1E Gen2, almost identical to P1 Gen2) consumes 3.9w, which is pretty good. The fan only turns on when I compile something large or do something with the NVidia card.
No elaborate script is needed these days, the kernel's runtime power management suspends the card automatically as long as /sys/bus/pci/devices/…/power/control is "auto" and the device isn't being used (the nvidia/nouveau module is unloaded).
Documentation for the nvidia module claims [0] runtime pm is supported even when the module _is_ loaded for GPUs since Turing, but I haven't been able to test that (mine is older than that).
If have one those, without the 4k screen. No complaints so far, even GPU heavy games like the early versions of Battletech worked fine, battery life under gaming conditions is somewhere between 2 and 4 hours. Non-gaming around 4 to 6 hours. With the Intel GPU deactivated, getting external screens working while the machine was in hybrid mode was too much of a pain. After all I wanted it for the nVidia GPU.
Ubuntu is working right out of the box, I didn't try the finger print reader so. I prefer something I know to unlock over something I have.
Yes, I suspect it should be fine with dGPU and 1080p screen. I think in addition to the greater power draw, the compute needed to drive the 4k is just greater. In fairness I keep the dGPU active all the time as the Intel GPU produces significant UI lag under Linux at least.
I hate non-dedicated GPUs with a vengeance. As a gamer, they never are up to par anyway, and never were. Even way back, Windows struggled balancing both. So you had to switch one of them off. I get that they are useful for non-GPU heavy use cases, in a gaming machine I can perfectly live with dGPUs. As a result, I never tried the Intel GPU under Ubuntu.
The X1E Gen 2 was a nice compromise between a business and a gaming laptop. For the first 2 years it ran Windows anyways, now it is dual boot. With some exceptions, mostly older games, it runs my complete Steam library just fine. And for those rare occasions it doesn't, I can still boot it in Windows.
Linux, well Ubuntu, is refreshing to use. First time I tried Linux, and it feels a lot more like an OS should feel. Not crap or bloat ware, no calling home, no cloud account.
The machine does get hot sometimes, getting some more air under it mitigates this all the time, the X1 doesn't have a lot of space under it.
I have never experienced UI lag with Intel graphics on Linux (only ever on Nvidia, actually), so it's probably fixable. What DM are you running, and what are your PRIME settings?
Battery life is perfectly fine with an NVidia GPU on any modern laptop with Optimus or a MUX. You just have to set it up to fully power down the GPU. I get 9+ hours of battery life with a 3070 on Linux, it's just always fully powered down.
Even at 1440p 240hz, pushing 2x more pixels than 4k60, I still get 5-6 hours of battery life.
Yes, it sucks that you have to go through the weeds to get it to work, but once it works it works.
> You just have to set it up to fully power down the GPU.
Can you please tell us a bit more?
I have a NVidia + Intel GPU. I was thinking about using the NVidia for KVM (the NVidia would be powered down when not using KVM), and the Intel for native linux display with Pop or Ubuntu 22 LTS as another attempt to use Wayland (since I read NVidia GPUs can cause many issues)
On modern Linux systems the way to do it is using PRIME render offload.
That way, the Intel (or AMD in my case) integrated GPU will be used normally, with the Nvidia GPU fully powered down (you need a new enough card for this). Then, when you need it, you can use a command or environment variable or graphical launcher to signal to use the dGPU for offloading.
The GPU will then power on and render to a virtual display, and the framebuffer will be copied to the framebuffer of the relevant application on-the-fly.
Once no more applications are using the NVidia GPU, it will power down.
This way, there is no need to use a KVM, or do PCI passthrough, or anything of the sort, it mostly "just works".
If the (very small) overhead of passing through the iGPU is too much and your laptop supports it, you can also using MUX graphics and restart the DM with a config that will allow the laptop to rewire the screen into the dGPU, but I have never found this necessary or helpful.
> Display is configurable from the base version 15.6” FHD (1920 x 1080) IPS up to 15.6” 4K (3840 x 2160) OLED with Dolby Vision HDR.
> I had to choose the 15.6” FHD (1920x1080) Dolby Vision HDR screen, because 4K options are not supported on the integrated GPU. It’s a HDR400 WVA IPS display panel with 16:9 aspect ratio, 800:1 contrast ratio and 72% NTSC color gamut.
Sigh. There's no way I would want an NVidia card in any laptop, especially not a linux one. Why must companies do stupid configuration tie ins like this? At least there's a workaround.
Related: If you want a Dell laptop with Linux preinstalled, they probably won't let you max out the RAM and/or CPU.
We use this exact same laptop at Red Hat, and meh!
I like the laptop sometimes, but I've actually had plenty of times where it's more of a pain. For example, I run multiple 4k displays on my desktop, and using the Lenovo thunderbolt docking station with multiple 4k displays does not work. two 1440p displays are fine, but not two 4k UHD displays. Another issue Iv'e seen is the laptop simply reboots mysteriously, presumably due to thermal panics. I have to run chonky k8s cluster on my laptop requiring at minimum 20 giB memory, and like ~ most of the available CPU... and it gets hot, and reboots.
Fedora support is fabulous, and well you might expect that when you have the single largest open source corporation, not to mention Fedora's benefactor, using the laptop at scale.
I've personally switched to using an Intel NUC for the daily grind, but still use the laptop for travels and what not.
To prevent overheating on my X1 ThinkPad under Fedora I set the CPU governor to the power safe mode. As an added benefit it makes the laptop almost silent even when using all the cores/threads to compile huge C++ code base that may the memory usage towards 32 GB. Surely it compiles slower, but the slowdown is less than 25%
You just need to write 1 to /sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate/no_turbo , like in
sudo sh -c 'printf 1 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate/no_turbo'
Writing 0 re-enables turbo. Note it is not the same as the power-saving mode in Gnome settings under the Power section. This is more similar to Low-power mode in MacOS which also prevents Turbo boost.
EDIT: I was wrong to call it power-saving mode in the grandparent comment. It should be called no-turbo mode there.
and the lazy way to do this is via "panel" apps (on Genome KDE whatever). I prefer this way since it helps me switch between different modes (such as if I want to do something resource intensive).
> Given that IBM has transitioned to MacBooks for corporate use, have at least some Red Hat developers moved to MacBooks as well?
Seems unlikely as that'd imply running the OS they're making in a VM: the M1s only officially support macOS, and Asahi only just released their first alpha a pair of months back, with a lot of hardware not working yet. There's also a bunch of software which is not compatible with 16K pages, which asahi uses.
this doesn't really sound like the type of workload a laptop should be evaluated on... although it is an extremely strong laptop so without gaming I wonder what the intended workload really is
I still wonder what could have been if IBM just kept the Thinkpad lines. Those IBM-designed Thinkpads were built like tanks. Industrial. Legendary keyboards. I really miss those machines. I had some of the best coding sessions on them and can’t help but think Thinkpads played a role in creating that experience.
The skeptic in me thinks that long lived, upgradable, serviceable, resellable laptops would never have survived long anyways. It’s far more profitable to sell new machines to people and businesses after 3 years. Those long lived tank laptops were actually just too good.
IBM was selling service contracts too, which increased their incentive to make the machines last. Some businesses (and governments) would still be willing to shell out the money for that kind of quality.
Lenovo still offers up to 5 years, next business-day onsite service for the Thinkpad line that is somewhat reasable. Unfortunately, the battery warranty is an additional line item. Usually the 3 year NBD onsite option with battery is about $250 for a T14 or X13.
If I remember correctly, people regularly shelled out $5,000 plus for those Thinkpads. They had some insane “Rolls-Royce” type of support for business executives.
I don't know, I think they would've gone with cheaper and cheaper materials and ended up with pretty much what Lenovo has nowadays.
Dell and HP also had great business machines. I'm particularly fond of the Elitebook 8530/8730 - built like tanks, easy to repair, good keyboards, and still so thin for the time (even today, they look and feel good).
Quality went downhill ever since - newer models are still pretty good, but not as good as older ones. More plastic, fewer screws, trash keyboards, just kind of average for the price.
I'll give HP some credit for being the last out of the 3 major business laptop manufacturers to put 2 SO-DIMM slots on their flagship laptops (EliteBook 8xx series). Everyone else has moved to soldered RAM or 1 slot with soldered RAM.
They also still use 4 RAM slots and an MXM slot for the graphics card on their ZBook workstations. Sadly the CPU is soldered and availability of MXM cards seems to be extremely limited nowadays.
One of my college seniors had one. It was such a beauty with that small yellow light bulb protruding from the top. Absolutely gorgeous experience.
I used to want one so much, none of the laptops since have ever enticed me like that, the MacBooks I use since then are nothing compared to that. Computing was so much fun those days (rosy eyed fallacy likely).
I can't recommend picking one up enough. You can own an x201 with a first-gen i5 for ~80 bucks, I paid $50 for mine without memory or an HDD, and then outfitted it with a 256 gig SATA SSD I had laying around and maxed out it's memory at 8 gigs. Totally worth the price and novelty of owning a tiny laptop like that!
The quality has noticeably deteriorated after Lenovo brought the Thinkpad line but then in general the quality of electronics is only getting worse not better.
> 7-9 hours of typing, browsing and some programming.
> 3-4 hours of video/audio conferencing or other CPU intensive tasks.
This is one of the primary reasons I can't even consider moving away from an M1 Mac. I used to love ThinkPads but not being able to use the machine for 10+ hours without charger is a dealbreaker in 2022.
My pinebook pro beats those numbers, and it was $200.
4 hours intensive use would be a more of a deal breaker for me than the combined flaws of the pinebook pro, so I'd pay up to $200 for a laptop that only got 4 hours.
I have a laptop not because I want to use my computer on my lap or while unplugged, but because I want to be able to carry my computer between different workplaces.
As an industrial controls engineer, I'm constantly bouncing from my desk to my rolling cart in the shop, to putting it in my toolbag and driving to a local customer's site, to putting it in my carryon and flying to a remote customer's site, to my home office. At each location, I have power available. At some locations, I have external monitors and a keyboard/mouse, so I could easily plug in a Mac Mini or luggable mATX desktop, at others the laptop is often perched on some convenient stack of pallets and peripherals like monitor stands would be highly inconvenient. A 10x15x1.5" slab with a power brick (and a spare power brick can be left at frequently used locations) is just a really nice form factor to carry around, it's superior to separate parts like even a small Mac Mini, SFF, or mATX desktop, an external monitor that probably needs a box of some sort to keep it from being damaged, and a keyboard and mouse.
I use too much Windows-only proprietary software to make the iMac sensible, but I like the idea of the power and legibility of a large display, desktop-grade CPUs, and the larger thermal envelope available by ditching the battery and requiring wall power. Does anyone make an all-in-one or a carrying case for all-in-ones (with probably a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse) that would make jumping between different work locations make sense?
I'm aware that's sort of what a gaming laptop is, and it's pretty similar to the Lenovo Thinkpad, Dell Precision, and HP Elitebooks that I've used in the past...Especially after a couple years of 24/7 charger connections while baking the battery with a Quadro GPU running Solidworks, you barely have enough battery capacity to carry the laptop from one desk to another. Unfortunately, all those workstation laptops make concessions to try to pretend they're a Macbook Air where you can do...something? apparently some people do some kind of work with the laptop running on a battery and balanced on their knees. It's just a foreign concept to me. I'd rather they were 2" thick with a 120V socket, no battery, and 400W of CPU+GPU.
A battery is nice as an integrated UPS, to be able to move the machine between rooms, put it into a bag for hours and resume from suspend in a different place without having to restart every single application, same thing over a night.
About Macs, in my case I never liked their GUI since the very first Mac (the top bar, the menu, etc) and that's an instantaneous show stopper.
> About Macs, in my case I never liked their GUI since the very first Mac (the top bar, the menu, etc) and that's an instantaneous show stopper.
I'm a huge fan of the modern UI seen in Windows and Gnome where the "wasted" space of the title bar can show open tabs in Windows Terminal or Edge: with a minimized taskbar, the browser and the terminal can be used in fullscreen with 0 vertical space lost.
> This is a usually cited concern for so many people and I'm curious to know why because I rarely unplug my laptop, like most people I know.
> Sometimes I need to move, for example while travelling, otherwise I would use a desktop computer.
People travels often. I do everyday.
I have one corp laptop and I don't have charger in my home. I don't want to have one more power brick for my 16 inch M1 macbook so I usually borrow a line from my wife's M1 Macbook Air but that rarely happens like only during weekend.
After switching to M1, I feel very safe to be unplugged. Even if I need to charge it, some 20W level of phone chargers can charge my mac while I'm using it. This guy only uses around 15~20W even with tons of chrome tabs + zoom meeting. It is using 9W ATM.
This mindset is similar to what people with wired headphones think of Airpods et al. It's not an apparent benefit when you're in the bubble of thinking it's normal to have a wire going across your torso all day and hearing the thuds and bumps propagate through the wire to your ears. But when you buy a pair of wireless buds and have them for a week - you don't go back. You've discovered freedom.
Likewise, with battery, you don't think it's an issue now because you know your laptop's limitations and therefore rarely unplug it. But when you get the ability to do so - you'll start to adapt to your new freedoms.
> This mindset is similar to what people with wired headphones think of Airpods et al. It's not an apparent benefit when you're in the bubble of thinking it's normal to have a wire going across your torso all day and hearing the thuds and bumps propagate through the wire to your ears. But when you buy a pair of wireless buds and have them for a week - you don't go back. You've discovered freedom.
What is abnormal is that in 2022 people think it is acceptable to be forced to use wireless headphones and have to constantly have to think and worry about keeping them charged, esp when they are used in a context where you quite possibly have them plugged in your ear all day.
Wireless headphones have their place (primarily in outdoor active settings in audio only contexts for small periods of time). But if you are sitting in front of your computer all day, there are these magical devices called wired headphones with infinite "battery life" and world class sound quality that you don't have to worry about being out of charge in the middle of an important meeting. Unlike wireless ones they also guarantee audio always being insync with video if you are watching a video regardless of the type of device/machine/operating system you are using them on, something I have never been able to get consistently working to my satisfaction with bluetooth headphones.
i mean, as far as wireless headphones/headsets are concerned, my counter-argument is this:
I really don't like having a wire constantly tethering me to my desk.
With my wireless headset, i can get up, walk around my office, throw something away, or walk out to the other room and grab a coke from the refrigerator; all without pausing my music or taking my headset off.
I charge it at night and it is good all day. no worries here.
I don't want to have to keep track of charging yet another device, esp one as important and frequently used as headphones. Heck, some days I forget to plug in my phone to charge let alone headphones. Not worth the headache esp when there is another version of the device available with "infinite battery life". If some people prefer wireless and don't mind having to deal the potential inconvenience of always having it charged then more power to them... my problem is when companies try to push wireless headphones on us by taking away the 3.5mm jack.
I have wireless headphones. They were cheaper than AirPods (they're Jabra) and have pretty good sound. They're full-size, not earbuds.
The battery lasts for a couple days of fairly heavy use, and they degrade to... wired headphones, essentially, since I can use them while they're charging. Also they have a 3.5mm jack if I want to use that. And they've got a microphone, so I can walk around while on calls.
same. mine are HyperX Cloud Stingers for work, and they are fantastic. Range is so-so, but I believe that is due to it being plugged into a docking station.
My headphones (Sony WH-710n) have ~35 hours of battery life. That's a bit over 4 workdays of battery life. They seem to recharge from very low to full in less than an hour. So every few days I'll plug them in at my desk for about an hour, and I'm good for another few days. Its not too difficult for me to find up to an hour every four days to charge them. Its not like I'm having to micromanage charging them, needing to plug them in every night or else I don't have headphones at all the next day. And they charge off the same cable as a lot of the stuff in my bag already, USB-C.
Yea I find them a huge PIA for anything other than gym sessions or running. For that, however, they are amazing.
Then again the battery has just died in one of my wireless headphones (luckily not the primary) which means I can now only exercise with one side. Not a crappy brand either. I have wired headphones going on 10+ years that work flawlessly.
my wireless headset can be used while charging. not really a headache. at worst, my wireless headset just becomes wired for the time period that i am using it while charging.
I don't think this is true for a large majority of us. Use cases and therefore priorities differ, its not that we just haven't "seen the light".
My laptop lasts a good 6-7 hours doing normal tasks, but I hardly ever use more than an hour or two at most as that is as much time as I usually spend in meetings. Anything above that is wasted on me as I prefer my dual monitor and keyboard setup too much and subsequently can keep it connected pretty much 24/7.
It's much similar in the case of wired headphones. I bought a wireless headset many years ago. As the battery has deteriorated a bit since then I feel that I too often had to stop listening to music during work hours because they needed to charge. If I forgot to charge them when not at work, they would have to charge during work hours when I would much rather use them. I decided that this annoyance was greater than having a cable that I didn't notice was there. The sound is better too so yay
As an audio guy I tried, but I don't like the sound. My Sennheiser HD-25 cans are perfect for the road. The cable and the cups are propperly decoupled from the headpart, the cable comes as a plug and play replacement should it fail after 3 years of rough (including sports) use.
I have had one pair of these headphones for 16 years now. I wonder how airpods would compare in terms of pure surviveability.
I have the 1st gen and the Pros. The 1st gen lasted 2 years on the mark until they started switching off without warning. I used them for music/audiobooks/calls. Now, i cannot really count on them for anything so i use them when i get (rare) gsm calls. I got a pair of 40€ airbuds from amazon wirh great battery life and sound(although i use them just for calls - i am in calls 10h per day and use just one at a time) but i cannot pair them to more than 1 machine. For other cases i use the pros.
The hd-25 are not noise cancelling, but they have such a good attenuation that I can easily use them as a hearing protection when I forget mine when at band practise with a loud drummer.
This might also be the reason why they are quite popular with DJs
Funny, people accept limited (I don't use Bluetooth headsets, but I assume battery life isn't an issue in real life) battery life for fancy headsets but complain about it with laptops. I'm the opposite, I embrace the limited battery life of my laptop (running purely on the nVidia GPU and sporting a i9, on Linux, the most I get out of it are 6 hours, less when playing games), but use wired headphones. Not judging neither side, just a funny when you think about it.
Both wireless headphones and laptops have downsides that you pay for the convenience of portability/ease of use. Sometimes it's worth it, sometimes it's not.
I use laptop only when I don't have any other option (traveling, meetings) and there is no way in hell that I'm going to work on a unplugged laptop for more that few hours simply because I don't like the ergonomics, performance and lack of "monitor space". This means that "battery life" after certain treshold (few hours) is useless for me and not something I would consider while buying one.
I understand that different people have different workflows and battery life is crucial for some of them, but it's not something everybody needs.
I actually have wireless keyboard, mouse and earphones, both for work and for sport.
But like other commenter says I need nevertheless an space for a 27" monitor, keyboard/mouse and a comfortable office chair. I don't think I have a "mindset", I'm all about improving my day to day, I spend an insane amount of hours in front of my computer. I have been told that my next work computer is going to be a MacBook Pro so I will get a taste of the Apple experience.
While I do share the general idea and I do enjoy the battery life of my M1, I can't relate about earbuds, at least not those I tried. Until then, I'm happy to keep my DT-770 wired.
i had wireless headphones and true-wireless ones later on and i still went back. i mostly use my wired headset now and have a fiio bluetooth receiver for the times i would prefer to be more mobile.
i switch between two computers, a phone and a tablet quite a bit during the day, so having to fiddle with bluetooth settings every time i switch is more of a deal-breaker for me than some microphonic noises from the cable
You can just get up and go and not even think about power. You can even take an overnight trip and not bother to bring the power brick. It's very nice.
... plus, crazy, excessive-seeming battery life at purchase means you still have "all-day" battery when the device is 5 years old and the battery has significantly degraded.
If you scroll down on the link above you can see some graphs that show the 1280P is significantly faster than the M1 and the battery lives are very similar 11 hours vs 13 hours.
AMD are also doing a good job. The 7000s look very good. Crazy that this is still on a larger process node than Apple.
Well... yeah. Apple is running 5nm silicon, there's no way Intel can squeeze the same battery life out of that performance profile on their 10nm node. The flip side of this coin is that it's really good battery life for casual use, and it's not like that performance is going nowhere: it's thrashing the M1 in benchmarks.
I think things will get a lot more interesting in 2024, when Intel and Apple are on similar nodes. Right now Apple is making chips with transistors that are 2-3 times as dense, but they're consistently losing the performance crown to x86 machines on dinosaur silicon. The performance-per-watt gap is bound to start closing, and when it does there won't be much of a benefit left to using ARM, especially if your casual users can get Macbook-beating battery life with it.
How is that relevant, though? Even the M1 Max gets smoked by an i5 in single-core performance, and stands neck-and-neck in multicore. In a "fair" fight, Intel still takes the performance crown home. Density is relevant because the only argument I hear from M1 pundits is about performance-per-watt, which is only achieved through monopolizing the 5nm supply chain. When Intel is standing neck-and-neck on power draw with significantly higher clock speeds, single-core performance and IO bandwith, Apple's chips are going to lose their luster.
Plus, it's not like you need to use ARM to compete with that efficiency. Just 2 years ago AMD was shipping Ryzen laptop chips (like the 4800u) with similar x86 performance at a similar price point in a similar power envelope. How'd they do it? They designed it with 7nm lithography. It's not magic, just the obvious benefits of using the latest technology.
A fair fight in this case, laptops, is one that takes dissipated heat and cooling into account.
Intel might beat the previous generation of their competitors, but at what cost, absolutely impractical in reality. Scorchingly hot or noisy as hell, with poor battery life.
It's not magic and Intel is losing in a lot of aspects.
No, the M1 Max beats the same processor in the article (i7-1280P) in Cinebench multicore: ~12365 to 11480. That is a 10 core M1 Max vs the 14 core i7. Your "fair fight" is just moving the goal posts to some other random non-specified (probably non-laptop) processor.
Yeah, I am getting there; I just like working under Linux more and mac OS X does a bit, but nothing is like Linux with i3 for me; it is so much more productive (for me).
On most laptops I find using a battery for any kind of heavy work a non-starter anyway. I might send an email or take a call on battery but I wouldn’t even launch a heavy IDE. Without aggressive power saving (I.e CPU sits under 1GHz even att full load meaning less than half the performance) then battery is often less than 30 minutes. I should add that this is for scorching hot “desktop replacement” (45W) laptops. But I also wouldn’t want to compromise on perf while plugged in, in order to get more battery time.
This may be true on Intel/AMD based CPUs but it has not been my experience on an M1 machine. I have the same workflow both connected to power and not. Multiple docker containers running, slack, zoom etc. There's definitely no performance compromise.
I don’t intend to use it away from a socket so I dont want to conpromise 1% of the performance when plugged in by getting a lower power CPU that has better perf only when not plugged in.
What CPU do you have that doesn’t throttle? It’s not an Intel H, I’m guessing an Intel U version, M1, or Ryzen then.
It's not that the OP would like that, it's just how it is with Intel+Nvidia "desktop replacements". Those setups do not scale too well between workloads.
I just switched the other way from an older gen P1. I got maybe 1-2 hours battery out of the P1. I could barely go to one meeting without a charger. The M1 macbook lasted several days on one charge. I’m mind blown, having used wintel laptops for years.
I have a XPS 15 with a 10th gen processor. Its absolutely perfect, linux support is great. Except it gets hot an battery life in 2-3 hours max. M1 stats seem a dream, just too expensive and screens are too small I can't justify it.
Same here. Although for some projects lately that needed quick a bit of docker infra running, I found battery life dropping to 7-9 hours for the m1 and then my x220 (which doesn’t notice docker much unlike the m1) performs better with it’s 11+ hours.
I have to ask, how are you getting 11+ hours with an x220?
Aside from the screen, battery life and difficulties finding quality battery replacements are among the main reasons why switched to an M1 from an x220.
For developers, going with Intel only (no Nvidia discrete card) is the most sensible choice. I have P15 and it's riddled with issues - not that they are not solvable, but it needs workarounds, restarts of X (logout/login), or running discrete only (which eats battery).
The problem is they don't make the larger workstation laptops with Intel only.
> For developers, going with Intel only (no Nvidia discrete card) is the most sensible choice.
Absolutely not. Even the latest gen Intel ThinkPads are power-hungry and wasteful. They either throttle to shit, run way too hot or run way too loud and you have increasingly terrible battery life in all three cases.
AMD resolves a few of those problems, you get more with the same power consumption, but still a good few steps behind a M1 Mac things combined.
It does seem fairly usable already. I'd say it's going to be viable as a primary workstation sooner than later, but things like polished GPU drivers will take more time.
There are other ARM machines as well, that run Linux more easily, but those aren't as high-performance yet.
Some acceleration for sure is necessary, though things like video acceleration (that belong in the set "polished GPU drivers") are quite secondary. Linux is a good example of that, accelerated video decode is still quite rare and finicky.
I came to exactly post this. I previously had a HP ZBook with Nvidia Quadro inside and although I managed to get it running nicely I recently bought an LG Gram with integrated graphics and I'm not looking back. Both came with a Windows which I immediatly changed to Linux.
If you are not into gaming you can save big bucks and weight buying a laptop with integrated graphics. If you need a GPU for work you most probably need one with >8GB anyway.
PD: Why do so many laptops come with crapware instead of vanilla Windows? Why??? Why do laptop manufacturers tarnish their product so much? It remembers me so much of Android phones.
I also own a ZBook and I looked at an LG Gram as a possible replacement in case something happens to my laptop. I use the 3 physical buttons (click, paste - a Linux thing, right click) and the LG doesn't have them. That made me immediately discard the idea. On the other side this Lenovo has the physical buttons. I wonder how terrible the touchpad actually is. I only need to move the pointer and scroll. No gestures, no clicks.
If you don't care about gestures as they've always been fine in my experience. I can't speak for gestures because the only one I use is right click (two finger tap). But for pointing the cursor and pulling the trigger the touchpad/trackpoint works fine I use both constantly since sometimes the trackpoint is easier to reach or the touchpad is easier to reach. I also use both sets of buttons as well as sometimes it's easier to have your left hand at home position and your right hand trackpaddin' but you use your thumb on space to left click.
all-amd systems are a solid alternative as well. if you only have an igpu, it's effectively the same experience as an all-intel system. if you additionally have an amd dgpu, offloading work to it is as simple as setting DRI_PRIME=1 in the target process environment
Besides the lack of OLED display, the limited RAM on AMD laptops is another showstopper then. I want a minimum of 64GB ECC, which I can get on a Thinkpad with an Intel Xeon CPU.
I have one - prime offloading works exactly the same as on Intel. As far as external displays it's very simple, when I plug one in it is owned 100% by the NVidia GPU. Which is not an issue because I have access to AC.
Since they stopped wiring outputs to the dGPU, it's not really that bad. You just rmmod nvidia/nouveau, echo auto >/sys/bus/pci/devices/…/power/control and ignore the dGPU until you need it. And even then, it's absolutely fine to launch a second X server for the game you need to play without shutting down the first one, or just use bumblebee/primusrun.
> The problem is they don't make the larger workstation laptops with Intel only.
This might be a Lenovo-only problem. With Dell, you can customise-to-order a Precision 7760 with an 8-core Xeon, 128 GB unbuffered ECC memory, a lot of storage, and no discrete graphics card, if you so desire.
Many of these options aren't available on the site, but you can always call/chat in and from my experience, Dell will be happy to customise a machine to your requirements.
That is IMO a very shitty experience, why would they do this when they already have an online shop where you can configure stuff?
You cant blame people people for not knowing this when such thing is gatekeeped. IMO fuck dell for that approach
That's another thing I don't understand, these configurators are not available in my country (Czech Republic) - neither for Lenovo nor Dell.
Fortunately I was able to find a local Lenovo partner, who has some internal access. But I don't understand why they don't have it public for whole EU.
Huh, I didn't know you could force to use discrete GPU only on the P15. I am considering switching to this laptop from T480, where this doesn't seem possible.
Actually, one is an X1 Extreme Gen 3, and the other is a P1 Gen 3. Same machine with different GPUs.
My work provided me with the X1E with Ubuntu preinstalled (that is our standard dev environment). But I found the hardware support very unsatisfactory.
I use a specific display configuration. Three monitors in total: the ThinkPad's 4K display, with a 24" 4K display above it, and a second 24" 4K display to the left in portrait mode.
With Linux on the ThinkPad, I never got that to work. The best I could do was a single external monitor, not both of my external monitors plus the internal.
And I never got any of my Bluetooth headsets to work at all: Apple AirPods, Plantronics, and a couple of no-name brands. They all paired fine as headphones, but the microphones never worked.
I noticed that this work ThinkPad had a Windows license sticker on the bottom, so I figured what the heck, let's see what happens if I reinstall Windows.
The triple monitor config worked with no hitches. The AirPods worked fine.
So I set up a VMware virtual machine and run our dev environment inside that. Now everything works great! (I also tried VirtualBox but found the display responsiveness much better in VMware.)
Once this was sorted out, I was so happy with the machine that I bought a matching P1 for my new personal machine. (Regarding P1 vs. X1 Extreme, I just went with availability: Lenovo was out of stock on the X1E's but had a nicely configured P1 ready to ship.)
I have a similar setup - X1E Gen 2 with two Dell monitors - the secondary one on the right rotated to portrait mode. The primary monitor connects directly to the laptop via USB-C (and it is able to charge the laptop too over the same cable so thats a bonus). The secondary connects over HDMI via a hub[0] that connects to the laptop over USB-C. These two + my laptop screen work fine though I usually keep my laptop closed (though I have noticed that the GDM login screen appears sideways on the secondary but once I login, everything is fine).
The main issue with this setup is that both my USB-C ports are taken up but since most of my peripherals are wireless, it is not a problem for me. Another issue is that if I try to use the Intel graphics to drive this setup, everything basically crawls and is unusable so I can only use NVIDIA graphics with this (switching to Intel graphics is fine when I'm away from my desk).
Getting multiple screens on a docking station to work was a pain with my X1E Gen 2 as well. Under Windows. Since I used it for work (office, not development) and gaming, I resorted to turn of the Intel GPU permanently. Reduced battery life, but not in any way it hamper it's use. Since I switched to Ubuntu I have yet to see any difference in battery life. And multiple screens work just fine under both OS.
For the screens the problem could be related to the dp(via usbc)/hdmi ports.
Most of the times if the port is directly connected to the dgpu it doesn't work under linux (this is, for what I understand, a problem with nvidia and their closed source optimus technology driver that is very hard to solve)
That's why I always made sure to buy Linux laptops with only the intel or amd igpu, and without any dgpu. Yeah, it sucks
> They all paired fine as headphones, but the microphones never worked.
To me that doesn't sound like a hardware problem. I need to switch the codec & profile[0] in pavucontrol to use the microphones, which is not done automatically. That might be the issue here.
I find it rather peculiar that tech folks think a plastic laptop is good build quality considering what we have from Apple and others.
I wish more linux laptops had the build quality and support of macbooks. This isn't a rant from an Apple fan, this is a rant from a laptop fan. ThinkPad's aren't good laptops despite what the guy with the pocket protector says. They are flimsy and feel cheap. They still have 20th century tech (eraser mouse, c'mon!). They are my grandfather's laptop.
I make a distinction between "Plastic" and "Carbon Fibre Reinforced Polymer with a magnesium roll cage" that this laptop uses.
We don't think an aluminium bike is better than a carbon fibre bike, so why is an aluminium laptop better than a carbon fibre laptop? I mean aluminium has some nice advantages like heat dissipation but CFRP allows for much lighter laptops. If anything I prefer CRFP because of the weight advantages and because it's more of a "sleeper" material when laptops are VERY tempting for thieves.
Oh, I'm glad I'm not the only person who noticed this - several job laptops (macbooks) have definitely done this to me as well. It's subtle, like your wrist is sticky or being tapped rapidly, but the moment you yank the mains power out from the machine it goes away. Very unsettling (and escalates to painful at times).
I used to experience this as well, on multiple MacBooks across years. It seems to have disappeared when I moved to a non-MagSafe USB-C charging generation of MacBooks (can't say for the latest ones though).
The problem is - laptops used to have their own dedicated chargers. And generally speaking, they were grounded. Now we're moving to usb-c though, it means we've lost it being grounded. And many laptops are made of conductive materials so therefore it is an extremely minor annoyance and downside of usb-c.
Also, I'm in the UK with its crap ring circuits packed with 240v/13amps. I'd rather have a ground when I'm one fault away from 3000 watts momentarily being delivered to my lap. Especially with these exciting new GaN chargers and their open circuit failure modes..
My understanding is that all chargers, GaN or not, are required to use a transformer to electrically separate the primary (wall input) from the secondary (charger output). So a fault directly connecting you to the wall circuit should not be possible with an authentic charger.
> We don't think an aluminium bike is better than a carbon fibre bike
Depends on how you define better. Carbon bikes are prone to catastrophic failure, and if you fall often are a bad idea. Of course, you might just say "just don't fall".
Out of curiosity, do you have any sources with actual evidence that carbon fiber is prone to catastrophic failure in bike frames/components, particularly compared to aluminum? From my (rather limited) research, there seems to be plenty of speculation and anecdotes online about the fragility of CF, but not much actual evidence of rates of catastrophic failure. My impression (not based on expertise or much evidence) is that properly designed CF is much stronger for a given weight than most metals, but can fail at relatively low loads if stressed in a way it wasn't designed for. As it applies to biking, I guess this would tend to mean that CF bikes are more likely to be structurally damaged because of a crash/fall, but not necessarily more likely to fail and cause a crash/fall. This of course supports your point that CF is not a good choice for someone who falls often.
> Now that use of the material, once reserved for high-end bikes, has become widespread in the bike industry, reports of accidents and mysterious failures are on the rise.
> Reed and other experts in carbon fiber agree that any material can fail. Wrecks happen from faulty aluminum, steel, and even rock-hard titanium. The difference with carbon fiber is that it can be difficult to detect signs of damage that might signal imminent failure. Cracks and dents in other materials are typically easy to see, but fissures in carbon fiber often hide beneath the paint. What’s worse is that when carbon fiber fails, it fails spectacularly. While other materials might simply buckle or bend, carbon fiber can shatter into pieces, sending riders flying into the road or trail. And this kind of catastrophic destruction can happen to any part of a bike made with the material.
> “It’s completely reasonable for someone who wants a lightweight bike to look at carbon fiber, but they need to understand the risks,” Elrath says. “Absolutely this is getting ignored.”
There are plenty of videos from competitions where the carbon suddenly fails. I've never seen that with aluminum bikes. Last three accidents from 4:15:
But going back, if one is not racing, is it really worth the extra risk for minor performance improvements? Some say that after any serious fall/crash a carbon frame/component should be replaced because it's difficult to assess if it was damaged or not. How many can afford that?
I was hoping for some actual data. As I mentioned there's plenty of anecdata online, but I don't know if anyone has really studied this. The article you linked to suggests that nobody has done a systematic study.
As a counterpoint to the video you linked, I'm reminded of this video of Danny Macaskill having to work pretty hard to break a carbon rim:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfjjiHGuHoc
> ... if one is not racing, is it really worth the extra risk for minor performance improvements?
It really depends on how much extra risk there is and how much the rider values the performance improvements. Without actual data about the (relative) risk of carbon fiber failure in bike components, we have to guess based on the information we have avaliable. Most of this seems to either be anecdotal, or coming from from interested parties, e.g. bike manufacturers, lawyers who make their living suing bike manufacturers, and journalists who are probably more interested in writing about something exciting happening than something exciting not happening. My impression is that the relative risk of of using carbon fiber in some (but perhaps not all) bike components is pretty small compared to the other risks involved in biking, and the performance improvements are big enough to be worth it for me, even though I don't race.
Aluminum bikes are just as prone to failure, and in fact are less likely to be left in a repairable state after an accident. A dent or a crack in the frame ofter renders it useless.
True of carbon as well, but they can be repaired in some cases; aluminum frames almost always need to be scrapped.
Yes, honestly, a good aluminium frame is preferable to carbon for 90% of people. The small tradeoff in weight and vibration/stiffness characteristics is really not worth the loss in structural integrity, money, and peace of mind.
Modern carbon frames are designed with structural integrity in mind, the frame-building process allows more fine-tuning than aluminum. Aluminum's best quality is it's value, you can wreck one and buy another and still have spent less than a low-grade CF frame.
Not quite. Carbon fiber is a composite. Structural integrity is not one dimensional, and while carbon fiber frames are great in their intended loads, they are bad in puncture and abrasion, and that is inherent to carbon fiber.
It is so much easier to wreck a carbon fiber frame than an alu frame. It just takes one pointy rock or one bad slide. Whereas an alu frame will only receive cosmetic damage
Re: bikes, I've found most CF frames lack fender/rack mounts. If you want utility (commuting, shopping, travel), aluminum is going to win out. For example, I can't think of a single CF cargo bike.
My username may give this away, but after tens of thousands of miles ridden on a variety of frames, I've settled on chromoly steel as the most versatile material. In fact I just picked up another steel frame bike this past weekend with a rack for panniers and a fork that can fit gravel tires.
Regardless I find it very strange to compare a laptop with a bicycle. You would pick the materials when constructing either one for very different reasons.
Specialized Diverge does have fender/rack mounts (although you need to replace the stock seat post clamp with another one for the top rear rack mounts, but Spec does sell one). It's not exactly a utility bike, but for touring around civilized Europe it's a very good bike. :-)
> why is an aluminium laptop better than a carbon fibre laptop?
It looks nice.
Which is completely subjective, of course, and purely about aesthetics. But for a personal item like a laptop, I think aesthetics are much more important than HN comments would let you believe.
I will never understand the fetishisation of metal as a "premium" feeling material - if anything, it's impractical for a laptop. (conducts heat so can be uncomfortable to use on your lap if the thermal solution is poorly designed; dents/bends when dropped; probably harder for RF/antenna design...)
It's the same reason why phones turned in to "premium" glass and metal sandwiches that people immediately slap in to a cheap plastic case because the "premium" design is simply too thin and slippery to use.
Samsung was rightly nailed in the 2010s for producing horrible plastic phones, but Nokia's use of quality polycarbonate in their Lumias were ignored.
> It's the same reason why phones turned in to "premium" glass and metal sandwiches that people immediately slap in to a cheap plastic case because the "premium" design is simply too thin and slippery to use.
People slap phones in to cheap plastic case to prevent scratches, or to make phones balanced in case of a camera sticking out of the back.
I worked for Nokia. The Lumias had great hardware. And even Windows Phone wasn't that bad. If they'd bothered doubling down on Meego just when Google was still struggling with making Android usable, fast, and not an enormous mess, they would have had a chance. Instead they dumped it in favor of Symbian and later Windows Phone. MS bought the remains of Nokia, mismanaged it, and then cancelled the whole thing.
Plastic is made from oil, and has limited recyclability (the polymers degrade so at best you only down cycle). Aluminum is one of the most abundant materials in the earth’s crust, and once refined is basically infinitely recyclable (or so the story goes). Aluminum is also reasonable light and strong, with good thermal properties (if your laptop chassis gets too hot, it has other design issues at this point IMO).
plastic can be (almost) infinitely recycled for industrial use, it's food use that has limited recyclability.
also: Macs are very hard to upgrade (sometimes it's impossible to) and become e-trash in a couple of years, while these "plastic" laptops can last a decade before being discarded as junk.
Your comment is so incredibly divorced from reality.
Plastic doesn't grow on trees either. Its production has huge impacts on the environment.
Aluminum is highly and easily recyclable. In fact Apple makes their MacBook enclosures from 100% recycled aluminum. No other computer manufacturer can make the same claim regarding the production of their plastic body notebooks.
The idea that plastic can be infinitely recycled is just that: an idea. The infrastructure for recycling plastic is far more complex than recycling aluminum, as well as essentially non-existent.
Apple computers have a history of having high resell values and long lifespans. You can see the evidence of that just by looking at eBay. And when they do eventually get tossed out that aluminum body can actually be recycled, where the same claim for plastic bodied notebooks cannot be factually made.
> No other computer manufacturer can make the same claim regarding the production of their plastic body notebooks.
I seriously believe it's time we start considering Apple a religion.
Technology company HP Inc., Palo Alto, California, has a product and service portfolio that includes personal computer systems, printers and 3D printing solutions. Increasingly, the company’s products are manufactured using recycled-content plastics
All the ocean-bound plastic that HP incorporates into its products is PET. The company says its HP Elite c1030 Chromebook Enterprise laptop is the world’s first Chromebook made with ocean-bound plastic. The device also is made from 75 percent recycled aluminum and features a keyboard made from 50 percent recycled plastics
HP is using ocean-bound plastics in its products, with the Dragonfly is made of 80% recycled materials
HP has just launched new ENVY notebooks that offer creators the freedom. The ENVY laptops are also made from recycled aluminum
In 2018, we began implementing the use of an innovative bio-based packaging made from bamboo and sugar cane fiber. The material is not only 100 percent biodegradable, it is lighter than previous packaging and its strength characteristics enable design improvements that reduce overall package size.
This new packaging was used to to ship memory cards and one of our ThinkPad models. With lighter packaging materials and package weight, the result was 6.7 percent less transportation CO2 emissions. We are therefore looking to expand the use of this bamboo and sugar cane fiber packaging innovation.
Over a decade ago, Lenovo began using 100% recycled and recyclable packaging material. Instead of using polystyrene packaging, we now encourage the use of molded pulp, fiber and low-density polyethylene (LDPE).
Lenovo unveiled their latest range of gizmos at CES 2022 a short while back, including the new ThinkPad Z Series of laptops featuring eco-friendly designs. The ThinkPad series is made from 75% recycled materials, the Z13 and Z16 are made from 100% recycled aluminium
just to name a couple of them.
Every brand out there is greenwashing its name...
Anyway
Apple has committed to be 100% carbon neutral in terms of its supply chain and products *by 2030*
In all of those examples you provided none of them meet the same criteria.
Apple's entire macbook line, both Air and Pro, have bodies made from
100% recycled aluminum.
The examples you provided, it's 50% recycled plastics or 75% recycled
aluminum or 80% over-all or if 100% recycled aluminum is used it's
only for some of their product lines.
Given all of that: I never said other companies aren't trying, and I'm
not dismissing their efforts. I just said they can't make the same
claim. Additionally, when it comes to recycling those plastic bodies
the infrastructure just isn't there like it is for aluminum.
> Every brand out there is greenwashing its name...
I'm glad they're doing it, even if it's just to improve their brand
image and not out of actual concern for the environment.
> I seriously believe it's time we start considering Apple a religion.
This is not even close to correct. The vast majority of plastics can't even be truly recycled once. Not back into their original form, anyway.
Saying Macs become "e-trash in a couple years" is similarly way way off the mark. Expected life for many Macs is a decade or more. I have one that is from 1984 that still works perfectly. After that, much of the machine is fully recyclable, and the case is 100% recyclable.
They aren't "forced out of the market". That's just made-up.
And the animus against standard OS upgrades is not particularly convincing, to me at least.
The value of Intel Macs is holding up just fine. I can go sell my 2019 Intel MBP and still get a lot more out of it than a PC laptop of similar vintage. This has of course been historically true of Macs, as well, as even a cursory investigation will reveal.
> become e-trash in a couple of years, while these "plastic" laptops can last a decade before being discarded as junk.
My experiences different, I'd still be rocking a 2014 MBP had it not suffered massive liquid damage. All Macs and MacBooks I or relatives have crossed or are going to cross the decade threshold with aplomb.
8GB of RAM is plenty fine for me. I just don't have a thousand tabs opened (I never do anyway, whatever the RAM amount), which is mostly the usual problem but the state of the web platform and its runaway resource usage is another debate entirely.
> one of the main components gets out of production it's all about luck
You make it sound like it never happens with non-Apple hardware. With the flurry of devices that are put out every other month by a lot of hardware vendors, "out of production" often means a couple years, barely enough to cover warranty claims, and then they coast on stocked spare parts.
I am in the habit of trying to revive legacy hardware when people throw it away, and have a closet full of hardware barely older than 2-3 years that could not be repaired because of a broken part that should have been perfectly repairable were the part be available. Usually these get fixed by having two broken machines and doing a transplant, not by sourcing original parts from manufacturers. Batteries are loads of fun, even just one year after a product release it might be impossible to source an original one, either because they have additional import legislation so they're outright not distributed overseas, or because they're deemed consumables when they're field-swappable, and thus often not covered by warranties (and thus vendors don't make any effort stocking them), so you're left with buying third-party ones of obscure origins which can be either duds or fire hazards waiting to happen with a non-negligible probability. At least Apple puts forward some hard numbers so I know what I can rely on†.
Hell, just last year I restored a PoS system that had 1GB of RAM and a 8GB SSD, put some lightweight Linux on it, recovered a couple of ESC/POS thermal printers, hacked some bridge in Ruby between the PoS software and the printers, and the device chugged along for a solid year before finally giving up for good, which saved the store owner from shelling out stupid amounts of money and helped them bootstrap their business.
With hundreds of machines from various vendors that went through my hands I feel I have enough statistically significant data to extract trends and draw my own conclusions. These don't support that Apple devices become e-waste in short order, but I respect that your experience and opinion might be different, even though I don't adhere to it.
While I agree to most of the glued/soldered/planned obsolescence criticisms related to applethings I do feel the need to point out those "obsolete" macthings tend to run Linux just fine. I should know, writing this on a 'late 2009 27" iMac' which I got for free due to its video card being broken (which it is no longer, 8 minutes in the oven at 195°C is all it takes) running Debian. While it is also possible to get more recent versions of macOS to run on these things this is not nearly as easy nor useful as running Linux which just supports the hardware without any qualms. Apple does not want you to use older hardware so they don't build macOS for machines which are perfectly capable of running it. Installing unsupported versions is made possible by monkey-patching the release in a rather hit-and-miss fashion, often leaving parts of the hardware (bluetooth, sound, wifi) without or with sub-standard support. All this while Linux runs flawlessly on the same hardware.
Depends on which one you're using, mine contains a Radeon HD 4670. There is a lot of NVIDIA on the PCI bus but this does not seem to be an obstacle to the thing running flawlessly:
There is some Broadcom as well - the Bluetooth controller, which works fine - as well as some Qualcomm - the wifi controller which, again, works fine.
This is a 'Late 2009 27" iMac', running the internal display as well as an external 1920*1200 24" monitor through a DP->HDMI cable. Everything works, including the silly IR remote control thingy (tested using the IR blaster on my phone).
Non-latest macOS versions still receive security updates. Safari 15 is available for Big Sur and Catalina. It's not like one has to always upgrade to the last major version.
When they go out of security support these machines work quite well under Linux (as I could test myself, I recycled a bunch already).
The body is extremely sturdy along with the hinges.
It's not plastic - it's magnesium alloy. They are not flimsy or cheap.
Have you ever used a trackpoint? It's extremely ergonomic and much better than a trackpad. It requires a bit of time to get used to it - but it's totally worth the time investment.
And please don't make comments like 'Grandfather's laptop'. Just because something is old doesn't mean it's not good.
Look up Richard Sapper - the person who designed the IBM Thinkpad - a lot of brilliant design thinking went into this.
If something is highly functional, durable and can be easily repaired - that's beautiful. Aesthetically the Thinkpads are beautiful as well - an understated beauty vs the 'look at me, look at me - I'm shiny and thin'.
> The casual dismissal of TrackPoints in the grandparent comment shows that the author has never tried one.
They're a great and innovative "backup" pointing device when one doesn't have access to a mouse or touchpad. They really don't compare to either of those more expressive and efficient options, though.
> The casual dismissal of TrackPoints in the grandparent comment shows that the author has never tried one.
I've tried to use track points. A dozen or so times. Recently I got a new thinkpad from work and gave it another go, same result. I just don't like it.
Granted, the trackpad on my thinkpad is also garbage. I prefer my external trackball mouse.
Trackpoint fanatics don't seem to understand what works for them doesn't necessarily work for everyone. I find myself rolling my eyes a lot in threads like this.
I’ve used them quite a bit. They were standard issue at a certain place named after a hat. It is NOT a fantastic feature to have your mouse move when you type which I found happened constantly when using a ThinkPad. 1) the eraser mouse “track point” was novel in 1994, not anymore. It’s in the way.
Likewise with the physical mouse buttons on the trackpad. It’s 2022. We have touch screens with gestures and stuff. Why do I still have to use a physical button? Tap to click you say? Turning that on means being even in near-field proximity to the trackpad means it’s a click, whether you wanted it to or not.
Your fingers are not on the trackpoint when you type. The mouse pointer doesn't move when you use the keyboard.
Also, the three trackpoint buttons are right under your thumb - your hand literally doesn't have to move away from the keyboard. No touch screen necessary. That would be even worse having to move from keyboard to screen.
It really sounds like you've not used the trackpoint correctly.
But it's great that there are options and it seems you've found what works for you.
Can I ask how are you supposed to use a trackpoint?
I recently bought my first thinkpad, a second hand Gen 5 X1 carbon, and I really like it.
I haven't yet invested the effort in learning to use the trackpoint.
I guess you use your index finger on the trackpoint, and thumb on the mouse buttons? For scrolling it seems you hold the middle button with the thumb and then scroll with the trackpoint?
I don't know - I have a long history of ThinkPads (and adjacent devices, including some oddities like the WorkPad z50) and I cannot imagine wanting to go back to a TrackPoint after experiencing a high-quality touchpad.
Thinkpads work. They don't make user hostile choices like zero-upgradability and zero-repairablity, the touchbar, replacing the esc key with the touch bar 'key' (only to roll it back) like the the macbooks. They also don't make confusing usability decisions like the giant ass trackpad that routinely registers false positives as you type.
I recently got an old refurbished Thinkpad T430 for casual use when I am not near my desktop and installed Debian + LXDE on it. T430s are models from 10 years ago and is more enjoyable to work on than the 2019 MacBook Pro provided by my employer that I have to use for work. The only way I can make the MacBook tolerable is by using it in clamshell mode connected to monitors + physical keyboard/mouse so I don't have to interact with the actual hardware. It takes off like a rocket engine and warms my side desk pretty well (not to mention physically hot to touch, can't even imagine using it on my "lap"), docker is crap on it, not to mention the cmd-ctrl nonsense in addition to the things mentioned earlier. I have already dropped my Thinkpad a couple of times in pretty bad falls as it has survived whereas I don't have the same level of confidence in the MacBook.
> They don't make user hostile choice like [...] the touch bar
This is false.
This monstrosity first appeared on the X1 Carbon 2nd gen (along with the loss of our beloved dedicated trackpoint buttons), and the backlash was so big that they reinstated all the buttons for the next generation.
Correct. I would lump ‘erratic trackpad clicking’ to its list of hostile user behaviors. The hardware inside the laptop on the board is nice. It’s the peripherals and body that make me feel like I’m working for IBM in 1996. Small changes in the design won’t make up for an outdated design.
Also, outside of SDD or RAM, what else are you upgrading? Does it even need to have that capability considering how often you do? Would you rather have better parts that won’t fail so easily in a slimmer, sleeker, design than one that sacrifices weight and size to allow you to maybe have the choice?
I like right to repair. I like being able to upgrade something. The frequency of which I upgrade my ram and sdd is about as frequently as I’ll need a new motherboard anyway as my board is outdated 4x cycles.
I think you just look for different features in a laptop then the Thinkpad crowd does. I love the track point, you get a mouse you never have to take your fingers off the keyboard to use.
I've used a plethora of modern latoptops, and to this day my favorite laptop is an ancient x200. It has not trackpad, only a track point. I upgraded it to heck, with a new ips screen, ram, new wireless card, storage, etc. The keyboard is wonderful, the screen looks great, The foot print of the laptop is quite small. I only wish I could have that laptop with a modern processor, as that's where it's fallen behind.
I've never enjoyed MacBook as much as that thing. I'm definitely not a granpa either.
Have you heard about the X210 project? Some enthusiasist in China modded a motherboard to replace X200/X201 with modern chipset and ability to run 4K screen:
(It was updated to use 10th gen Intel in 2019, I don't know if it runs the newest ones now though. Would really love if someone make a Ryzen part for it)
But it's, of course, a mod rather than a finished product, so...
CF reinforced fiber is not cheap plastic by any margin.
I've owned alu-slab macbooks (personal) and company-owned thinkpads for a long time.
If you bump the macbook, you get a permanent ding. Nothing happens on the fiber for comparable force (unless you literally crack it).
If you flex the notebook, the alu can be permanently deformed. The "cheapo plastic" will easily take a ton of torsional deformation without complaining.
It's a very functional chassis in my eyes.
And I love the boring look honestly. I'm kind of disappointed that recent models switched to a more grey-bluish look.
"Eraser mouse" cmon? That's one of the reasons why I (and as I've seen many others) prefer thinkpads. Trackpoint, good keyboard, good linux compatibility, upgradeable.
Despide some Lenovo BS plays on firmware etc a thinkpad is still, in the age of making everything fancy looks over functionality, a thinkpad. A reliable product.
I've been trying to find a substitute for years. I can't find one. Macbooks are (generally) good products, but they don't have trackpoints, I don't like their keyboards, linux compatibility is not where I like it to be, and definitely not upgradeable.
What I find peculiar is the fetishization of metal for laptops and phones. I hate how a cold slab of metal feels in my hand. I hate how the aluminium framed laptops radiate heat and make it impossible to actually use them on my lap.
I exclusively used MacBooks from 2012 to 2018 or something like that, before switching to a Carbon X1, and could never switch back. None of the laptops from Apple I had could actually be used from my lap, which is where I want to use my laptop, because of the heat coming from the bottom of the MacBooks. So I'm quite happy with plastic/softer materials rather than whatever metal material Apple uses.
The 2018 x1c vs the 2018 MacBook Air was somewhat a blowout. We're talking 14" vs 13" screen, lower weight vs higher weight, 4 core vs 2 core, reliable machine vs butterfly keyboard, essentially even battery life, displays, and speakers for the most part.
You had to be REALLY attached to MacOS or the Apple ecosystem to seriously consider a MBA. When Apple m1 was released, the battery life and performance situation VERY much changed making Apples product very very competitive as a standalone product. You absolutely made the right choice in 2018, but the game has changed and Apple is back.
> You should try and compare a M1 Mac with your Carbon X1. Most likely yours runs much hotter.
Unless I'm mistaken, the material of the M1 Macs seems to be the same as before? If the machine runs at 100% resource usage, does the underside of the body no longer get so hot you can't have it in your lap?
> If the machine runs at 100% resource usage, does the underside of the body no longer get so hot you can't have it in your lap?
Nope, never. That's not to say that if you run a Wii emulator for hours it doesn't get very warm, it's simply not intolerably hot. That's without fans. I'd expect a fan-equipped model to at most remain warm.
> That's not to say that if you run a Wii emulator for hours it doesn't get very warm, it's simply not intolerably hot
I've never run any emulators, I'm guessing they are about as resource-hungry as compiling things? Since laptops usually compile much slower than desktop computers, lots of time is spent compiling something when I use my laptops.
> it's simply not intolerably hot
I guess everyone's tolerance is different, but would you, while you run your Wii emulator, be able to have the laptop in your lap with just a thin garment between the laptop and your skin?
If they weren't so damn expensive I would have already! Also waiting for Asahi Linux to mature before I'd even consider it, really hard to abandon Linux ecosystem once you've gotten used to it. I would never be able to replicate the productivity and the UX of my desktop setup with macOS, so Linux support is a must for me at this point.
I'm writing this on a plastic laptop that I've been using as my only machine since 2014. Anecdotally its build should be that bad if it's still good to let me pay my bills. Of course it's not in the $300-400 range and its upgradeability made the difference. I would have replaced it a couple of times if I couldn't have added extra RAM and swapped the HDD and DVD for 2 SSDs or replaced the keyboard every time my fingers ended up wearing it. That would have been a waste of money and that's more build quality than plastic vs metal.
Same, I bought mine for 600 euros in 2014, still running fine with additional 4GB and a SSB but I had to drill the plastic chassis and put three small bolts to keep the hinge and the chassis together. Just like the previous one. I am planning keep it for another ten years but still if I ever buy another ruggedness of the chassis will be absolute priority.
> I wish more linux laptops had the build quality and support of macbooks.
Have you considered Dell's XPS line[0] (or their business equivalent, the Precision 55XX/57XX line)?
For a well-built notebook rivalling/exceeding the MacBook Pros, there's always the Precision 75XX/77XX line[1].
The new Precisions announced just a week ago with Intel Alder Lake CPUs[2] now have 16:10 displays, OLED, but still retain 'modern' features (some I consider regressions, like moving from dedicated trackpad buttons to a 'clickpad'). These are the notebooks with the new 'CAMM' memory modules.
Dell always has options for RHEL/Ubuntu from the factory, and these notebooks also run other distributions (I have a Precision 7560 running Windows 10/Arch) very well.
> I wish more linux laptops had the build quality and support of macbooks
I'm glad my "Linux laptops" are very much not like those macbooks with their glue and solder and "no user-serviceable parts inside (and we really mean it)"
> This isn't a rant from an Apple fan, this is a rant from a laptop fan. ThinkPad's aren't good laptops despite what the guy with the pocket protector says. They are flimsy and feel cheap. They still have 20th century tech (eraser mouse, c'mon!). They are my grandfather's laptop.
The good thing with those machines is that you'll be able to keep on using your grandfather's laptop while those whose grandfathers opted for macbooks are left wanting. I'm using a T42p from 2005, apart from putting in an SSD I have not changed the thing. It was, and still is, a perfectly useable tool.
Funnily enough the Framework laptop is nothing like 'glue and solder' (it's designed for repair and upgrade, with extremely well thought out captive screws and magnets) but does have I would say 'the build quality and support of Apple laptops'.
Support even better in a way, since they'll just ship you a replacement part rather than charge you through the nose for 'Framework Care' only to tell you it's old and needs replacing, can trade in if you want or send it off for weeks to have a 'refurbished' (not new) part fitted.
Again feels rigid, but ....
You can actually step on a thinkpad, but just google "macbook air bend". The MacBook Air is still a great laptop, but if you think it is more rigid than the competition, no it just might feel that way.
Your first argument maybe is true but in the overall comparisons these laptops are heavier.
Forgiving for drops and dents? Yeah, I’ll give you that. Carbon fiber is durable, not scratch proof though.
Less expensive, yes, and you get those discounts bleeding into the components they use and the specs. Spec a high end Dev machine and compare with MacBook offering and it’s not even close. System76 is getting there, but they still use plastics too.
Build quality, I completely agree with this. The problem is production quality isn’t guaranteed and I had more issues with PC laptops (Dell, HP, Lenovo) than I have with my MacBooks (2008, 2012, 2014, 2020 M1).
Why do you need such a build quality? Do you toss around your laptops? Do you keep dropping your laptop? My question is what is the use of such a build quality (apart from the very subjective - "it feels good")
> My question is what is the use of such a build quality
Travel. As a former on-the-road consultant my laptops have taken all kinds of beatings - spills, inconsiderate recliners, drops etc. A (small) part of my preference for Apple machines is that they can be replaced with something basically identical almost anywhere in the world almost immediately by visiting either a first or third party store when something bad happens. Even commercial warranties with on-site support don’t get that good.
I absolutely do those things all the time as somebody who is naturally clumsy and a heavy mobility user. A laptop that can survive some light abuse, which both MacBooks and Thinkpad's can is an absolute requirement for me.
I can't tell you how many times in my life I've seen a laptop come crashing to the ground. For somebody like me MagSafe is an actual competitive advantage because of the multiple laptop charging ports I've destroyed by tripping over the cord accidentally. I am not alone.
I got a USB-C magnetic adapter/interposer from eBay for my laptop. It's pretty handy, and it means I can still unplug the USB-C supply from the adapter and charge my phone if I need to.
And I also like the right angle nature of the thing because of my my desk works.
It’s pretty unclear to me which is supposed to be which in this comparison after the ThinkPad switch to mushy chiclets in the early 2010s (limited run anniversary edition excepted).
The Thinkpad chiclets suck compared to the scissor switches of the earlier models, but compared to the soft putty that is Mac keyboards, they're still a winner.
When I had to use a Macbook for work a few years back, I was unable to use the keyboard for more than 15-20 minutes without it flaring my RSI. That's compared to about an hour or so I can get on my Thinkpad.
If you've ever taken apart a ThinkPad, you would notice that inside is a metal frame to support the entire laptop body. It's not plastic. Plus, this ThinkPad (and the newer ThinkPads in general) have a metal exterior
By that logic, civil engineers show how little faith they have in their buildings by having a reinforced concrete support and glass/steel frames around them
Not the buildings, they have little faith in the structural strength of poured concrete which is why they use rebar. It increases the strength to tolerable levels so they can build what they want to build. So yeah. Civil engineers know the properties of the materials they work with. So should hardware engineers. I'm aware they all have metal frames. I'm also aware that some aluminum laptops incorporate the frame into the lattice structure the motherboard sits on. I like when engineers find ways of using the materials to their strengths (aluminum laptop) vs having to strengthen (plastic) or support (carbon fiber).
Are you even aware that most of the people on this planet either can't afford Apple or just don't want to throw away so much money for fancy design quirks?
I switched from a Legion 5 (plastic housing) to a Legion 7 (same design, but aluminum) and the only noticable difference is that the plastic is much better at keeping ambient temperature. When off, the 7 feels noticably colder and when on, it feels hotter.
im guessing you live in a warm climate so. i don't and metal laptops are nearly always cold and sap the heat from your hands.
im not sure i would like carrying all that extra weight around either. its not like i an going out on an expedition everyday where i need my laptop to hold up in all sorts of extreme situations. ive never even dropped or broken any of my "plastic" laptops and I've been using them for a few decades now
Aluminum sucks if you're on AC power that isn't properly grounded, as others have pointed out. I personally prefer laptops with carbon fiber for that reason.
proper thinkpads have strenghtened construction with metal inside and plastic in general is better comfort wise regarding how hot it can get compared to better heat conducting metal
They are in no way flimsy, you will much easier damage internal components of nany Mac over Thinkpad T series.
but yes, they won't win any beauty contest - if you want reliable workhorse which is relatively ugly go for Thinkpad T series, if you want laptop for showing off go for Mac and other "brands"
Re: "proper" ThinkPads - Lenovo has made a mess of the model line up and I don't think it's easy for the non-ThinkPad aficionado figure it out (e.g. T series being the entry point in to the classic magnesium alloy roll cage).
As much as I do like the layout of that keyboard (which my T420 I believe has as well) I wonder if they made other layouts but still with the nicer switches of the T420 style? Will have to look into it. I know there are firms in China making custom mobos to fit into I believe the X201 or something similar to make them more modern
It's weird to me that now, when Apple is firing on all cylinders with their best ever hardware (both the M1, and the new MBP with improved keyboard, ports and removal of the touchbar), someone would switch away from Apple.
I've used Linux for 20 years on desktops, but laptops, where hardware/software integration is crucial, I've never found something trouble free. Wireless and video drivers tend to be good only if you use intel. That limits you on a GPU choice. Probably an AMD APU would work well, but the dual intel iGPU+nvidia is terrible on Linux
> It's weird to me that now, when Apple is firing on all cylinders with their best ever hardware
Are they firing on all cylinders on the software side too? Great hardware combined with software that makes ones life unnecessarily difficult would cause one to bail to something that's better suited to them overall.
I've been keeping a wary eye on how Apple controls root access, and I'm on the fence regardless of how great the M2 is, though the Asahi folk could earn Apple a few purchases
I am just waiting for Asahi to become more stable and support a bit more before I get a new one. But at the price of Apple HW and getting perf/battery life it's hard to compare. The Lenovo's are in or above Macbook Pro prices.
I want to not be tethered to a desk while working and not lose perf to get ok battery life. These P1's are the closest I have seen though.
If you are specifically choosing something that works trouble free with Linux (i.e. popular with the kernel and distro developers), then this needn't apply. And practically speaking there could be nothing more popular than workstation ThinkPads.
My work ThinkPad (Carbon X1 gen 8)'s touchpad is fine. The gestures work fine with Fedora. The touchpad wasn't a downgrade after coming from a work MBP running OSX.
In some ways it's better because I can use 3 finger click to close tabs and open links in new tabs.
Unlike in the article, I'm not a fan of the fingerprint reader. It rarely recognises me and (at least on fedora) I need to try it a few times before it will fall back to letting me type my password.
Many Synaptic touchpads don't have proper gesture support in X11. They work out of the box in Wayland, but on X11 gestures are meh even if you can get them to work. You can use a tool to execute commands on certain gestures, but you don't get the immediate response or the ability to pause halfway through.
The author bought a model that can come with an Nvidia GPU so I'm guessing they might be on X11. That could explain their problems.
> Why they have this bad touchpads is beyond me. Then it would be better to ditch them completely and position the keyboard nearer to the user.
I think some brands have tried this (like ones that include a mechanical keyboard or a screen) and the feedback about having the keyboard closer to the user and not having a "shelf" you can wrest your wrists on is almost always negative. YMMV.
I've been very happy with both my P1 and Carbon touchpads. Not as customizable as a mac's (using BTT) out of the box, but the feel is fine. Much better than the Dell XPS I'm writing this from, dragging anything is literally impossible.
I have a P53 as my personal device and trackpad works great, but the P15s for work is garbage. It jumps all over the place at times and even feels worse as in not smooth enough.
I’m reluctant to let go of my X220 for exactly this reason. On typing-heavy/pointer-minimal tasks, the keyboard and wrist rest ergonomics are basically perfect. To the point where I made a wrist rest for my desktop keyboard out of carved pine wrapped with leather that precisely matches the X220 geometry.
Based on all the comments on HN about how great Thinkpads are supposed to be with Linux, I bought an X1-Extreme some time ago.
From my experience, Linux support for Lenovo devices is terrible.
ACPI, power management, and UEFI are consistently causing problems. Grub has an issue with the 4K display, causing it to render at about 1 FPS. The dual-GPU (Intel and nVidia) situation is unworkable under Linux. Suspend on lid close is unpredictable. The fingerprint reader has never worked, and the driver for the TPM appears unfinished business under Linux. The battery life under Linux is about half of what you can expect from Windows.
My setup with the AN40 Thunderbolt dock probably makes it worse, the AN40 (even under Windows) is a terrible buggy mess, after about 10 firmware updates it is now somewhat usable under Linux. Resume from stand-by is a gamble each morning. Prepare to reboot and power-cycle often if you want to run this dock under Linux. fwupd does not work for all peripherals (such as the TB dock), so you'll often need Windows to perform firmware updates.
Maybe I could solve some of this stuff if I'd spend some time on it, I don't know. I do know that as long as I run Linux as my daily driver, my next laptop won't be a Lenovo.
Don't use Grub or any bootloader if you can avoid it. I haven't used Grub in 10 years. Load Linux directly as an EFI executable via the EFISTUB approach.
You almost certainly only need to run two or three efibootmgr commands to accomplish this. For most people that means only the "Using UEFI directly" section is relevant.
> Don't use Grub or any bootloader if you can avoid it. I haven't used Grub in 10 years. Load Linux directly as an EFI executable via the EFISTUB approach.
I run Windows dual boot, since I need (native) Windows for certain work related tasks.
> S3 suspend was removed as a default option by many hardware manufacturers. You will likely need to enter the BIOS to change this.
It's on, S3 is not the problem
> There is a bug in 5.17.x kernels where suspend doesn't work with bluetooth enabled. It will be fixed soon.
I'm not running 5.17.
But frankly, I don't want to care about all this "oh, but you just have to do [insanely_technical_thing]"
Sure, if I invest $LOTS_OF_TIME in it, I might be able to fix most of the issues. But this is a $3000 professional laptop, which is supposed to have good Linux support. This machine is my work equipment and I chose this expensive machine so I don't have to tinker with this stuff. It should just work.
>But this is a $3000 professional laptop, which is supposed to have good Linux support. //
That's a big fail by Lenovo then, so why didn't you return it? When the support guys logged in to your computer to fix it, what did they do -- just go "yeah, or product is crap" and usher you away?
Mostly because I had more important things to do at the time. Though not perfect, the computer does work, it does get the job done.
And also, I wouldn't know which other brand/model to get. I made my decision to buy the X1E based on the HN community recommending Lenovo as having one of the best support for Linux. So if I switch to a different brand, I might end up with an even worse Linux experience, so it wasn't worth the risk to me.
It's not that everything branded Lenovo runs linux flawlessly.
There are know models and model lines that do so (like the T line). Usually they were / are even offered in variants with Linux preinstalled from Lenovo web site.
Other models may have and do have problems, unsupported hardware, etc.
My X1 carbon works flawlessly aside from the fingerprint scanner (never tried it) and the builtin 4G modem which requires Windows drivers to initialize on Verizon with some shady proprietary blob that is downloaded over the air.
Yeah for the most part it's a "Linux on laptops works if you <list of steps to configure things>...". At least that has been my experience. Although I have not run Linux on a laptop in years so maybe it's time to revisit that.
There isn't much configuration to do if you have an X1 carbon installed with EFISTUB booting if you have the full KDE suite installed. KDE makes your interaction with any peripherals utterly seamless. If you don't want to tweak your Linux machine much, you need to go all-in on KDE.
It's highly dependent on the specific hardware. On some everything works out of the box, others you're stuck with very little working (think Apple M1). Just like any OS you always need to ensure hardware compatibility before purchase.
>> Don't use Grub or any bootloader if you can avoid it. I haven't used Grub in 10 years. Load Linux directly as an EFI executable via the EFISTUB approach.
> I run Windows dual boot, since I need (native) Windows for certain work related tasks.
The windows/efi boot menu can handle dual boot.
But, assuming you want/need secure boot and bitlocker - I'm not sure if there is an easy way to avoid having to type in recovery key on kernel updates :/
Perhaps efi > direct windows and efi > grub > Linux might work? Probably still needs recovery key for bitlocker after grub update? Maybe this is solved now - I don't dual boot any machines w bitlocker right now.
>But frankly, I don't want to care about all this "oh, but you just have to do [insanely_technical_thing]"
>It should just work.
Then you should buy a laptop that ships with Linux and has official support from the vendor. Like the Dell XPS Developer edition, or anything from System76.
By not using Grub you lose the ability to fallback on a safe kernel. That may be quite dangerous depending on how reliable kernel update is for you. I have been saved by kernel fallbacks before. Double that for laptops whose ACPI drivers randomly break from version to version, as evidenced by your note on 5.17.x kernels.
Regardless I sympathize, as I recently had a good deal of trouble updating from BIOS to UEFI. The 4K issue seems to also affect Dell XPS15 and leads to a kernel panic on the latest Canonical Live CD [1]
> By not using Grub you lose the ability to fallback on a safe kernel
That is factually wrong: if you create other EFI entries with different kernel payloads, then enroll them in your UEFI bios, you can select them at boot time in a menu.
This is how I test cmdline options (same kernel packaged in different .EFI)
If you forgot to do that before a problem, but still have the old payloads around, you can even use the UEFI to add EFI payloads by selecting their files from your EFI partition.
Hmm seems we disagree so it is not factually wrong, but a matter of where you draw the line at fallback.
I am not an expert in uefi but my uefi system does not give me the ability to pass command line arguments to the kernel. I actually went to check and took a picture[1].
According to your statement that means you need a working system to repack your kernel if you do not use grub. That kind of proves the opposite of what you write.
With grub you can set kernel arguments in an ephemeral way by just interrupting the boot. In the past, when testing failing kernels it was mighty useful to add a magic argument to the kernel.
This got me looking around at how one would load a luks or dm-crypt encrypted drive from efi without grub. I didn't find anything solid but I've used initram shims for stuff like that before so that might be an approach but at that point you might as well use grub which has some nice features built-in.
I guess I'm really curious what there is to gain by bypassing grub if anything?
I don't use GRUB on any of my systems anymore, here's a couple loose answers to your questions.
> This got me looking around at how one would load a luks or dm-crypt encrypted drive from efi without grub.
systemd-boot lets you define an encrypted drive at installation, which is what I do for my LUKS devices. Whole thing works pretty flawlessly, in my experience.
> I guess I'm really curious what there is to gain by bypassing grub if anything?
I mean, you're not "bypassing" anything; Linux has molecularity at it's core, it's perfectly normal to swap out it's surrounding components to personalize your system. Personally, I pass on GRUB because systemd-boot is fast. Booting with GRUB takes 10-45 seconds depending on your hardware and encryption setup: I've never seen systemd-boot take longer than 15. If you're not dual-booting or doing any fancy baremetal stuff, I think most people would be perfectly happy with it. GRUB certainly still has it's place though, and I'm glad it exists.
I mean, that's not entirely true. You can chroot into your box and change your kernel if something goes horrifically wrong, the situation isn't as unsalvageable as you paint it out to be.
It's possible but it's more inconvenient than it needs to be. I'd rather be able to select a previous kernel from a list instead of trying to remember how to change the kernel through chroot on a broken system.
You can totally select a different kernel if it's packaged in its own EFI payload.
You can even enroll this EFI payloads from within the BIOS by just selecting the file from the EFI partition if you forgot to add them into your UEFI (ie if they don't show in your F12 boot options)
I have used EFISTUB for 10 years but I wouldn't recommend it for the next install. The bootloader is the one arcane place that you don't want to be clever with and get reminded of its presence daily, because once it fails for some reason, it wastes much more time to find and read docs and diagnose than the time saved in boot speedup, because the knowledge to debug it is not something you would remember everyday. And this setup is even rarer than Grub, so any failure cases will not have help from cached knowledge and thus require much more research from first principle. Some backup options here would help in case, even if they impose some tax in boot speed. (If Grub takes a tax of 3 seconds per boot, and if a failure in EFISTUB takes 1 hour to resolve, it takes 1200 boots for EFISTUB to be worth the risk, which is 3 years if it's a laptop booting once per day, and much longer for a desktop.)
Once my desktop using the EFISTUB setup had a kernel that failed to boot, stuck at some filesystem error. Then I had to come up with a rescue plan at the spot, because there was no other way to boot into the desktop and there was no tutorial to help with this at the time.
The issues of EFISTUB:
- It doesn't interact with kernel updates nicely. I used a script in /etc/kernel/postinst.d to copy /vmlinuz to \EFI\debian\vmlinuz.efi. There is no rollback, and no multiple kernels.
- It doesn't work well with kernel parameters. The parameters are encoded in UEFI NVRAM. You have to create separate entries for different kernel parameters, or manipulate the NVRAM back and forth with efibootmgr, which is another gun that easily shoots the foot (you can easily mess up the bootorder variable).
- It doesn't play nicely with Windows and Secure Boot.
I use EFTSTUB with Arch Linux and I agree about it taking up more of your time. However, for me, this was all the very start to first set it up. Since then, it’s been smooth sailing.
I also use multiple kernels and I have had issues with kernel updates, and no issues with kernel parameters. However, there is friction with creating separate entries and so I created a very simple shell script to save my commands.
I’ve had no issues dual booting with Windows using BitLocker. I do not use secure boot (yet).
If you’re willing to spend an hour to set it up, I’d go for it. However, that’s an hour of your life you can save with Grub.
Sure, it's common to have it working for a long time, because breaking changes and interactions between different systems occur very infrequently at the level of bootloader and firmware, but when it happens it can easily get into very difficult support situation. Logistically speaking, firmware is not a nice place to play around. It's not well coded, not well tested, and rarely "used" by an end user.
For one I wouldn't put great confidence in a script to manipulate UEFI boot entries, because it is not idempotent and there are precedents to brick the UEFI with unexpected sequence of interaction. Also Windows' reboot options and its annual upgrade tend to mess with the boot variables. I had to help repair colleagues' laptops that had Grub's boot entries erased by Windows upgrades.
> Also Windows' reboot options and its annual upgrade tend to mess with the boot variables. I had to help repair colleagues' laptops that had Grub's boot entries erased by Windows upgrades.
I'm mostly a Windows user, and this has never happened in my experience: at worst Windows might reorder the UEFI boot options, or change the default boot option, but it has never overwritten or erased an entry.
At worst they are still available in the F12 boot menu.
You can embed the parameters in the EFISTUB, this is explained in the arch wiki.
I use that to test different parameters with the same kernel packaged in different EFI payload, which I can select from the F12 boot menu if I don't want to use the commands to specify "use this payload only for the next boot"
I see that you can use systemd as a boot loader (UEFI only). I've never tried it, but would like to set it up. The Arch wiki (of course) has info on it:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/systemd-boot
Yes, people who tell you that you can blindly buy any Lenovo laptop for Linux are lying. You have to do some googling first. Or check the inofficial Thinkpad Wiki. But other than that, if you pick a device that's recommended for use with Linux, it's as good as it gets regarding Linux on laptops if you ask me. Saying that your next Laptop isn't a Lenovo because your random purchase sucked is a little :rolleyes:
Oh and yes, avoid nvidia if you do Linux. Some people say it "works for them", but I for one would recommend just completely staying away from Linux if you want nvidia.
The truth is, and will probably always be, that you have to do some research before buying HW if you're using Linux and don't feel lucky.
I agree. I got a Lenovo Thinkpad L13 and I got lucky that there were no major issues running Linux on it. Although, this will be my last Lenovo laptop and also running Linux on a laptop.
I use Linux entirely for programming, and I already do that on VM's, on a server that I have. I basically just need to SSH and start Vim to do whatever I need to.
I have decided to move to using a Macbook Air with OS X. I like iTerm2 more and can just SSH into my Linux VM's. I am waiting to see if the new Air's launched this year will have dual monitor support, otherwise will just get an Intel based Macbook Air from 2019 or 2020.
> Yes, people who tell you that you can blindly buy any Lenovo laptop for Linux are lying.
I wouldn't say they're lying, per se, just that it's not 100% true. If you use PopOS with an X1 Extreme then almost all of those features work out of the box. On another OS they may not though. A good portion of what OP is describing require some applications present (and configured) in the userland, just having drivers isn't enough. The bit about grub I'm not sure about, but I believe it; that said grub is always a YMMV situation in my experience.
Have you used it without the dock? Because my experience with daily driving Linux at work for 10+ years with Thinkpads has been the complete opposite, with the exception of NVidia's driver garbage (which is just a problem with NVidia generally).
My current work system is a P53 that has an Nvidia GPU though and it's been working very very well for me through updates and the like via dkms.
The only other problem on that list I've encountered was within the first month or so after buying my T14s suspend support was a problem.
That's why I bought the $400 official Lenovo dock.
Unfortunately, I can't do my daily work without the dock. (at least not without having to introduce numerous dongles and USB hubs, which may cause more issues)
I think most of the praise on Thinkpads comes from older versions, from IBM and the first Lenovos. I have an X220, and even though it's quite outdated hardware for today's world, it is still a very capable machine.
The most recent laptops are very good, but their support of linux is lacking compared with the older ones. As a rule of thumb, I try to find the model page in arch wiki before any purchase, it should list most of the common problems and how to fix them (if they are fixable at all, your X1-Extreme page for example[1]).
I have a Zephyrus G15 with 5800u/RTX3080/40GB/3TB and with the 5.15 kernel it works flawlessly on Linux Mint. I use it more often than MBP these days. The only drawback is no DisplayPort for VR.
Last time I got a new laptop, I simply ordered a Lenovo Thinkpad (X1 Carbon, not Extreme) with Linux pre-installed. I am past where I want to tinker to get the hardware and software working together, but do prefer Linux as my daily driver. I haven't had any issues with it, but I also got a relatively simple setup. I've ordered a Linux pre-installed Dell in the past with similar fine results.
Thank you for sharing; these comments make me pause.
At work, RHEL on Thinkpad is one of the standard offerings, and has continued to be across many generations. EVERYTHING works. I've had a work-provided RHEL Thinkpad (T450) which was smooth and seamless, as have my colleagues (most of them chose X1 variations, some T480, some with the newer T14).
I have a large number of Thinkpads at home and I want to install Linux on some of them, but comments like these make me wonder how much extra work and special juice our IT department had to commit in order to make it happen - and what my own experience would be in real world.
Older (1/2 years) models will generally have good support. In my experience you start running into issues when you purchase the latest gen and kernel support hasn’t yet caught up (e.g. 12th gen Intel processors)
I cannot confirm any of this, and I am a complete noob regarding Linux. I don't have a 4k screen, and the Intel GPU is deactivated since day one anyway, so I can't say anything about using both GPUs in parallel. Sleep and power saving works just fine, firmware updates work without interference from my side. I use Nvidia proprietary drivers. Thunderbolt and external screens work without trouble. And battery life is good, maybe a little worse then under Windows, but that rather feels like minutes and not hours. Max I get out is just a little over 4 hours of Civ VI. Leaving it in sleep depletes the battery in the course of 3 days, more or less.
> Maybe I could solve some of this stuff if I'd spend some time on it, I don't know. I do know that as long as I run Linux as my daily driver, my next laptop won't be a Lenovo.
Could not agree more. I was using mac's for a decade prior to buying thinkpad X1E a couple years ago. It's been an absolute disaster and I now loath them. Multiple years after purchase, the only distro I could find that even half works is Fedora.
Docking is worse, even under windows. So the dock was working under linux for a while but as a last week it's completely non-functional, no usb, no display. Under windows, probably 25% of the time the USB devices don't function on startup, and have to be unplugged and plugged back in. I was trying to run a monitor with hdmi and it would half the time not wake up. Switched to display port and it's a little better but still problematic. And if your computer goes to sleep, it's 5-10 minutes of trying to wake and often requires hard power cycle to come back. I had to set the computer to sleep only after 2 hour or so. This is with all firmware and os updates applied.
In the future, will be be selling these hot messes, and moving to a framework laptop. Doubtful I every buy another thinkpad, I have many fond memories of my first couple of IBM based thinkpads those were awesome machines.
> ACPI, power management, and UEFI are consistently causing problems.
> Suspend on lid close is unpredictable.
Yeah, same experience here. The worst part is I can't even figure out how to debug this stuff. No idea where things are going wrong. I've gotten as far as dumping ACPI tables and disassembling some of its code but I can't find anything relevant.
What is Windows doing that Linux isn't? It can't be so insanely difficult, can it?
> The dual-GPU (Intel and nVidia) situation is unworkable under Linux.
Yup. Gotta choose one of them, can't use hybrid graphics.
> The battery life under Linux is about half of what you can expect from Windows.
I think it's due to power management issues, especially the dGPU which can't be turned off due to lack of hybrid graphics. On my laptop I got great battery life after disabling the GPU in the firmware settings.
Also, pretty much everything is GPU accelerated nowadays. Even terminal emulators. Kitty for example will cause massive power usage spikes.
I have run into issues when the hardware is very recent, but usually have a “works out of the box” experience if the model has been out more than 6-12mo. This often coincides with good deals on those models since Lenovo refreshes every 6-12mo and has sales to clear out the prior year’s inventory.
I prefer the trackpoint honestly. I get many people don't like it, but for me the trackpad is a nuisance and I have it disabled.
The reason is that I almost never use my laptop on a table, and the trackpoint makes it more comfortable, as you don't have to move your hand between the keyboard and down so much.
I guess is an adquired taste, but it's one of these things that keep me in thinkpads.
I agree but most developers I know use a laptop purely as a desktop machine with a mouse / external trackpad and keyboard attached to it. It might not be as big of a selling point as you make it to be for many people.
Agreed, the only good trackpad is the one by that company that can simulate different materials, touch depths and types of resistance through ultrasound. The trackpad themselves are tiny and super expensive, but it's the best trackpad you can possibly buy.
Unless you mean Apple. I don't get the obsession with Apple's trackpads. My experience with them hasn't been great. They do integrate very nicely with the OS and they are pretty nice and big, but I don't really see or feel the difference between a Thinkpad or a Probook with Windows precision drivers and a Macbook.
What an odd entry. Looking at the specs, this is one horrible device. What is the point of promoting this old brick featuring one of the worst CPUs ever released? If you're in the Intel camp, there are much better choices using 12th gen processors
My slick 5800h Lenovo laptop also runs Linux but is faster, lighter, cuter, and simply better in every respect. Battery lasts over 15 hours easily, depending on display brightness.
Seriously, I can't stress enough how bad this specific hardware is.
I have a model from this series. I find the trackpad to work great and I don't see the problem the author is having with it. Dragging works just fine, assuming you use the correct drag gesture (quick double tap, then drag, like usual).
Compatibility wise, my experience has been slowly degrading. I've had to force the Intel GPU driver to use DRI 2 or X11 wouldn't work (this might have something to do with the manual config in the sound system I needed to get the sound working when I bought the laptop because Intel hadn't released proper drivers yet).
I'd use Wayland, but that just doesn't work with the Nvidia GPU (even though it should in modern drivers). A recent kernel update broke sleep for me, it now no longer goes to sleep and immediately wakes up.
I also occasionally get full system freezes whenever GDM tries to load the login screen, either on boot or when switching users. Those have been becoming more rare lately but it's still happening every now and then. Just a black screen, the computer slowly heating up and nothing.
Lastly, for firmware updates you just need to boot Windows every now and then. Some firmware updates come through fwupdmgr, but others need to be installed manually or through a Windows install.
Perhaps I need a reinstall Linux, perhaps I need to switch distros. It works fine with it works: touchpad is nice and responsive, has full multi finger gesture support in Wayland, the keyboard is good and the palm rejection is a pain when trying to game on the touchpad but it works great for normal typing. I've also found it a lot quieter and longer lasting on Linux than on Windows, where the CPU and GPU either underclock dramatically or the fan spins up constantly.
Honest question: Have you ever used a MacBook trackpad long term?
From my experience with Dell XPS/Precision, Lenovo Thinkpads, IBM Thinkpads, and finally MacBooks, the MacBooks are far ahead.
The Thinkpads trackpad are way too small, and Dell's are now days large enough but too imprecise. Both the Dell ones will sometimes trigger a click when typing on the keyboard since the trackpad is too sensitive.
I've tried them every time someone with a Macbook came over and told me I have to try the touchpad because it's the best thing since sliced bread. It's definitely a big touchpad, but that's about all I can say about it. It's definitely not worth the extra spend on Apple hardware and neither is it worth dealing with macOS. It's not a bad touchpad at all, it's just unremarkable in the higher end laptop space.
I'll agree that they used to be exceptionally good before the Windows 10 precision drivers became widespread, though. Those made a huge difference in the PC world, for Windows and Linux support, and it took the industry many years to get to that level.
Going by the current state of my touchpad, I use about 60% of the area of my current touchpad so honestly I'm fine with the size on my Thinkpad P1 gen3. The HP Probook I had before that (which, to be fair, is eight years old now) definitely had a touchpad that was too small.
Apple also seems to be the only company that produces a decent external touchpad, which is irritating. I feel like I'm more productive with a touchpad but finding an affordable touchpad with decent reviews is nearly impossible, except for Apple's magic trackpad. The best alternatives seem to be Chinese clones from Aliexpress but I don't feel like writing my own drivers to get those to work well with Linux.
I think the summary of this laptop would have been entirely different had the author gotten one with the nvidia gpu. As a user of that machine, the inability to disable the nvidia gpu and drive external monitors is IMHO a deal breaker (the firmware only allows one to disable the iGPU too).
That is because its only recently that nouveau has stabilized sufficiently that it tends to work in the common cases on that platform. If your not running a bleeding edge distro/kernel getting random monitors connected via the onboard HDMI or TB3/TB4 docks are pretty much out of the question. Even then, its hit/miss with the latest 5.17+ kernels. The problem are so numerous that they aren't worth going over, but the end result is that for most people the only way to get it working (say with a couple monitors plugged into the TB4 dock) is to use the proprietary nvidia drivers. Which wouldn't be so bad, but that also means not having secure boot, and hibernate/standby/etc will also have issues.
Bottom line, for linux unless you _REALLY_ need the nvidia get it without.
> Lenovo is famous for their TrackPoint (that little red thing on the keyboard), but I am not sure if I’ll take the time to learn using it. Some say it’s far more precise and comfortable as you don’t have to lift your fingers from the keyboard. I might give it a shot sometime.
Why buy a ThinkPad if you don't use its most important selling point?
The rest of the laptop, is the obvious, but clear answer.
I bought a couple of ThinkPads because they're well tested on Linux, have the best non-mechanical keyboard on a laptop that I know of (even after Lenovo), and have a decent build.
I can't stand using the TrackPoint despite having tried a few times, but my workflow relies more on a keyboard and any decent scrolling device, for which two-finger scroll on the touchpad more than suffices.
They’re still one of the better options if you want a powerful laptop (read: desktop replacement) to run Linux on. The only competitive option is Dell Precision series (imo).
I used to be really good at using that. Even played FPS games using just the TrackPoint and laptop keyboard. I have had one on nearly every laptop I owned (OmniBooks, later Elitebooks and ZBooks) but kinda stopped using it and now it feels really awkward.
I've also switched from a MacBook to a T14 Gen 1 about a year ago and the TrackPoint is the one problem I struggle with on Linux.
On Windows, it's buttery smooth and a joy to use. On Linux, the refresh rate tops out at 80 Hz, and if you so much as lightly touch the touchpad with your palm, it goes further down to ~45 Hz for the next few seconds. All of this makes for a very rough, jerky and imprecise movement.
I really want to use Linux on my T14, but this problem just makes the experience a pain. I really wonder if everybody recommending using TrackPoint and running Linux have somehow solved this issue?
I don't use the trackpad at all so I don't have that problem. :)
You could try playing around with the settings in /sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/. The file "sensitivity" or "rate" might be what you're looking for.
Sadly, I've tried it all. It seems that the 80Hz cap is enforced by the kernel PS/2 driver, for whatever reason, and is shared between the touchpad and the TrackPoint since they are on the same bus. I can only imagine drivers under Windows employ some proprietary trickery to get around that limitation.
I like the Trackpoint, but beware. I used an old 760 years ago with OpenBSD, and after many months of using the Trackpoint, my pointer finger started to have RSI issues.
(Similarly, I used a thumb trackball for a long time, and eventually my thumb started to have issues as well.)
For occasional use, these things are great. Long term under heavy use, I have my doubts. It's always better to use the bigger muscles and joints if you can.
I've been using the Trackpoint for almost 20 years now and I never had any problems with it. Not exclusively though, for desktop applications I still use a mouse.
But for couch surfing at home I haven't used a mouse in years.
I'm sure it's very dependent on each person. Some people get tennis elbow, some don't.
The Thinkpad 760 I had only had a Trackpoint, so when I was using it as my main machine, I used it 8-ish hours a day. The last joint in my pointer finger was pretty sore by the time I stopped using it.
Would have been more interesting if the review covered anything about the actual experience of Linux on this rig other than "works". In particular, rough edges that a long-time Linux user might expect such as suspend/resume reliability, backlight control, peripheral power management w.r.t. bluetooth, webcam, fingerprint reader, nvme device, sound codec, etc, whether Linux is able to continue if a usb-c display is removed while the machine is suspended, etc. For the most part I do expect many of these things to work out of the box on Thinkpad X-series machines but you never know, and power management in particular has often been a mess. The author's claims about battery life are so poor that I suspect power management is not really optimal on their machine, either.
I've been holding off on purchasing a new Lenovo laptop. Shortly Lenovo will start shipping latops with the new generation AMD Ryzen mobile chips that have RDNA 2 GPUs. [0][1] This is a real game changer.
The amount of power and open source VULKAN friendliness is going to be incredible.
I look forward to being able to do container work, and emulate Gamecube games all on a single Linux machine.
I have an AMD Thinkpad (X13 AMD 2nd gen) and it's one of the most frustrating devices I've had in years. Linux support is superficially fine, but in continuous use lots of tiny, annoying incompatibilities (and sometimes pretty significant impairments) show up.
There's a set of known hardware issues (e.g. unable to resume from suspend, USB ports stop working until hardware reset is performed through the pinhole, ...) and I've been experiencing _all_ of them regularly. Never had these kinds of issues with an Intel machine (as they have much more battle-tested hardware).
I'd recommend to only buy an AMD laptop if you have a fallback and can afford to treat it more as a tinkering toy type thing. Note that some of the hardware issues also affect other OSes than Linux.
Personally I'm getting rid of this thing in favour of an Intel machine again.
Seconded. As much as I like rooting for the underdog and was really hyped by AMDs success after so many years of failure, my laptops always have been and will continue to be Intel based. I actually tried a few times, last time with second gen Ryzen, and as the parent comment says, it's always random little things that sometimes don't work.
That's funny. I have a Thinkpad P14s for work and an HP x360 for personal use which are both running Linux with AMD. They have the best Linux support I've ever seen. The graphics drivers are especially nice, fast and bug free. I can't image ever going back to Intel.
The only thing that bothers me is that lack of S3 sleep on the HP but that was a choice by HP and can the ACPI tables can be patched in the BIOS.
Same here! With Intel-based Thinkpads, especially X1 Yoga Gen 6, frequent issues in Linux. But Yoga Slim 7 with 4800U and afterwards P14s Gen 2 with 5850U, amazing experience, and the latter is the best laptop overall I ever had (including MPB 14 that I'm using now).
You're not alone -- I recently had a heck of a time trying to get a T14s AMD 2nd gen to work well in Linux (mostly same CPU/chipset/hardware as your X13).
I never got wakeup from S3 suspend to work, it just froze; wakeup from S0ix actually worked ok for a while with a recent kernel (5.16 iirc), with a random kernel commandline addition (iommu=pt) to avoid a random 14-second pause on lid open (always exactly 14 seconds!). But wireless was still flaky on wakeup.
I played a bunch with powertop and different settings to try to get reasonable efficiency. Tried getting hardware video decode to work with YouTube/Firefox (vdpau / va-api); it sort of did, except when it crashed.
Then one day a week into the adventure, it just stopped waking up from suspend, after I-don't-know-what changed. Needed a hardware reset each time I opened the lid. I returned the laptop and bought an M1 Air instead; I love my Thinkpads and open systems but I also love good engineering.
System integration / QA / getting quality polished firmware is an underappreciated art it seems!
same. i just set up a P14s Gen 2 AMD (with 4k display, ryzen 7 pro 5850u, 48GB ram) and after swapping out the garbage wifi/bluetooth module for an Intel 210 and the NVME for a 980 Pro this machine is excellent with EndeavourOS/KDE (5.17 kernel with AMD p-state support).
the only tweaks i've had to make are
1. enabling bluetooth service to autostart (disabled by default by distro for security)
2. installing the amdgpu vaapi drivers to get hardware video decoding in MPV and tweak some Chromium flags to get hardware video decode on Youtube, etc.
the only "issue" i've run into is getting TRIM to be re-detected properly for UASP-capable USB storage devices [0], but it's so minor that no one except me will notice :). it's not a ThinkPad problem, but likely something in linux's udev.
i dont use the fingerprint sensor, TPM or secure boot, so cant say anything about those.
(supposedly switching suspend mode to linux in bios helps, too)
I'm touting everywhere how P14s Gen 2 AMD is the best laptop I ever had - performance, portability, silent, ports, battery, keyboard...Even compared to the MBP 14 I'm using now, I'm missing it, and Linux, while I doubt I would miss anything from MBP if I switched back, even though it's objectively great.
the 4k panel is much better than the 2k/QHD IPS one i have on my previous T480s, and that one is better than all previous ThinkPad IPS panels! the colors are much better and actually pre-calibrated. still not OLED or Mac, but for a non-touch/matte ThinkPad display, it's definitely the best i've used so far.
This one could be a better value compare to the Intel one, if it provides support for Thunderbolt 3 eGPUs.
One downside I can think of is that T14s usually only comes with soldered on RAMs, no DIMM slot, meaning it's less upgradable (say to 64G of RAM). That's why I'm waiting for a new AMD T14 which should come with a DIMM slot and hopefully USB4. And if Lenovo failed to deliver the T14 that I want, then I'll probably just get an E14/old-style XPS13. I don't really need cellular connectivity, fingerprint scanner and backlit keyboard anyway :-\
Fwiw, i have a Thinkpad x395 with AMD Apu. It's mostly nice, but there are GPU driver issues that have been unsolved for almost 3 years now with that generation of ThinkPads (0). Let's hope such issues are sorted out for newer models
With such issues, don't expect Ubuntu to fix it while staying at the same kernel version. Instead, either try their HWE-stacks or upgrade to the intermediate non-LTS releases.
Fedora, for example, will always use the latest upstream kernel while keeping the rest of the packages reasonably stable. Usually, this plays nicer with new hardware.
Yeah Fedora is my go-to for anything business related because of this. In my experience it's the best mix of platform stability while still getting the good stuff that gets added to the kernel on a regular basis.
What gave the impression that I stay with lots releases? New kernels,.distro releases, different amdgpu ppas.... I've tried a lot of stuff, but these errors don't go away
I'm also waiting for the X13 Gen3 AMD becoming available, with RNDA2. Shall work well with Archlinux, enough performance for programming (GCC), playing (CSGO) and very portable. A lot better in a backpack on a roadbike or while traveling (plane, train).
Using privately a X220 and begin mobile with it is just remains a nice device. Standard keyboard, standard performance and pleasure to carry around without worries.
PS: I'm surprised that Lenovo still don't give users a "quick start manual" explaining how to use the TrackPoint. It is a game changer for everyone capable of touch-typing. Why leave a good keyboard when your fingertips can remain there? I don't blame the users here. Apple contrary uses video advertisements as hidden "introducton guide" to buyers. Remember when IBM just didn't build in TrackPads? The area was used a palm-rest.
I have 2. Lenovo Legion 7 with aand AND cpu. And a ThinkPad X1 Extreme gen 1. I’m hoping new job I can get the X1 Extreme gen 5 cos I love the 16:10 screen.
Yep, that's what I'm also looking for. I bought the Thinkpad E14 Gen3 not because it was the best I could afford but because it was the best Thinkpad with AMD chips in it. I'd happily chip in +1000 euros for a higher build quality laptop with similar stuff inside.
Something significant has to happen before I buy another Intel/Nvidia combo ever again. I'd much rather suffer the mediocre OS and go to Apple.
Why does GPU get a green dot (ie: "good") if the reviewer opted for the non-NVIDIA model and doesn't require GPU for their workload? The biggest issue I had with the Gen2 (aside from the atrocious trackpad) was the fact that with the GPU enabled, battery life was miserable, with it disabled HDMI didn't work (no external monitor!) and switching modes required a restart of Xorg, unless you spend a week trying to figure out arcane bullshittery. I say this as a Linux veteran who currently runs MX Linux on a MacBook pro 2015: the gen2 was terrible for me.
Ethernet ports can be a bit dangerous though - trip on that cable, and you end up ripping the entire port out of the motherboard. I've done that once on a iBook G4 in 2003 or 2004. Could never get the port soldered back on.
Have used T42, T500, T440p, X1E gen2 throughout the years, all with versions of Fedora.
Most things just work.
The X1E gen2 needed a bit work to curb (idle) power consumption. The SD card reader would prevent the CPU package from entering C10, and the fans were always running even when the machine was not warm.
I have the version with the NVidia dedicated GPU, which works pretty well. It's off most of the time, and is only turned on when needed.
I have one of these with a Nvidia GPU and my complaint is that the fan runs hard all the time while driving a pair of 4K displays (one HDMI and one USBC.) Drives me nuts.
Whats wrong with 15.6" FHD IPS displays ? I thought the optimum display chart looked something like FHD 1080P till 24", 2k resolution from 27"-32", and 4K for anything bigger than 32". I have a 24" FHD monitor, unless I look too closely and focus on the screen during coding I don't usually see any pixels. Hating on a FHD 15.6" sounds like a first world problem to me :P
FHD displays need pixel perfect rendering to look really good and sharp. People who buy 1440p or 4k displays are ultimately compensating for a poor quality rendering pipeline (a very real issue on MacOS) that just blurs everything to near-unreadability.
In my opinion anything higher resolution on a screen that size is just wasted GPU power. The author mainly uses the laptop on a stand, attached to a monitor, from what I can tell from the pictures so they're likely even further away from the screen than normal laptop users.
I have approximately 0.75 / 0.50 diopter, which is fairly mild for age 40. I agree that I feel anything above 1080P resolution for laptop screen is wasted GPU and wasted battery. It feels like a race between battery improvement and hungrier resolutions that's not working out in my favour :-/
I had to chime in that, if 14" vs 15.6" is not a deal breaker, P14s Gen 2 with Ryzen 5850U, 32GB RAM and integrated GPU is the most performant, silent, portable and generally capable laptop I ever had (and I've changed a lot).
I got greedy and switched to a MBP 14 with M1 Pro, which is also great, but almost everything (speakers and trackpad excepted) on P14s was either on par or even better (perf, ports, weight, noise, keyboard, build, screen, battery...). MBP is excellent, but I miss my Arch setup a lot and don't think I would miss anything from the MBP actually if I switched back.
I know Lenovo is going downwards with Thinkpad line, but P series seems to still hold well - for now at least :/
I hope the P14s Gen 2 is better than Gen 1, because that's the worst device I've ever owned (by a very wide margin). It constantly overheats, the CPU throttles down, and it becomes slower than my now ancient x230 ...
Are you referring to an AMD-based model? I had a Yoga Slim 7 with 4700U and P14s Gen 2 with 5850U and both were flawless in terms of performance, thermals and noise
I was referring to the intel i7 version, in my neck of the woods the AMD models are hard to get and usually can't be customized (for whatever weird reason).
Trackpad and screen are the only real things I wish they would improve. Remove the buttons, make it wider and go from the base up to the keys. Whatever nostalgia people get out of the Thinkpad it's not it's trackpad...it's the nub you had to use because of how bad the trackpad has always been.
I think for a laptop where you are paying for dedicated GPUs you should get an option for a 4k ips screen. It makes text so clear and crisp and really doesn't drag down the performance on a modern chipset
Keyboard is excellent, not old school X or P good, but it's better than any other keyboard you are going to find on a laptop sold now.
I had a T15g and my only regret was getting the anti glare display. The matte cover just looks like crap compared to a glossy display. I believe Lenovo calls the non-matte display "anti-reflective".
I noted it is on a stand. There are better stand which is more flexible, which adjust the angle of the screen and keyboard and height. I found it is making use of portable great.
Wonder whether it is ease to use usb to try it on. Got my wife one port broken thinkpad. The windows subsystem sort of work. But it is hard to use x-windows.
I am running Arch Linux with Kernel 5.17.5-arch1-1. The speakers do work fine on Windows but for some reason I cannot get them both to work in Linux? Whatever settings I do using Arch's wiki, I can get everything working fine with external speakers, Bluetooth speakers, headphones, but just not the right-sided speaker. Not sure if anyone has the same issue.
I'd love to buy a new Thinkpad But it doesn't exist.
Thick design: 15 inch 4k, backlit full keyboard, replacable big battery, replacable ECC ram, gpu or igpu but no Nvidia(swaywm on nixos), 2 ssds (zfs mirror), ports: rj45, usb-A and usb-c at all sides(left/back/right), hdmi
No need for webcam, fingerprintreader nor touchpad(trackpoint with 3 buttons is king)
And yes, it can be thick/heavy. If I need it light. I'll use a smartphone...
Privacy hardware buttons would be a bonus, as is open firmware.
This is a bit like asking "who still uses keyboard shortcuts?"
After all, there is really no reason that anyone using Paint in Windows would ever type Alt+F and then A when they want to do a Save As...
Right? Sure, it worked for the last 30 years. But come on, who ever would type Alt+F and A? It has to be less than 1% of all the Windows users out there. And our telemetry proves it!
If you have a billion Windows users, and you rewrite Paint - as Microsoft did in Windows 11 - so it no longer knows the keyboard shortcuts that 1% of your users rely on, no big deal. You've only inconvenienced ten million of your users.
Or you hit Alt+F4 on Paint and you have an unsaved image. There is a nice dialog that asks "Do you want to save your work?" And there is a really common case where you were just using Paint as a scratchpad and you would like to type Alt+N here to say "no worries, I was just fooling around."
This dialog used to read "Yes | No | Cancel". And Alt+N let you say "No".
In later days, the dialog changed to "Yes | Don't save | Cancel". But with a clever trick, Microsoft made the "n" in "Don't save" the shortcut key. So even with the updated and much more clear wording, your Alt+N still worked!
Until Windows 11, where this code was all rewritten by people who never knew that anyone ever used these keyboard shortcuts.
The TrackPoint may be something like this. Those of us who insist on it may be small in number. But if it is ever removed, then the one reason why we will only buy ThinkPads is gone. We may as well get a Dell or an HP or a Mac M1 or whatever.
Thanks for pointing that out. The Windows 11 dialog does not take any keyboard shortucts. I can't even use Enter or Escape, or switch between the options using arrow keys. This has to be a bug, right. Right?
I think it is literally impossible to exit the program without a mouse, after you did something that requires saving.
> Thanks for pointing that out. The Windows 11 dialog does not take any keyboard shortucts. I can't even use Enter or Escape, or switch between the options using arrow keys. This has to be a bug, right. Right?
Lately I've been thinking of finally upgrading Windows 11 since they keep pushing untimely prompts to do so more and more frequently, but reading this makes me glad I've hold off. If they still have major bugs like that, I'll wait another year or two before considering it again.
>>We may as well get a Dell or an HP or a Mac M1 or whatever.
I agree with everything you say; note though that power-user oriented versions of HP & Dell laptops do come with the nub, or at least they did until recently (I've used both a Dell & HP with a nub as recently a ~18 months ago; it's possible in the ever-growing Applefication of the world [shudder], they've been discontinued). I think even some Toshibas have it - generally it'd be in whatever the brands consider their "Road-warrior" models :-> . You see a LOT more of them used on the airplanes of business corridors (e.g. Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal) than anywhere else :).
> The TrackPoint may be something like this. Those of us who insist on it may be small in number. But if it is ever removed, then the one reason why we will only buy ThinkPads is gone. We may as well get a Dell or an HP or a Mac M1 or whatever.
You could buy Dell or HP with trackpoint already years ago. Not sure the current state, but trackpoint is not ThinkPad exclusive feature.
> This is a bit like asking "who still uses keyboard shortcuts?"
No, it was a good-faith question of who finds it useful (for what type of work) these days. I think it's a fair question since every other manufacturer has settled on trackpads. As context, I added that I, personally, find it ruins my screen on an otherwise good laptop.
Why the rant about keyboard shortcuts? The only answer you gave to my question was essentially, "over my dead body." No explanation that would help me understand you.
It does not appear to be a good-faith question or at least there does not appear to be a true effort to understand it. FWIW, I use pointing stick and the poster's analogy is the one I wish I could've used for decade - it is friendly and detailed and perfectly represents my use case and feelings (and is much better explanation than my own sibling comment, which was admittedly more of a "over my dead body" :). Like keyboard shortcuts for those who use them, it has more of a learning curve but (we feel) is ultimately a much faster, more efficient and effective method of doing things. You don't have to agree, it may not be for everyone - as I mentioned in sibling response, my wife and I will forever use our laptops differently, and that's OK!
(if we want to start a parallel religious war, let's talk about 3.5mm on phones too! :> )
>> every other manufacturer has settled on trackpads
Note that at various points, until very recently, Dell, HP, Toshiba etc all had power-user oriented models with pointing sticks. If they've gotten rid of them in the last year or two, that is indeed a sad news for many of us - it was never a "either/or" proposition. There's already Apple and many knock-off for those who prefer it; I hope that a laptop for power-users still has a profitable niche :-/
Thank you for providing a useful answer, despite not believing it was posted in good faith. You might be right about other producers still making sticks. I haven't been in the market for a few years.
What should I have done differently to make it appear as a true effort to understand?
I'm a random stranger on the internet, so with no intent on telling you how to live or interact :), My own limited biased subjective 0.0005 cents:
1. Original question: "Who's still using this?" is direct and to the point; I grok it. But note that some people in many contexts may interpret it... aggressive. Human mind fills in detail in blunt / short sentences. Politeness in some cases is filling in those blanks pre-emptively. Uncharitable reading of your question would fill in the blanks in "Who's still using this?" as "WHO is still using this?" expanded to "WHO is still using this???" expanded to "WHO is stupid enough to still be using this???". They/We would be wrong, but be cognizant of good and bad interpretations of writing.
But that's very minor and extremely audience specific. Bigger point:
2. Charitable reading. This is such a hard thing to do for all of us, especially on the interwebs, especially when there's even a minor difference opinion. I thoroughly, genuinely, believe that the keyboard-shortcut poster provided best possible explanation and tried very heard to type it up and come up with meaningful analogy. I will totally steal it! :) When you read it / interpreted it as a rant / over-my-dead-body, I in turn did not feel you gave them a charitable reading, which subconsciously meant I did not give you a charitable reading either.
So what I think would've made it appear as a true effort to understand, would've been... making a true effort to understand - reading the keyboard shortcut post with a mindset of "what information can I gleam from this / what can I learn / which insight can I take from this". Which, FWIW, is an approach that I think is phenomenally useful in life, I'm actively working on myself, and am successful some small percentage of time :D
(again, not claiming some useful insight, but since you asked, my 100 Croatian Lipa :). All the best!
Thank you. I see Stratoscope responded as well, so I'll keep this short. (again :)
Re-read the post. The original conclusion was:
> The TrackPoint may be something like this. Those of us who insist on it may be small in number. But if it is ever removed, then the one reason why we will only buy ThinkPads is gone. We may as well get a Dell or an HP or a Mac M1 or whatever.
It says nothing of who "those of us" are (the explicit question) other than a cyclical "those who use TrackPoints." And it doesn't at all answer why (the implicit question.)
So I genuinely couldn't find any information related to my question. Since the (long) text was about keyboard rather than pointing device, it also felt very... out of scope. Hence my conclusion: classifying it as a related rant. Granted, I could have just ignored it. Not sure why I replied, TBH.
I guess you're telling me to not gatekeep and try to keep replies on track. Instead, go with the flow. Fair enough. ;)
I think a few posts went on to eventually answer factually what we love about trackpoint - keeping hands on home row, preciseness, speed, high skill ceiling, etc.
But I also think the keyboard shortcut analogy, while indeed not talking about TrackPoint itself, is actually the most useful post for the goal of understanding it: One may never agree about usefulness of TrackPoint, but that analogy helps with understanding that "There's a small minority of power users for whom this is a force multiplier and who feel very strongly about the optimization it allows them" :)
You are right, my rant about keyboard shortcuts was not really related to your question and did not answer it. So with apologies for my rather tangential analogy, let me explain how I got there.
I recently read a ThinkPad review where the author said something like "Why does Lenovo insist in keeping this stupid red nubbin when nobody uses it?" In other words, "I don't use it, so I can't imagine that anyone else would."
I misinterpreted your question as being in that same vein.
Others have given some more direct answers, but let me add mine. As a touch typist, the TrackPoint is the only pointing device that is directly available with my fingers on the home row.
With a touchpad, and especially with a mouse, you have to be in "typing mode" or "pointing and clicking mode". You can't intermix the two modes seamlessly, as you can with the TrackPoint.
Another advantage is the presence of physical mouse buttons. Some other laptops do have these, but they seem to have fallen out of favor to allow a bigger touchpad. The physical buttons let you position the mouse pointer and then click without any chance of the pointer drifting a few pixels while you click.
I also really appreciate your followup question, "What should I have done differently to make it appear as a true effort to understand?"
My suggestion there would perhaps be along these lines: "I don't use the TrackPoint and in fact I removed the cap because it was leaving marks on my screen. But I'm curious to hear from those who use it. What do you like about it?"
In any case, thank you for stimulating an interesting discussion!
p.s. Regarding the screen, I think some of the older ThinkPads may have been more susceptible to this. I also wonder if the screen marking may be due to putting the ThinkPad in a backpack where other objects put pressure in the middle of the lid. I generally carry two ThinkPads in my backpack, my personal and work machines, and I pack them with the tops facing each other and a cotton dishtowel in between. I need a towel anyway to clean the screens and my eyeglasses, and putting the towel between the two tops prevents them from scratching each other. This way the bases of the machines are facing out, and these are much more robust than the lids.
Thank you for the follow-up! Very thorough. Sorry if I was being rude.
I do use the mouse buttons on occasion. I can't actually remember the last time I used the trackpoint. I did in some cases, but the annoyance over the dirty screen became too much and it had to go. ;)
Re. lid pressure, that will certainly make it worse, but the T460s I use at home rarely goes outdoors, so I don't think that's the cause. I see dirt build-up on the screen even now that the trackpoint is below the keys, so there's probably finger oils rubbing off the keys as well. Oh, and maybe using the rubber a lot will flatten it so rubbing is less of a problem.
> My suggestion there would perhaps be along these lines
Thanks. I still find it amusing that politness and humbleness is not the implied default, but something that needs to be made explicit every time. I should have taken the time to write something longer. :\ Next time.
I'm using it since +20 years and many ThinkPads (had one Dell with a trackpoint in the early 2000s) - it's the thing why I'm staying with ThinkPads. If you are touch-typing, working on the go, in rough environment, then there is nothing better. Last 3 and half years I had X1E Gen1, was the worst ThinkPad experience of all the ThinkPads that I ever had (extremely hot, bad Linux support, loud, worst ever battery life, mirror display) - and the 1st ThinkPad in 20+ years that just stopped working after 3.5 years. Now I have the P1 Gen4, without Nvidia, the QXGA resolution and matte screen - and I love it. Was afraid because the key travel, got less, but I actually have to say that I prefer it compared to the previous ThinkPad, and it's less noisy when typing.
However I have to say that none of the ThinkPad trackpoints match the easiness and the precision of the Tex Shinobi external keyboard - it's just delightful how it feels, though, typing on it is very loud.
> Me; it's far superior to anything outside of a mouse.
I used to love the track point - it felt so efficient to have my pointing device right on the home row of the keyboard.
Eventually I realised it was the cause of some pretty bad RSI (or something) in my index finger. Now I have to remove the plastic cap to stop myself from using it.
I can see that happening. Interestingly though, while I'm a right handed person and use mouse with my right hand, I use the trackpoint with my left hand! It actually thus helps prevent RSI for me - I get to mix it up and switch my hands :). I also find that it's a very different position - I think stretching right thumb to hit left button is harder than using left thumb to hit left button, which is just naturally resting there (understanding of course these can be remapped:).
Yes. With some important asterisks depending on person, usage and preferences :). Let's say it's far better FOR ME :->.
I really like sibling comment's comparison with Keyboard shortcuts. Keyboard shortcuts don't make mouse or touch screen wrong or bad; some of us just prefer them and find them more efficient and effective.
Using trackpad disrupts my flow whereas trackpoint is embedded on the home row. Further, I am much faster and more precise on trackpoint. I have never on any machine achieved easy effortless pixel-perfect precision on a trackpad, and have never found a way to quickly in a single motion repeatedly reach the extreme buttons/locations I want to. Now, I'm a trackpad newbie, but watching other trackpad proponents use their laptop has only confirmed my feeling. It looks easy but slow.
This is not to say there aren't people out there who use trackpad quickly and efficiently; I very much assume there are, plenty! I just have not witnessed them.
My feeling therefore, possibly incorrect, is that trackpad and trackpoint fulfill different purposes: Trackpoint is a high-learning curve, high-skill ceiling option that is ultimately more efficient for some. Trackpad has FAR lower learning curve and is much easier to start using, and is right choice for majority of casual users or those who don't prioritize input efficiency - but it feels like it plateaus earlier, or at least those in my group of family / friends / co-workers plateau with it far sooner.
It is the only thing that prevents me of getting any other laptops. Three mouse buttons and the trackpoint right next to the keyboard is the perfect way of using a laptop for me.
It's the reason I'm locked into ThinkPads and never buy other laptops, even if I might prefer them in other respects. It's immensely better (for me) than a trackpad. Faster, less tiring and more precise. To the point that for most task, I won't ever bother to take the mouse out of the bag.
Ah, thanks. I have the opposite reaction. It's too stiff, so my finger tip gets tired after a while. The friction against the pad is also tiring, but not as badly.
I sorely miss it since switching from ThinkPad to MS Surface a few years ago. I almost always use a mouse, even on the go, as TrackPads just don't work for me, the need to keep my fingers raised produces discomfort quite quickly. The TrackPoint is one of the reasons I'm considering a ThinkPad again.
I love the nipple. I'll take it over any touchpad and for some weird reason I end up faster with it when aiming for small elements, even though it's completely counterintuitive.
Selection bias: Lenovo is selling some (I bet a fair one) percentage of laptops precisely because they have the trackpoint. Remove it and lose even only one million customers forever? Why?
FWIW: I will literally not use a laptop without it. It does have a learning curve, but after you've gone through it, watching people use trackpads is pa-a-ainful. Like being a touch typist and watching somebody finger peck while staring at the keyboard at 20WPM - you just want to take over and get it done :D . Yes, trackpad has a minimal learning curve, but it plateaus so early.
Especially in small format computers - it actually really bothers me that we are sacrificing keyboard quality, size, and standardized layout, for this gigantic yet inefficient ever-growing trackpad (and thus killing the home/end/pgup/pgdwn section, arrows, functional row, etc), when the nub has minimal foot print and would allow full keyboard and practical design even on smallest laptops.
But it's all about different approaches. If able, I will always prefer an ergonomic keyboard, ergonomic mouse, large mousepad, and a couple of large monitors when working. My wife on the other hand will happily use 13" laptop with trackpad in awful position on the couch for hours! We have different priorities and preferences and will never persuade each other :->
I use it. It lets me keep my hands on the home row, which is great when I need to alternate between clicking and typing. And the pointing stick is great ergonomically, if you're using your laptop in any kind of mobile setting. You don't have to contort your hands to reach the touchpad, which can be difficult if your laptop is, you know, on your lap.
I use it. Go to any Thinkpad enthusiast website and you would think the opposite. There are different types of trackpoints. The one I use is flush with the keys.
Eh, I have been using latest gen x1 carbon for last year or so that I got from work and recently bough a p15 gen1 for some personal windows usage.
I have to say, both machines are terrible.
X1 is pretty slow (some 4c i7 with basic iGPU) - running dual 4k displays, webex and similar apps is pretty slow, even scrolling websites is not smooth quite often. Also, fan never turns off and battery life is well, not great.
P15 is just ridiculous for it's MSRP, touchpad is shit, battery life is shit, CPU sometimes gets stuck at ~400Mhz just because (x1 also has this problem actually) and after googling it seems to be common issue with lenovo hardware (WTF)
Also, why they they included 2 thunderbolt ports and 1 usb-c where not one of them supports charging is beyong me, having to use this stupid lenovo psu every time is PITA)
It's the most fun I have had using a laptop since my first MacBook. Moving from the MBP to the ThinkBook has made me realize how... boring MacBooks are - not saying that's a bad thing. MacBooks do 'just work'.
But the ThinkBook? The machine is fantastic. Sure, it has some soldered on RAM, but half of it is upgrade-able. The disk is a standard M.2 drive - easily replaced. It blows the M1 MacBook I use for work out of the water in almost every single number, except battery life. It was $100 more than a MacBook.
It's got double the RAM (16GB vs 8GB on the Mac), double the storage (1TB vs. 512GB), the NVidia 3060 seems to work a little better with OpenGL apps then the M1's GPU. More importantly, you can use two 4k monitors at the same time -which is impossible with the M1 MacBook Pro.
The Windows install was vanilla - not really anything additional installed. Maybe a Lenovo support app? Easy to remove from the control panel. Pretty much everything with the Lenovo machine was supported without too much fiddling around after installing Arch Linux.