Hacker News Reader

Comment by ensiferum | Hacker News Reader

I have been a long time ThinkPad user and recently purchased my latest ThinkPad T460p. Sadly it has some issues, the latest NVidia drivers don't work on the device but I'm forced to use the 1 year old driver that Lenovo provides in their packages. Figuring this out took my several days of trouble shooting (only dx9 was affected).

Also the system fan is constantly running. I went to their support site and the online support is not available in my country and the "contact support" system doesn't/didn't work (opened some empty box in the website). Super frustrating.

As much I hate to admit it, the ThinkPad is no longer what it was back in the IBM era.

Combined with stories about vendor lock in. I'm saddened to say that this shall be the last ThinkPad/Lenovo that I'm purchasing.

View on HN

I bought a T460p a few months back, and while it's a very good laptop for the price it had a very annoying problem with the Trackpad that would occasionally just stop working after suspending the laptop (and only doing a cold reboot with all power cords removed would fix this). Sadly it took Lenovo two weeks to send a technician with a replacement part to fix the issue, contrary to their "24 hour target" advertised on the website. A few years ago customer support was much more responsive, so it seems that they are indeed trying to cut costs in that area.

That said, I also use a X1 Carbon, which runs great with Linux and doesn't have any problems at all concerning hardware and drivers (graphics card, mobile broadband, two external monitors via DP all works flawlessly and the battery lasts 6-8 hours under normal use). I'm confident that the Linux support for the T460p will improve as well as developers have time to write better drivers, after all it's still pretty new hardware (barely six months old).

Honestly Dell does Ubuntu pre-installed and therefore its XPS and Precision models never give this kind of bullshit uphill, even if you don't buy the Ubuntu version. It's now my go-to vendor, simply because I consider any vendor which does not do full testing on Linux, and sells any hardware that doesn't fully support it, as suspect and not worth bothering with. I'm sad to see that Lenovo is now in that camp.

Just wondering, does Dell support non-US keyboard layouts? I only saw that XPS available on some Dell-US site..

I'm running an ISO keyboard on a Dell Precision as we "speak". Recall you don't have to buy the Ubuntu pre-installed version because it's the same hardware. I retro-installed mine on a UK-keyboard Windows Precision M3800 (now superseded by the 5510). And it works perfectly. If I were to buy one now I'd just go for the 13-XPS as the infinity display is big enough, although a fully kitted out Precision 5510 with Xeon, 32GB RAM and Nvidia quadro is mighty tempting but we're talking 3000 USD (2150 GBP) with 1TB SSD.

One of my co-workers bought a Linux laptop from Dell, and while the Linux capabilities worked, he spent several weeks working with their support to get the laptop re-imaged. The first time they returned it it had no system image. Apparently their service depot doesn't have system images for their version of Linux. The support rep had to actually intercept the laptop on the second trip from the depot to reinstall Linux.

Ditto. But I think we have fallen on hard times when Dell becomes the go-to.

I have to assume you're referencing Apple, because otherwise, apart from maybe Lenovo, for a good quality decent price machine with at least a semblance of design attention, Dell has been pretty good for something like 8-10 years now (HP: are you listening?). Dell also has a long history of access to and enthusiasm for cutting edge components.

If however what you're lamenting is the idea that we have to look somewhere other than Apple these days, then I have to agree with you. Their lineup is truly forgettable in the above-starbucks market, tragic considering the history of the macbook. Maybe just maybe that'll change in October, but then we'll still have to deal with the iOSification of OSX to the detriment of developers. Also I'm a big mech keyboard fan and the rumoured oled bar function key replacement idea does NOT work for me unless they open source it (haha).

Agreed, and I'm a long-time ThinkPad advocate with a stack of older models in my closet going back to the R31. I've always thought they had superior keyboards and pointing devices, and every one of my old ThinkPads runs Arch beautifully. (Granted, I didn't bother installing X on the R31.) Given the opportunity to pick out a new laptop for work last week, I passed them by, and that was before I was aware of this news. They've done too many questionable things lately, and lost my trust.

Lenovo has lost my business. The ThinkPad is not for Linux any more.

Honest question: what is the alternative? Apple is not. Dell has finicky hardware. HP has crappy laptops. Asus is hit and miss.

When my x1 dies, I think I'll just continue and get the then current generation x1...

Idk of the reliability, but I recommend looking at the recent build quality of HP laptops in person. It's pretty impressive. Still need to see that they're good for the long run, but they look like they're getting better.

Also Dells being finicky? Never heard of that, but wouldn't doubt it either. I think the XPS line works well with Linux. I know someone who used Ubuntu exclusively on it for a long time.

My Dell impression is anecdata. A company of a friend of mine bought a bunch of XPS 13. Out of a dozen laptops, only two were not RMA'd. The issues were not the same either. Keyboards with stuck keys, dead pixel strips on screens, screens that were too dim even on the highest setting. The overall impression was really not good.

For work, I just ordered a Dell Precision, the one that supports Ubuntu. We'll see how it turns out; I'll chime in on the next HN laptop thread. (Seems like we have one every week or so.) It certainly looks better than Lenovo at this point.

Alternative: Librem 15

>> When my x1 dies, I think I'll just continue and get the then current generation x1...

They changed the finish a bit so that carbon-fiber texture is gone, and they removed the physical volume button above the function keys, but at least there's proper function keys now (unlike the third gen, I think).

I got mine with 16 GBs RAM and 1 TB SSD.

I had to tell someone :P

Congrats, it looks like a sweet machine. I have a 2nd gen one. The one with the clickpad and no proper function keys. Got it after a 1st gen one was stolen. I'd trade it for the previous version if I could. A couple of months after I bought it, the 3rd gen reverted the idiotic clickpad and oled function key ideas.

The bad side in disguise is that these machines are tough. They usually last five years of daily travel and daily usage, so I'm still three or four years out of a decent trackpad.

I've been happy for a few years with my 17" System76 laptop. Came with Ubuntu preinstalled, and has worked fine through two major OS version upgrades. Really fast boot with the OS on an SSD drive.

Ha, same problem here with an ideapad z500 and Linux Mint, latest NVidia drivers prevent my laptop from booting. Now I have to resort to XServer and adjusting brightness via the command line: xrandr --output LVDS1 --brightness 1.0

But hell it's a great laptop for its price.

The reason I was looking at the Lenovo 710s instead of the thinkpads was specifically because the 710s included a nice intel GPU (iris 540) and not a nvidia chip which hugely complicates power management, drivers, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com