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Comment by parasense | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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%

Can you elaborate on how to set the CPU on that mode? Is a command or BIOS setting? I would like to do the same on Ubuntu.

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.

in case you did not find out by now

  echo performance |tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/policy?/scaling_governor

The easy way in Fedora is using `tuned-adm`.

```

$ tuned-adm active ...

$ tuned-adm list ...

$ tuned-adm recommend ...

$ tuned-adm profile powersave

```

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?

On the PC front, do you find that other workstations (Precision, Elitebooks) are better supported with regards to Linux and associated peripherals?

> 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

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