The Lenovo T450s Is Working Beautifully With Linux

Written by Eric Griffith in Computers on 16 April 2015 at 10:40 AM EDT. Page 1 of 3. 43 Comments.

This is the second and final part of a guest article by Phoronix reader Eric Griffith sharing his experiences about the new Lenovo ThinkPad T450s laptop with Intel Broadwell processor under (Fedora) Linux. You can see the first part of the article at Lenovo ThinkPad T450s Broadwell Preview.

A couple weeks ago I bought the Lenovo T450s, this is my first laptop-upgrade in about three years and I have to say... I am so glad that I did upgrade. Over the last two weeks I've been using the T450s as my daily-driver and its been working almost perfectly under Fedora Linux.

The Install:

My Linux distribution of choice right now is Fedora 21 KDE. I'm not a big fan of GNOME, and XFCE abs LXDE never really had the level of polish that I liked.

Using a stable version of Fedora I was able to boot with Secure Boot enabled and just let it go. If you boot Ubuntu or openSUSE you should be fine as well, as they both implement the shim loader at minimum.

The actual install was surprisingly fast. Once I had everything configured the way I wanted it and started the actual installation process of copying over data the install took 3 minutes and 13 seconds. For those of you who are familiar with installing Fedora that's the time it took from when I was done configuring partitions to the time it said "Installation complete. Press reboot to log in to your new system."

Power Efficiency:

Sitting idle at the desktop the laptop was consuming about five watts of power, with WiFi on and the backlight set to 50%. Giving the laptop an estimated battery life of about 15 hours. The attached screenshot isn't with a full battery, hence why it says twelve.

While typing this review with Firefox open (two tabs-- both Phoronix), LibreOffice Writer, Docky running, Wifi and Bluetooth on the laptop was consuming about 6.60 watts giving an estimated battery life of ten and a half hours.

All estimates were taken using PowerTop with all but one 'tunables' set to good.

Modifications from base system:

Obviously since this is the laptop I'm going to be using every day, I wanted it to be configured and reviewed the same way that I'll be using it. As such this is not a 'base' Fedora + updates installation.

- Kwin was set to use OpenGL 3.1 for compositing.
- Thermald was compiled and installed.
- zswap was enabled.
- TLP controls power settings.
- I do keep Docky running at all times, though it was disabled for benchmarks.
- All updates were applied as of Friday, April 10th.


Related Articles