Lenovo To Certify Their Full ThinkPad/ThinkStation Line For Linux

[torsionbar28]

Chinese govt is mandating that all Chinese companies wean themselves off US technology dependence over time as a matter of national security.

The US would be well served to aim for the same. As nice as the ThinkPads are to use, It's nonsensical that DoD uses Chinese-made IT equipment.

[torsionbar28]

What the Communist Party truly wants is hardware and software under their thumb, as the US has with Windows

China has this already. Microsoft is supplying the Communist Party with a custom win10 build. Win10 CGE. China Government Edition. Whereas plain win10 is pure spyware, sending all manner of telemetry back to Microsoft, by default, the Win10 CGE has all that spyware disabled. Microsoft also supplied the Communist Party with the Win10 CGE source code under NDA. Microsoft stock has nearly doubled in the past year, due in large part to the truckloads of $$$ the Communist Party is paying them. Not that I use any Microsoft products, but makes me loathe the Redmond turd that much more.

[Trevelyan]

Any nice AMD CPU + AMD GPU (or APU) options in their line up? Preferably Aluminium or Carbonfibre rather than (cheap) plastic.

[CochainComplex]

Any nice AMD CPU + AMD GPU (or APU) options in their line up? Preferably Aluminium or Carbonfibre rather than (cheap) plastic.

I recently asked a similar question to the sales department for business products (Lenovo Germany). (If there are any AMD Ryzen based Workstations in their business lineup) - they have replyeed no and there will also be none in the near future.

[woprandi]

Ubuntu & Red Hat are already available to order for the P series. I'd prefer the T and X series with only Intel chipset and much ligher

[holunder]

Nice! This is awesome news, I am big fan of Lenovo laptops especially. I also dont mind if they ship with Nvidia, I think they are bricks of performance gold... though its mostly because of GPU Compute.... if I was only gaming ATI would be carefully evaluated in my analysis.

ATI? Did you live under a rock for the past 14 years?

[edwaleni]

I spoke with the Lenovo Team at CES 2020 in Las Vegas.

I asked all the same questions everyone here does, so here it goes:

1. Coreboot: Status = No. No value proposition for them. When someone (like a vertical or integrator) can make a case, they will look then.
2. AMD CPU's in the ThinkStation line: Status=Possible. Threadripper is being evaluated for workstation use. What changed the perspective? Zen 2. Why? Most of the verticals and integrators of ThinkStation ( where the growth is) specify Intel for the IPC. Epyc: Status =No. No one can make a biz case for it in workstation. Won't happen. Ryzen in ThinkStation line=No. Not being considered. Ryzen is a consumer CPU.
3. Why just P series? Because that is where many of our verticals and integrators will use Linux. This is our portable workstation line.
4. Why not IdeaPad? Lenovo Product engineer told me point blank that IdeaPad's are Windows/Consumer devices by design and will always be. If Linux works, great he said. They make no effort to regression test against Linux.

Lenovo's workstation business has grown several fold in the last few years. Most of these people are US based and some used to work in HP's workstation group and are not aligned under consumer. They are hungry, adept and know how to look under every rock to find new niches to exploit. But they don't embrace religion, they embrace margins. They are finding more margins in the workstation space with Linux than they have in the past and they are prepping themselves to exploit it more fully.

While the libre and BLOB adverse may not see much progress here, it is a good foundation by which they can look at future markets where they exist. The more PR they can raise around Linux desktop use, the more options that will become available.

[bogdanbiv]

Why not IdeaPad line too?

Because all system hardware + software compatibility costs money, people and infrastructure (regression test against Linux). It requires hiring manual testers with some experience in Linux and testing software and it requires test automation engineers to write tests that perform automated checks. Also, if a something such as a driver is not working in Linux this incurs delays in launching the product => losing money.

[Guest]

We will certify our laptops for Linux, but when you buy one of those laptops to run Linux on it you still have to pay us for the Windows license. Also, we won't tell you on our website which of those is certified, you'll have to dig the world wide web for that info.

No thanks, I'll stick to original Linux vendors like System76, Purism, StarLabs, Slimbook, Tuxedo, etc.

The bad aspect of these "Linux" brands is, that they use clevo, which doesn't come anywhere near build quality to Lenovo/Dell/HP/... with same specs and same retail price. Clevo resellers price these machines at too high prices, it's just not worth it. And, so far, none Clevo machine provides spill resistant keyboard.

[ThoreauHD]

The timing of this is suspect. This has less to do with customers, and more to do with them surviving if the DOJ turns their ChiCom spying inventory into paper weights. Lenovo has been off US government PO lists for years now.