Lenovo To Begin Shipping ThinkPad Laptops With Fedora Pre-Installed

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Lenovo To Begin Shipping ThinkPad Laptops With Fedora Pre-Installed

When it comes to finding laptops with Linux pre-loaded by the OEM, it's mostly Ubuntu or its derivatives found most often on these devices. But Lenovo and Red Hat are announcing today that Fedora Workstation 32 will begin appearing soon on select ThinkPad laptops...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Lenovo-ThinkPad-Fedora-Preload

[edwaleni]

Lenovo has been certifying Red Hat Workstation on Think Pad's for years.

As for the other products, I talked with a Lenovo engineer for the IdeaPad's back in January and he said they only certify Windows on those.

He said the cost structure in that channel doesn't permit regression testing of alternate OS'es.

[ChristianSchaller]

Lenovo has been certifying Red Hat Workstation on Think Pad's for years.

As for the other products, I talked with a Lenovo engineer for the IdeaPad's back in January and he said they only certify Windows on those.

He said the cost structure in that channel doesn't permit regression testing of alternate OS'es.

Be aware that this is quite different from the Red Hat certification they and other HW makers have been doing. That has been for major corporate accounts only, while this is something a consumer can order themselves from Lenovos website and which Lenovo has established an engineering team to support themselves.

[SpyroRyder]

I wonder how international this will be. Part of the problems I have had as a person buying laptops in Australia is that all the ones that ship with Linux aren't offered in this region so I have had to either pay shipping from the US or just buy a Windows shipping laptop and wipe it

[skeevy420]

Our installer aims to make the complicated process of installing Fedora to replace another operating system as easy as possible, but it’s still a barrier even for tech-literate people.

That's because the Fedora installer has not one but three different disk partitioning methods and, IMHO, neither are really that good. They're either limited in functionality or slow and the automatic methods can lead to non-working installs (Silverblue+BTRFS). Outside of that, the installer is pretty straight-forward and easy to use. I found that to be my biggest complaint with the Fedora installation process and, honestly, Fedora in general -- fighting with me with one of my preferred setups right from the get-go is never a good thing and making the part of the installer that might be able to get me to where I want to go be slow and clunky, the Blivet one IIRC, doesn't help either...especially when you finally get to the OS and it delivers a such a nice experience that you wonder how the installer made it past Quality Assurance.

FWIW, I'm not singling y'all out. I did the Ubuntu 20.04 install last night and found a couple minor issues with its installer and ZFS setup and posted about that here too. One of them worries me enough that I don't trust it long-term so there's that (how it used /dev/sda7 instead of /dev/disk/by-id/disk-id-part7 when creating the root pool)

[nils_]

Always great to hear though I would prefer a notebook shipped without anything pre-installed since I'm going to wipe it anyways.

[ChristianSchaller]

Always great to hear though I would prefer a notebook shipped without anything pre-installed since I'm going to wipe it anyways.

I think the important part to remember for experienced users like yourself is that having to install and support your own OS is a barrier to adoption for a lot of potential Linux users and even if you will re-install yourself Lenovo doing this means they will work to ensure there are upstream drivers for all parts of their hardware so no matter what you run it makes things work better.

[ChristianSchaller]

I wonder how international this will be. Part of the problems I have had as a person buying laptops in Australia is that all the ones that ship with Linux aren't offered in this region so I have had to either pay shipping from the US or just buy a Windows shipping laptop and wipe it

The plan is for Lenovo to offer this globally, so if Lenovo has a sales presence in your country these systems should be available too.

[bash2bash]

IBM has started making its ownership felt around Redhat's property. IBM used its business relationship with Lenovo to include Fedora as a preinstalled os.

To be honest, no sane person who values his privacy is going to leave a preinstalled os intact. The first thing you do, is remove everything entirely and install from your own safe image. Lets not forget how terribly insecure as those vendor apps they preinstall and act as a great spyware... In other words, its really inconsequential/irrelevant what comes preinstalled.

Still, its a good business decision by IBM.

[Britoid]

I'm actually surprised this wasn't already a thing.

Red Hat love Lenovo