Lenovo To Begin Shipping ThinkPad Laptops With Fedora Pre-Installed

[fuzz]

Usually rpm-ostree reset to clear any overrides will do the trick.

This isn't ideal ofc, but it's still relatively easy.

Sure, and I think I did that once or twice without realizing the ramifications. But still, not quite ready yet for prime time desktop .

[You-]

From what I have seen many issues with rebasing have been with other rpm repositories enabled. For me it has been stable even when using rawhide/nightly builds.

I hope that by the time that silverblue is ready to ship on laptops this is not a requirement. The main current issue is with multimedia and getting that solved on silverblue is harder than on Workstation (cannot set to download H264 RPM without overlaying it) but once a solution is found, hopefully we will be in a position where the need for overlays will become rarer.

[r1348]

I am not entitled to make Lenovo product announcements, but it is certainly something we brought up with them as something we would like to see.

That would be instabuy for me.

[Mez']

On the one hand, what I consider as the infuriating Thinkpad, with that keyboard layout (that fn key instead of the ctrl!!), those buttons on top of the touchpad that you click everytime your hands are down to write, with random selection, cuts, and losses due to pushing those buttons unwillingly. And that trackpad in the middle, which is a damn bother to the use of the surrounding keys even when deactivated. In my opinion, that's the least practical and intuitive laptop I've ever used.

On the other hand, what I consider as the infuriating basic and limited vanilla Gnome experience of Fedora.

For me, it's like the worst possible combination of hardware and OS put together. The absolute nightmare of a workflow. 😁

And yet, it's always a good thing when you can get a pre-installed Linux system on a machine. More choice, more options for Linux users. I will obviously not buy one, but some people won't be bothered with the limitations or annoyances for their own workflow and it's absolutely good news they will be able to make that choice. 👍

[sarmad]

Let me guess: you'll have to use some data mining software to find the place on their website where you can purchase this, and it's also only available in the US.
I will be surprised if things are actually different this time around.

[Guest]

If this means I might be able to buy a new thinkpad and not pay for a windows license which would be of no use for me anyway, it sounds like a great deal even if I can't care less about fedora. Also, it means that they'll have to make sure firmware they ship boots on some linux kernel, rather than having to wait for firmware upgrades, this mostly applies to AMD CPUs.

[AdamW]

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)

Hi, Quality Assurance here!

Here's the secret:

operating system installers are *hard*. Especially the partitioning.

Okay, that's it, that's the whole secret. Partitioning is hard. There are a bazillion different ways you can do it, and everyone wants theirs in the installer. And remember Fedora supports multiple arches all with their own Special Special Requirements for how the disk should be laid out. It's a giant pain in the ass. At this point I'm generally convinced it is not a thing that it's actually possible to do *well*. This is why pre-installs matter, after all.

The installer gets past QA because it meets the QA requirements. Silverblue isn't in any of those because it isn't a release-blocking edition.

If you are a Certified Partitioning Expert(tm) and just want to do a certain specific layout, you can pre-create that layout with any tools you want, and then in custom partitioning or "advanced custom" partitioning (blivet-gui) just assign the mount points. That is intended to work.

And, honestly, I am on record very loudly as thinking that having both custom and "advanced custom" is dumb. I got outvoted, because QA doesn't have all the votes. If we did, no-one would be allowed to change anything. Ever.

[AdamW]

I'd rather you not accuse me of "twisting words" when RedHat has been literally and legally a "business unit" of IBM since July 9th of last year.

No, we haven't. Red Hat is still a separately incorporated company, which is wholly-owned by IBM. It's not a business unit of IBM.

This may sound like nitpicking, but it really isn't. It has real legal consequences. It also implies a lot about how the parent entity wants the relationship to work. A wholly-owned subsidiary is a thing you want to broadly make sense as an independent entity (could be for many different reasons - one obvious one is to retain the option of selling it on, though that's not really why IBM is doing it here). If you don't want that, you merge the company directly into the parent company's operations, which IBM has *not* done with Red Hat. Of course RH isn't literally entirely independent of IBM, but at present, but the difference between a wholly-owned subsidiary and a "business unit" is not insignificant. See https://smallbusiness.chron.com/diff...nit-25192.html and https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-di...-business-unit .

[lowlands]

I'd rather you not accuse me of "twisting words" when RedHat has been literally and legally a "business unit" of IBM since July 9th of last year. <snip>I would like to see more top of the line GNU/Linux laptops made in this manner - more choice would benefit us all.

Red Hat is a wholly-owned subsidiary of IBM which is quite different from a business unit. The former being independent while the latter is under operational control which Red Hat is not.

Totally agree that it would be great and beneficial if more vendors offered Fedora/Linux pre-installed. I'm thrilled Lenovo did and as a happy X1 user for years, my next laptop is likely going to be another Lenovo. Fingers crossed that they'll announce a Ryzen 4000 with a 4K screen.

[andyprough]

bash2bash claimed this. "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.." This assumption turned out be incorrect. What Lenovo is doing now is happening independent of the IBM acquisition. It is as simple as that.

I'm not a bash2bash reader or contributor. Never even been to the site, or whatever it is.