Lenovo To Begin Shipping ThinkPad Laptops With Fedora Pre-Installed

[lowlands]

ChristianSchaller Thank you and everybody involved for making this happen

[RahulSundaram]

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

You seem confused. I am quoting the origin of the same conversation you are right now in ie) OP of the same thread in this post in this site to give you more context since you seem to have missed that. You also apparently are missing the distinctions on how Red Hat and IBM is legally structured

[lowlands]

Yeah, Linux works great on my 2018 ThinkPad and while Lenovo gives me BIOS updates in ISO format, they only offer exe files for updating the SSD. I wish they'd let me update my SSD too on Linux.

Lenovo participates in LVFS and offers BIOS updates through fwupd. More to follow. Keep an eye on this page: https://fwupd.org/lvfs/search?value=thinkpad

[andyprough]

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 .

Then you may want to update your wikipedia page. I'm assuming you or someone you know may have some influence over that. If not, my apologies. First line: "Type - Strategic Business Unit". I'm very familiar with how subsidiaries work, and the legal aspect has to do with legal liability, which falls 100% onto IBM. And again, I would question why there would be an effort to differentiate the two companies. IBM has an outstanding track record of supporting the Linux kernel during the dark hours of SCO warfare. I personally feel that RedHat will probably be better managed and that my previous negative experience as a paying RedHat customer would probably not be repeated under IBM ownership if I ever decided to spend money on RedHat products again.

[andyprough]

You seem confused. I am quoting the origin of the same conversation you are right now in ie) OP of the same thread in this post in this site to give you more context since you seem to have missed that. You also apparently are missing the distinctions on how Red Hat and IBM is legally structured

No confusion - I was clarifying to you that the source of my question is not something I've read from whatever website or publication or whatever you quoted from. I was questioning one very small distinction made in a comment earlier in the thread.

[RahulSundaram]

No confusion - I was clarifying to you that the source of my question is not something I've read from whatever website or publication or whatever you quoted from. I was questioning one very small distinction made in a comment earlier in the thread.

Again you are confused, I am not talking about some other site. I am quoting the OP of the same thread right here. You are jumping in the middle of a thread and your replies make incorrect assertions as others have already pointed out

[RahulSundaram]

Then you may want to update your wikipedia page. I'm assuming you or someone you know may have some influence over that. If not, my apologies

No idea which pages you are talking about but Wikipedia pages aren't managed like that. IBM or Red Hat employees shouldn't be editing wikipedia pages related to their companies

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:FAQ/Organizations

[kylew77]

While not a Fedora fan, this is great news. I would love to see in my lifetime a Thinkpad with a BSD option. OpenBSD works best on Thinkpads and I've read good things about FreeBSD on them as well. Would love to see that option as a pre-install option.

[skeevy420]

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.

I do not disagree at all, especially in a situation like Fedora where there are multiple variants, corporate pressures, different teams at different states of progress, etc. I just saw that one statement about installing alongside or in that release statement Michael linked and my first thought was "Well I'd start with the three different partition methods" and it went from there.

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.

That sucks, but it's understandable. Since the BTRFS one has been a know SB bug for a while now (since 29 IIRC), you'd think they'd just remove it from the installer since Red Hat is depreciating that file system anyways. Would be a perfect place to add in an experimental Stratis setup

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.

I assume that ZFS would be a pain in the ass to get going there

But that's that part that I was talking about being slow and clunky. I'm wondering if that is, at least at the time, because Silverblue didn't ship with all of AMDGPU (which made me wonder if y'all test more with Nvidia and Intel GPUs) and if that would have effected its installer to give me the bad experience I'm talking about. Also, just realized I never actually tried that part of the installer on the regular Fedora edition.

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.

It is kind of dumb. I don't want to say that much more because I could write a bunch of ideas and suggestions. Partitioning and default setups is just something I can really nerd off with

[woprandi]

Of course we will reinstall ourselves because the default installation could be not adapted to our need. But it's very nice to avoid Windows and a proof that Fedora will works is a serious alternative. I use only ThinkPad from years and it works great