Lenovo Continues Improving Their Linux Support Down To The Hardware Sensors

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Lenovo Continues Improving Their Linux Support Down To The Hardware Sensors

One of the great Linux hardware milestones of 2020 was Lenovo beginning to offer Linux pre-loads on their desktops/laptops with the likes of Fedora and Ubuntu. But it's been great just not for having another major OEM offering Linux pre-loads but because they have also been engaging directly on Linux support improvements both through their engineers and at partners like Red Hat. That upstream support work has continued nicely...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Lenovo-P620-Sensors-Linux

[uid313]

So which manufacturer have the best Linux support? Is it Dell, HP, Lenovo or system76?

[Vorpal]

So which manufacturer have the best Linux support? Is it Dell, HP, Lenovo or system76?

I would guess System76, since they are Linux-first. I don't have any personal experience with them though. I personally use Thinkpads when it comes to laptops (I'm one of the rare persons who prefers the track point) and usually they work well out of the box on big distributions like Ubuntu. No idea about Dell.

I'm writing this on my T480 where everything (including the fingerprint sensor) works.

On my work laptop (a newer P15) nearly everything works: The fingerprint sensor "works" but is less reliable than under Windows. The touchscreen works okay but not all buttons on the pen that came with the touch screen do anything under Linux, so clearly something is missing there. It is not a feature I really use though, so I haven't dug too much into that. Finally the external Thunderbolt dock works, but I can't get "suspend when closing laptop lid" to work while connected to the dock.

[hansdegoede]

Finally the external Thunderbolt dock works, but I can't get "suspend when closing laptop lid" to work while connected to the dock.

This is by design, some users have 1 huge or multiple external monitors connected to the dock, so they don't need / use the laptop-panel as an extra screen and thus typically leave the lid closed while docked; and we don't want to suspend in that case.

On most modern distros this behavior is controlled by systemd-logind and you can enable suspend-on-lid-close even when docked by editing: "/etc/systemd/logind.conf" and then uncommenting the

#HandleLidSwitchDocked=ignore

line and changing it to

HandleLidSwitchDocked=suspend

. You need to reboot your machine after this because restarting systemd-logind will cause your GUI session to crash.

[Go_Vulkan]

So which manufacturer have the best Linux support? Is it Dell, HP, Lenovo or system76?

I would name the "Linux first" manufacturers in the first row: Tuxedo and System 76 are two well-known companies.
Then Lenovos Thinkpads.

I don't have experience with HP and Dell, but Dell is not considered anyway, since they only offer poor Hardware. Even in 2021, 4 years(!) after AMD Ryzen, their offerings with these CPUs are a bad joke!

I would like to extend your question to the Desktop:
Which motherboard manufacturer (MSI, Asus, Gigabyte, ASRock, Biostar) has the best Linux support? (BIOS and ACPI tables without bugs, well known and supported fan controller, hardware monitoring ....)

[tornado99]

The thing is that all these Linux-first manufacturers are actually assembling semi-generic designs from Clevo. They aren't building their own laptop shells. In my opinion they are quite chunky and dated.

Whereas Lenovo actually design and make the whole thing. Even their Ideapads these days are sleek all-metal designs approaching the quality of a Macbook unibody.

[grigi]

My Dell latitude/precision Notebooks have been running great with Linux for years.
Firmware updates over fwupd worked flawlessly as well.
I think the issue with Dell is only the office-class notebooks get Linux support, the rest is a luck of the draw thing.

Their server platforms are Linux-first, but that's where the money with servers are these days.

[bavay]

As the owner of a Dell XPS (the 15", 7590 model), I can not complain regarding Linux support, besides two issues: the fingerprint reader is not supported and the technical support is totally closed to the idea of discussing issues found on Linux. For example, there is a clear bug in the acpi tables (as well as several warnings when recompiling them with the Intel tools) and there is no way to make sure this would be forwarded to the bios developers (they might not want to do anything about it, but at least they should be aware of it). Same thing for the thermal management: as I mentioned that the cpu used to throttle very easily as seen under Linux, support did not want to hear anything from me, although the exact same issues hit Windows users. Finally, a bios update improved the situation (then we now have loud fan noises quite easily, but there nothing else that can be done when it's the cpu's fault).

[schmidtbag]

So which manufacturer have the best Linux support? Is it Dell, HP, Lenovo or system76?

As much as I dislike Dell, I would say I've had the best out-of-box experiences with them, even when they don't have official support. My experiences with Lenovo have ranged from "works even better than Windows" to deliberately Linux-unfriendly. Not sure about HP but I'm guessing it's a similar situation to Dell, except their laptops are less crappy IMO. For whatever it's worth, my experiences with Asus have been consistently terrible.

As others have pointed out, if you want the best support, you should go for the companies that are Linux-first.

[tornado99]

I'm not going to pay over a 1000 euros for an exterior that could be from the 10 or 15 years ago. Perhaps there is a problem with economies of scale but the Linux-first companies need to start making their own cases, rather than putting their sticker on someone else's.

At the moment I can just save my money by buying a Clevo laptop from a chinese e-seller and installing Linux myself.