What's your experience? does it run linux well. thanks

Is there a way to update the Lenovo thunderbolt 3 Firmware on Linux? I heard that because of how the previous firm ware was coded that it would kill the thunderbolt controller chip. Is there a way to apply that patch to linux?

PRICES ARE IN BAM(KM): 1 bam is 0.50euro ....so just devide price in 2 and you will get price in Euro.

If you could help that would be rly nice!

Thinkpad T480s 14,1 FHD i7-8550/24/512 SSD:

https://olx.ba/artikal/63261047

Thinkpad T14s gen 2 :

https://olx.ba/artikal/63717938

Lenovo Thinkpad L13 i5 11Gen:

https://olx.ba/artikal/63802123

LENOVO ThinkPad P50 Workstation i7-6820HQ 32GB DDR4:

https://olx.ba/artikal/63642854

Lenovo ThinkPad T470S i7 6600u 12GB DDR4:

https://olx.ba/artikal/50266639

LENOVO ThinkPad P50 Workstation , i7-6820HQ / 32GB DDR4:

https://olx.ba/artikal/63671358

LENOVO ThinkPad T470S i7-7600U 16GB DDR4 256 SSD 14":

https://olx.ba/artikal/63752246

LENOVO ThinkPad T480 , i7-8550U / 16GB DDR4 / 256GB SSD:

https://olx.ba/artikal/63952146

Got a Thinkpad x230, I ran the BIOS mod with IvyRain to install whitelisted wifi cards. I installe the recommended Intel 7260 but now I keep running into issues with bluetooth reliability. Tried the taping of pins 51 and 20 and it became more stable but some devices still cannot even pair.

What other options do I have that are at least just as good if not better than the Intel card I am using.

Thanks.

so I installed ubuntu, everything went fine then it asked me to remove the flash drive it was being installed from. However after I did that and it restarted, it showed the thinkpad boot screen for 2 seconds, then would shut down. any solutions?

I recently bought my first old thinkpad. A T510 model with an i5 and 8GB of RAM. I am able to boot in BIOS, but nothing more. As far as I can tell there were no passwords enabled when I bought it and when I changed the settings in the BIOS for all sorts of passwords to be disabled the settings were saved.

I made a VENTOY usb and I'm able to live boot into any of the distros I have on my USB. However, when I try using it on my thinkpad, only 1 distro seems to work. It's Linux Mint 20.3 Xfce. I really wanted to go with a standard version of Debian, but I just can't boot into it. If I select to install Debian from my VENTOY usb, I get a black screen or some sort of kernel panic. When I live boot into Mint 20.3 Xfce I can use it normally, but when I try to install it, my Thinkpad always freezes or shutdowns.

In the past when I've gotten these issues, it usually comes down to some sort of BIOS setting like secure boot, quick boot, or having it set to boot in legacy mode instead of UEFI. However, I searched all the settings and couldn't find any sort of setting that relates to the 3 things I mentioned. I read on some other posts that this particular laptop doesn't support UEFI and that it only has support for legacy. However, nothing I've searched for says that Linux can't install via legacy mode. On the contrary, Linux has excellent support for both.

I could really use some help please to get my thinkpad running Linux. Thank you for taking the time to read my post and any help is greatly appreciated!

Thinking about Gentoo or debian with a window manager

Hi all. I installed Ubuntu 22.04 on my Thinkpad T14 2nd Generation. After that, every time I turn it on, I get the "Reading ME firmware please do not power off" message, and it always fails (or skips the count) around 60%.

I updated the firmware a couple of weeks ago, when the available version appeared, but still was not resolved.

I know it's not a huge problem, but I do believe without that inicial check it would load faster.

Could you please assist me on this? Thank you in advance for your comments and guidance.

Cheers!

UPDATE: Finally the problem was fixed. The firmware update made a couple of days ago fixed it.

sup gang,

I just got a t480 about a week ago and am using it to try to learn more about linux. I'm using EndeavorOS w/ Hyprland and am having a great time, but find myself banging my head against one small (arguably stupid) problem: the LED light on the "mic mute" function button on my keyboard.

I leave my mic muted most of the time, which means the LED is on most of the time. I'd love to just invert the trigger for the LED so that it becomes a "mic is hot" indicator and not a "mic is off" indicator. I drilled down into /sys/class/leds/platform::micmute/brightness and have found that I can turn it on and off manually w/ echo, but I'm not too sure how to tell what triggers it and/or how to invert that. /sys/class/leds/platform::micmute/triggers just seems to be a list of possible triggers for any of the keyboard LEDs, and I'm not really sure how it works or what it does?

I've found that using echo x > brightness makes it so that it is no longer triggered through a keypress, but system restart seems to change it back. I guess I could write a startup script to turn it off and leave it off, but that seems lame. any advice? thanks in advance.

I just installed Linux on a ThinkPad T480. I want to use KDE Plasma 6. Everything seems to work, except SDDM's display is completely corrupt and unusable.

https://preview.redd.it/hyp7k1sqdo5d1.jpg?width=2560&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9cacd2927b988ad002869e45d4ba7636aa6ce2bd

I am able to login by just typing my password. Interestingly, the entire screen flashes two different patterns when the cursor is in the password edit field. Once the Plasma desktop starts, everything works fine.

Two problems: I want to login with X11, and Plasma will default to Wayland and since SDDM is corrupt I can't change the setting. Also, I...kinda want SDDM to work properly!

I tested the GPU by installing a temp Windows install, installing Nvidia drivers, and disabling the Intel GPU in device manager. I even tried playing some games appropriate for the card, and had no crashes or any issues, so I don't think the GPU is "bad".

Oddly, I have a "portable" Arch install on a USB stick, which I booted on the same T480 and SDDM was not corrupted. However, I can't figure out exactly what is different, since both installs are up to date with the latest packages as of this writing.

For now I "worked around" this by configuring SDDM to auto-login, which works, but I'd rather actually have to type my password to login...

EDIT: this doesn't seem to work, looks like the whole session gets corrupted, even booted into Plasma. Without rebooting I had reconfigured SDDM to autostart the X11 session, and then when I logged out I was given an X11 session just fine. But after a full reboot, it looks like even the X11 Plasma session is corrupt.

I'm guessing this has to do with the dual-GPU setup? I might have to blacklist the Nvidia card, but I also feel like it might be useful for some light casual gaming or some very minimal AI tasks, so I'd like to get it working without the corruption. (My naive guess is that the display memory isn't being "remapped" so I'm viewing a part of RAM on screen that isn't the framebuffer?).

EDIT 2: I found this post (https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Ubuntu/Anyone-Have-Working-Hybrid-Graphics-on-Linux/td-p/4357559) which instructs you how to add a conf file that forces X to always use the Intel graphics. This seems to have worked to solve the corruption, but now I have no access to the Nvidia card at all from X (e.g. with prime-run). At least the machine is usable now, but if there's anyone who knows how to get the hybrid graphics setup working properly so that certain apps can be pushed to the Nvidia GPU as desired, would be awesome!

What might cause this?

Basically title. I have no idea if people are using nostalgia googgles or have a legit point, but one thing i keep hearing being brought up is that current thinkpads dont have as good of a build quality or are built as though as older T480 models or IBM models. Whenever i hear about people using linux on old thinkpads they always say to stay away from the modern T14 due to quality issues.

I'm currently running auto-cpufreq on my T14 Gen 4 AMD with tlp for battery management only. But having read more about AMD's p-state, I'm not sure that this is the best strategy. Any advice?

My T14s Gen3 (AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U with Radeon Graphics) was working great with Kubuntu 23.04. However, on upgrading to 23.10, I found that the system would freeze if I connected the laptop to an external HDMI monitor. Unplugging the HDMI cable resulted in an unusable system, which I had to reset manually. Rebooting normally, the boot sequence would arrive at the SDDM (login manager screen), and the screen would go black again. Only way to boot up is via Recovery option.

I had an old copy of a 6.2 kernel, and booting into it seemed to go back to normal. However, I now only have 6.5.14 and 6.5.15 (I am trying to install a newer kernel from mainline, or will try to install 6.2 if that doesn't work).

I don't really know how to debug this issue. Connecting to an external USB-C dock with an HDMI cable doesn't work as before (dock works with a different computer), no external monitor is found. It's really infuriating! Anyone got any hints as to how to go around this?

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I recently got a sweet deal on a T14 Gen4 AMD. Loving it! I'm using it with a Lenovo Thunderbolt 3 Dock Gen 2, which works well most of the time. However, when it wakes up from suspend when connected to the dock, often the screen stays black. Sometimes I get like 0.0001 % brightness, which is enough to see that everything is working normal, just the screen brightness is too low. I can't increase it. I'm using Fedora 39.

Any advice? Any idea which forum to crosspost to?

Greetings,

I work at a small 501c.3 refurbishing donated computers. Recently we got the mother lode. ~400 T470s and T480s with a couple T490s sprinkled in for good measure. We have been using fog to image them using a kubuntu image. As with the course of refurbishment, I encounter machines with weak/bad batteries. As a cost saving measure, I was wondering if the internal battery could be omitted (disabled permanently) and install the 72Wh (61++) battery and distribute that to our clients w/o any issues. So far out of what we have received, I have about 50 machines that have bad batteries. Otherwise these have been execellent quality donations. I welcome your feedback.

tia

I've just bought my first ThinkPad, a maxed out T14s Gen 4 AMD (32 GB RAM, AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U wtih integrated Radeon 780M graphics) and I used Windows on it for a few weeks before I got the time to install Linux; on Windows I didn't experience any kind of issues with networking or with performance, so I wasn't expecting any problems on Linux.

Now, I have installed EndeavourOS with KDE Plasma and made basically only cosmetic changes to it. From what I understand, out of the box support is only available for s2idle sleep, and I didn't set up a swap partition so I couldn't use anything else.

I have noticed that some times, when waking up from sleep, everything behaves normally, but in other times the graphics are really sluggish. nvtop and htop don't show any huge resource utilisation, and even closing all other apps and leaving only the DE running still results in sluggish animations (e.g. when switching virtual desktops).

Has anyone else experienced issues with graphics after returning from sleep? Would you recommend I try anything to solve the issue?

From some research I did (not very directed since I didn't really know what to look for), it could be that the GPU isn't waking from sleep properly due to some Dynamic Power Management bug, with a possible workaround described here. I haven't tried it yet but plan to, and will report results back here when I do.

Anyway, thanks in advance for the help and for the great community!

Just a bit more information on what I'm running exactly:

me@t14s ~> neofetch
                     ./o.                  me@t14s
                   ./sssso-                ----------
                 `:osssssss+-              OS: EndeavourOS Linux x86_64
               `:+sssssssssso/.            Host: 21F8CTO1WW ThinkPad T14s Gen 4
             `-/ossssssssssssso/.          Kernel: 6.6.2-arch1-1
           `-/+sssssssssssssssso+:`        Uptime: 1 hour, 44 mins
         `-:/+sssssssssssssssssso+/.       Packages: 1049 (pacman)
       `.://osssssssssssssssssssso++-      Shell: fish 3.6.1
      .://+ssssssssssssssssssssssso++:     Resolution: 1920x1200
    .:///ossssssssssssssssssssssssso++:    DE: Plasma 5.27.9
  `:////ssssssssssssssssssssssssssso+++.   WM: KWin
`-////+ssssssssssssssssssssssssssso++++-   WM Theme: Breeze
 `..-+oosssssssssssssssssssssssso+++++/`   Theme: [Plasma], Breeze [GTK2/3]
   ./++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++/:.     Icons: [Plasma], breeze [GTK2/3]
  `:::::::::::::::::::::::::------``       Terminal: alacritty
                                           CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U w/ Radeon 780M Graphics (16) @ 5.28
                                           GPU: AMD ATI c3:00.0 Phoenix1
                                           Memory: 2160MiB / 30784MiB

me@t14s ~> cat /sys/power/mem_sleep
[s2idle]

Also worth pointing out that restarting the X session (either by rebooting or logging out and then back in) gets the graphics back to normal, but just changing the screen refresh rate to a different value and then back (as some people in other places suggested) does not.

Edit: Fix formatting for code blocks

hello I am pretty new here but I know a little bit about Linux but I have not been able to install Steam on the

ThinkPad my dad let me borrow to play terraria on it if anybody can help I will be laying

on my virtual bedroom bed sobbing btw everytime i try to install and log in it without having it crap itself

Love this unit, ultra light & portable, silent, completely fanless, incredible battery life, instantly on and always connected.

Just need to get rid of this windoze malware, any guidance and feedback appreciated.

Initial goal is to use as a mobile router with AT&T's $20 Tablet plan, get truly unlimited hotspotting. Cost me $700 so not much more than just a decent 5G router, all further functionality is just gravy on top!

At this point just doing my initial research, will use this thread to link to resources I find, other threads and then document my efforts.

I am a bit noobish in this topic area, please be gentle when I need stuff ELI5.

I've been running Linux on my T450s for a long time now, basically wiping Windows and installing Linux was the first thing I did when I took it out of the box so many years ago. I bought it specifically to run Linux on.

However, I feel like the clickpad needs a little work. I'll do my best to explain what's going on, but it may be difficult to pick up what I'm putting down since it is so subjective.

The two main issues I'm experiencing is being "over sensitive" with two finger scrolling. However, that's kind of a misnomer. I'm not unhappy with the speed of the scrolling or anything like that, but it seems to kind of bounce up and down a little... if that makes sense. Almost like the driver isn't "smoothing" enough.

The other issue is that I like to rest my thumb on the bottom of the clickpad, as if it were an old school button. This works pretty well, usually, but sometimes (maybe 45% of the time) when I go to click with my thumb the pointer will move, or worse jump occasionally. Again this seems to be an issue with some "smoothing" or thumb detection.

Basically, I'm hoping that someone out there has taken the time to really tweak and refine the options for libinput to reach that clickpad nirvana. As much as I like to dump on Macs, I do have to admit that their trackpads / clickpads work really well under OS X. If at all possible, I would like to get as close to that highly refined experience under Linux with this hardware.

In short, the touchpad experience is pretty good, but I think it needs a bit more refining... if someone has the holy grail of libinput configs, please share it or I suppose, perhaps, suggest what options to tweak and where to begin?

Thanks a lot and thanks for indulging my OCD lol.

I'm running arch on my X1C. I upgraded from a 9th generation, which had S3 sleep as an option in BIOS. This one doesn't.

cat /sys/power/mem_sleep only shows s2idle, no deep sleep.

What are other people doing? Is there any way to get suspend to work properly on this laptop?

I run LXDE so don't have whatever features for controlling the input interfaces might be built into whatever the standard DE is for Ubuntu these days.

Any other Ubuntu on Thinkpad users know of a GUI that can easily disable/enable the trackpad as required?

Thinkpad E15 Gen 3.

I am currently considering buying a used thinkpad, but am far more accustomed to the desktop GPU space.

Background

I've been through the "nouveau is busted, x11 does not launch, and the new nvidia gpl condom does not compile with the new kernel so SOL" too many times in my life. I don't want that frustration and time-sink.

Which is to say, I might accept a discrete nvidia gpu as a gift (and maybe store/regift/resell it), but I would certainly would not invest any of my money in one. I would much rather my money go towards something more working-and-open anyway (like the upstreamed AMD GPU drivers).

My limited research to this point indicates that nvidia gpus are a common "upgrade" option for thinkpads, and this troubles me a bit.

Questions

Should I avoid thinkpads with an nvidia gpu? Is this even a common concern for other linuxians?

In general, if I end up with a thinkpad that has an nvidia "upgrade", can it be disabled in the bios, or physically removed without major issues (i.e. falling back to intel integrated graphics as if it was not present)?

Are the nvidia mobile woes generally better or worse than desktop gpu woes? On rare occasion, I have had to move my display cable from my GPU to my motherboard, and it seems like that would be impossible on a laptop.

Hello

Long time Linux user here, and also a Lenovo user, but no use for a laptop currently so rather out of the loop. Saying that, the first laptop I owned was a Thinkpad 380d running RedHat 4.2. Had a whopping 16MB of ram! :)

My partner has tasked me to find a new notebook to replace her IdeaPad (which is a dreadful machine and has been far more trouble than it's worth). She specifically wants to run this game well (her current machine can do it but only badly).

She wants to run a game called Two Point Campus on Steam. These are the recommended specs from its page on the steam website:

Recommended:

• Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system

• OS: Ubuntu 20.04/Steam OS

• Processor: Intel Core i5 6600 or AMD Ryzen 1600x

• Memory: 8 GB

• Graphics: NVIDIA Geforce GTX 1060, 3 GB (Legacy: NVIDIA Geforce GTX 780, 4GB) or AMD RX 580, 4 GB (Legacy: AMD R9 290X, 4GB )

• Storage: 6 GB available space

• Sound Card: 6 GB available space

• Additional Notes: DirectX Version 11, Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system

What's the cheapest/least hassle Thinkpad available on eBay that will comfortably run this game? I know the instructions say Ubunu or Steam OS, but I've been using Debian since about 2003 and I would like to stay with it if possible. I accept that I might need to use nonfree drivers and while I don't like that I accept that to live a happy life it helps to have a happy wife.

Thanks in advance.

Hello,

I have trouble making my fingerprint reader work with fprint on arch. I downloaded the driver on Lenovo's website (libfprint-2-tod1-elan.so), and placed it in the /usr/lib folder, but running fprintd-enroll gives me the "No devices available" error. I also tried placing it in the libfprint-2 folder, with no luck. I am doing something wrong ?

Dear community,

I got a brand new T15, installed Fedora37 (i3 spin) and I tought I could use its 8 CPUs to do some heavy C++ compilation. However, results were pretty bad...

I ran a phoronix benchmark to verify that it is indeed the case, and, sadly, it is:

https://openbenchmarking.org/result/2303160-NE-PTSLLVMMA52

The "build llvm" results are showing at ~4th percentile, which is surprisingly bad for that machine.

(the laptop was on power supply when i ran the benchmark)

would appriciate your thoughts!

I’m trying to install Arch on my x230, using an ISO I’ve put on a USB flash drive.

The step I get stuck at is: Waiting 30 seconds for device /dev/disk/by-uuid/2023-03-01-12-52-00 …

However, I receive the following error: ‘UUID=2023-03-01-12-52-00’ device did not show up after 30 seconds…

From what I can tell in my Google searches, this just means that some kind of mount and/or pointer is misconfigured (I’m not familiar with Linux so I’m not sure).

I’ve cd’d into dev/disk/ and ls’d only to find: by-diskseq , by-id , and by-path .

The CLI then falls back to the interactive prompt.

Has anyone else recently run into this problem, and found a solution? Or is this post better suited somewhere else?

Update: the solution was to change the USB port I had my flash drive plugged into. After loading the ISO to RAM, removing the USB from one port and plugging it in to another while the PC was on solved the issue. I was then able to install Arch like normal.

I've been a long-time user of Linux Mint on my T460p ThinkPad, but I'm now looking to try out a new Linux distribution. I'm hoping to find a distro that is easy to use, stable, and provides good battery life on my ThinkPad.

My primary use cases are web browsing, document editing, and programming. I'm open to any suggestions, and I would love to hear about your personal experiences with different distros on the ThinkPad T460p.

I've heard great things about Ubuntu, Fedora, and Debian, but I'm open to any other suggestions that you may have. Please feel free to share your recommendations and any tips or tricks that you have for optimizing your Linux distro on your ThinkPad.

Thank you in advance for your help!

I recently got a T540p with the buttonless trackpad and have been using Manjaro KDE 5.15. There's an issue with the trackpad where it'd frequently just stop working properly. Some examples include:

-Trackpad and trackpoint not working at all after waking from suspend (updating BIOS may have fixed this?).

-Trackpad would randomly start doing gestures as it detects a "ghost finger" (moving the cursor with one finger ends up scrolling as if I'm using two fingers).

-Trackpad would randomly start middle/right clicking out of nowhere.

-Trackpad would still register right and middle clicks after suspend, despite disabling the trackpad from the settings. These aren't random clicks though.

None of these issues appear on Windows, and I'm unsure whether I should redo my Manjaro install or move to a different distro. Manjaro KDE is the only distro and DE I'm comfortable with at the moment, so I'd prefer to stick to this. Are there any fixes I could try?