Mastodawn

Lisa Lorenzin KR4LFE (she/her)

#Microsoft has finally annoyed me enough with this #Copilot and #Recall bullshit to overcome my inertia around moving off #Windows on my daily-driver laptop (#Lenovo #Thinkpad T14s).

Biggest concern is support for my Lenovo Thinkpad Hybrid USB-C dock. I'm not using anything unusual with it - just monitor, custom keyboard, wireless mouse. But I definitely need that to work under whatever #OS I switch to!

My primary apps are Firefox, LibreOffice, PuTTY, and file explorer to access our NAS via SMB. Others include Audacity, Foxit, Notepad++ - all generally available on #Linux. So I'm leaning in that direction - #FreeBSD also seems appealing, but I worry about how much tweaking I'd have to do to get things working.

Any distro suggestions? Anyone successfully using Linux with a Thinkpad dock?

#LinuxOnDesktop #LinuxOnDesktop2024

@llorenzin You'll probably want something with a newer kernel. Something like Fedora or openSUSE Tumbleweed would be good options for something like that. Ubuntu 24.04 or Debian SID maybe

But on the dock thing, that's going to depend a lot on drivers. Some of them work fine, others don't, and that's going to have more to do with the kernel than the distro. Those types of drivers are kernel specific. If it's in, then you're good, if it's not, then it might not work the way you want or at all.

Lisa Lorenzin KR4LFE (she/her)May 22, 2024

@thelinuxcast thank you!

@llorenzin there's a decent chance you can test this in a very low risk way: Some of the distro bootable installer images (e.g., Ubuntu) allow you to test before installing. If I were in your shoes, I'd boot it up and run it and see how it behaves.

Lisa Lorenzin KR4LFE (she/her)May 22, 2024

@DaveMWilburn that's a great approach, and I will certainly do so. Thank you!

Laptop Retrospective May 22, 2024

@llorenzin When it comes to docking stations, there shouldn't be any Windows-specific sauce to worry about, maybe outside of firmware updates.

Farce Majeure May 22, 2024

@laptopretrospective @llorenzin Lenovo ThinkPads and Docking Stations are well supported on the LVFS. They were one of the earlier vendors to support firmware updates on Linux.

Laptop Retrospective May 22, 2024

@vathpela @llorenzin Excellent, glad to hear it.

Lisa Lorenzin KR4LFE (she/her)May 22, 2024

@vathpela @laptopretrospective ooh, very encouraging - thanks!

Farce Majeure May 22, 2024

@llorenzin @laptopretrospective in fact I spent a week at their HQ in Morrisville (well, I stayed at my parents place in Raleigh) helping make it all work in... Maybe early 2018?

Laptop Retrospective May 23, 2024

@vathpela @llorenzin That sounds pretty darn neat. What was all involved in that process?

Farce Majeure May 23, 2024

@laptopretrospective @llorenzin unfortunately I think that's the limit of what I can say about it.

Laptop Retrospective May 23, 2024

@vathpela @llorenzin Gotcha. Thanks for sharing all the same.

Lisa Lorenzin KR4LFE (she/her)May 22, 2024

@laptopretrospective thank you!

avmakt May 22, 2024

@llorenzin
Good choice!

I'm running Mint Cinnamon on my T14s Gen 2 and love it!

Battery life is meh, but I'm usually (USB-C) docked and haven't bothered doing any tuning.

Can't recall if I had any problems, but if I had I probably found easy fixes in the excellent Arch wiki - https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php?search=t14s

Search results for "t14s" - ArchWiki

Lisa Lorenzin KR4LFE (she/her)May 22, 2024

@avmakt thank you! That's very encouraging, and I appreciate the resource... :)

/usr/local/goth May 22, 2024

@llorenzin for disro recommendations, I think I'd steer people towards fedora. It gets timely package updates within a version which I think is more important than Debian like stability for desktop users (not knocking Debian it has different goals and philosophy). Fedora's docs are pretty good, and there's a decently large community.

Also if you've admined a centos or rhel system you'll be in the same rpm based package ecosystem.

Personally I daily drive Arch Linux because as a Linux gamer getting fresh graphics driver updates is important to me.

Lisa Lorenzin KR4LFE (she/her)May 22, 2024

@ladytel thank you! I run a CentOS web & mail server, so Fedora is appealing - but I'm also a big fan of stability / not a very demanding user, and hearing lots of recs for Debian, so I think I'm going to try bootable USB of each and see which one plays most nice with my hardware...

BjarkeVL May 23, 2024

Yes! Works here without any problem at all! I’m quite surprised in a positive way how smooth the transition from windows to Linux went. Especially with my setup with the Lenovo usb-c dock and a quite wide screen with its own usb-hub. It just woks.

I tried first just booting the machine from a usb stick to see if the hardware was supported before installing it.

Using pop_os. (https://pop.system76.com/)

Pop!_OS by System76

Imagine an OS for the software developer, maker and computer science professional who uses their computer as a tool to discover and create. Welcome to Pop!_OS.

Lisa Lorenzin KR4LFE (she/her)May 23, 2024

@bvli very encouraging, thank you!!! I'm definitely going to try the bootable-USB route before I commit. :)

System76 is such a great org... I wasn't looking for a Linux laptop when I got this T14s, and it's relatively new, so I'm not planning to replace it any time soon - but they are absolutely on my radar for my next refresh.

Jon 🇳🇿May 23, 2024

@llorenzin As a compete Linux noob, I installed Mint on a refurbed Thinkpad X380 Yoga yesterday (for similar reasons) and it didn't miss a beat. All BT and WiFi peripherals work fine and I am really enjoying the distro and the tweakability without having to dive into the command line.

Lisa Lorenzin KR4LFE (she/her)May 23, 2024

@jond ooh, that's really encouraging - thanks! I'm glad the install was so smooth and you're enjoying it so much already... 🥰

Sandwich May 23, 2024

@llorenzin Il also recommend EndevourOS or Arch if you are more tech heavy.

I have experience with Lenovo Docking stations and it can be a pain on some DEs.

Everything wlroots based like hyprland and sway needs patching to get it to work at all. Ive made some AUR packages with Displaylink patches for that.

KDE Plasma 6 is handling it well but check this out:
https://github.com/DisplayLink/evdi/issues/459#issuecomment-2020292805

And BSD unfortunately no chance did not handle it at all.

Also a Tip if your using any Rolling Release Distro like Arch, don't update to the latest major kernel update imidietly but wait like 1-2weeks, otherwise evdi might be not ready yet.

ABGR8888 causes DisplayLink reconnection loop on Wayland sessions · Issue #459 · DisplayLink/evdi

Freeze Issue with DisplayLink Monitors on Wayland with ARGB8888 Based Compositors Summary A significant issue has been identified affecting users of the Plasma 6 environment when connecting monitor...

GitHub

Lisa Lorenzin KR4LFE (she/her)May 23, 2024

@sandwich wow, thank you - I really appreciate all the great info and resources! Definitely need to understand these better so I can avoid potential pitfalls...

I was a Linux sysadmin 20 years ago, and still run a mail & web server in my basement, but tbh I don't want to sysadmin my laptop - I just want it to work. :)

Andrew Wigglesworth May 26, 2024

@llorenzin As others have commented, with your further posts in mind, I think you'd be very happy with Debian Stable (Bookworm atm).

I've used Debian for decades now (well, over 2 decades is a plural ... first installed it in 1999).

If you want your computer to "just work", reliably turn on in the morning, but have great security fixes, then Debian Stable is where it's at.

I'm sure that there are other distros that you get on with, but for what you list, Debian is basically "set and forget"

Andrew Wigglesworth May 26, 2024

@llorenzin If you do install Debian Stable, be aware that the default Swap size that the installer sets does not cater for hibernation.

The Swap size question is a little complex, there's an interesting article about the practicalities here:

https://itsfoss.com/swap-size/

How Much Swap Should You Use in Linux?

How much should be the swap size? Should the swap be double of the RAM size or should it be half of the RAM size? Do I need swap at all if my system has got several GBs of RAM? Your questions answered in this detailed article.

It's FOSS

Lisa Lorenzin KR4LFE (she/her)May 26, 2024

@ecadre thank you! I appreciate the heads-up and will make sure I understand that topic before diving in...