[kwlug-disc] laptops with Linux preinstalled

[Doug Moen]

On Wed, Sep 23, 2020, at 11:45 AM, Ron Singh wrote:
> Doug, be heartened by the fact that almost always, that ETA is often incorrect in that the laptop will get to you much earlier. 
> That has been my experience.

My Thinkpad T14 arrived today! It has been a long wait, since I originally ordered in August. I didn't cancel, buy a used Thinkpad, buy a MacBook M1, or the other alternatives, because... the T14 with an AMD Ryzen 4750 still seems like the best fit for my needs. Note that I already have a T450, but this machine is going to be my daily driver, it's a premium machine intended to be a MacBook Pro replacement, except running Linux. The 8 core Ryzen with its beefy GPU will provide fast compile times for my open source project and be powerful enough to run my graphics code. The Thinkpad itself falls short of my goals in some ways, but it is super moddable and repairable.

My first mod is to remove the 128GB SSD and replace it with a 1TB SSD, the fastest Samsung I could find compatible with my hardware. I bought it today on sale at Canada Computers for $200. Lenovo charges C$1055 extra for this option. I just spent an hour watching YouTube videos on how to upgrade a T14. I will also upgrade the memory to dual channel, since that speeds up the Ryzen, and obviously I didn't want to pay Lenovo prices for fully maxed memory.

The keyboard is the wrong configuration (no backlight), and sales support agrees I got the wrong hardware, but after this long a wait, there is no way I am returning it and waiting for a replacement. Could be another 6 months before I get another one. I will purchase a new keyboard and replace it myself.

The trackpad is bad. It's actually worse than the trackpad in my T450, which I didn't think possible. This matters because I am transitioning from an old Macbook with a wonderful trackpad. Fortunately, lots of T14 owners on reddit have replaced their trackpad with a much better trackpad intended for the high end P1 and the X1 extreme. And the part is relatively cheap. I'll be running Wayland because there is a software project to create a MacBook quality trackpad driver, and their code hasn't been accepted into X11 yet. Nobody wants to work on X11, the project is highly resource constrained, so I understand the delay.

I didn't expect to replace this much of the hardware right at the beginning, but the ability to mod the Thinkpad (and the size of the modding community, and the availability of parts) was part of my reason for buying one.

I am initially planning to install Pop OS. This is based on the amazing sales pitch Jason gave a few years ago. Plus, the new easy-to-use tiling window manager sounds interesting. I am still interested to hear from Jason why he ditched Pop OS for Fedora.
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