saturnian Posted April 28, 2020 Share Posted April 28, 2020 You all have probably read about this already. I wondered what folks here might think about it. -- Lenovo is joining Dell in the “OEM Linux Laptop” club: Several Thinkpad models will join the Dell XPS 13 DE in Linux-land this year. I've run Fedora in the past, but I'd probably replace it with Debian -- if I was to purchase one of these. Lol, that $1200 check, if/when it comes? Hm, maybe not, have to be very careful with my $$ with all that's going on. Kinda tempting, though. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted April 28, 2020 Share Posted April 28, 2020 Neat, but weren't they doing this last year?? Lenovo shipping Ubuntu Linux on 2019 ThinkPad P-series models Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
saturnian Posted April 28, 2020 Author Share Posted April 28, 2020 I wouldn't know, but... Quote Lenovo's newly-announced 2019 ThinkPad P-series mobile workstations can be purchased with Ubuntu, according to the ordering page on Lenovo's website. Following that link, all I see is Windows mentioned. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hedon James Posted April 28, 2020 Share Posted April 28, 2020 I support any efforts by any OEM to bring pre-installed linux machines to market. IMO, that is the single biggest hurdle to linux adoption for most users. When folks buy a new machine, they WANT it to work out of the box. If it came with Windows, or OSX, so be it. That's what they'll use. With that said, I wonder why they chose Fedora? Fedora is the "test bed" for Red Hat and gets completely upgraded every 6-9(?) months. So I suspect most folks are going to resist the upgrade, and those that do it are going to have to follow through every 6-9 months (no skipping upgrades...they're linear). That's a LOT of opportunities to bork your system and consider that "maybe I should've just stuck with windows?" OTOH, I'm sure there will be folks (there ARE folks!) who think Fedora is perfect for them. With all that said, I think it's a good thing. Could be a better thing, and maybe it will be, but it's a step in the right direction for a longer-term solution. Choices are good, IMO! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
saturnian Posted April 28, 2020 Author Share Posted April 28, 2020 (edited) https://fedoramagazine.org/coming-soon-fedora-on-lenovo-laptops/ Very interesting, take a look at the comments following the article. Edited April 28, 2020 by saturnian 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raymac46 Posted April 28, 2020 Share Posted April 28, 2020 In my view the best way to go is to have your own version of Linux like Pop!_OS as System 76 does. That way everything is checked out with the hardware before the system ships and the builder can keep track of the necessary upgrades. They can set up an upgrade manager to make sure nothing gets broken. I know that a preinstalled Linux would go a long way towards increasing its popularity, but I worry about too much choice for uninformed consumers. Fedora is a nice distro but it's a little too ginchy for consumers. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted April 28, 2020 Share Posted April 28, 2020 3 hours ago, raymac46 said: Fedora is a nice distro but it's a little too ginchy for consumers. What do you mean by that? Personally, I think Fedora and LinuxMint are good ones for beginners. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raymac46 Posted April 28, 2020 Share Posted April 28, 2020 (edited) Fedora is like Debian. It's only open source so you can have issues with codecs and firmware. I am not a big fan of the RPM package management system either. Linux Mint is a good beginners distro because it takes care of those issues for you. Maybe if Lenovo customizes Fedora it would be OK. But I think you need a little more experience with Linux before you tackle Fedora. Mageia would be better if you like RPM. Edited April 28, 2020 by raymac46 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
saturnian Posted April 28, 2020 Author Share Posted April 28, 2020 I ran Fedora here from the F14 release to the F18 release. Might be interesting to see how things are looking these days. I like apt and pacman better than .rpm package management. I thought Fedora was ok but I remember having to fix issues at times. I don't think it would matter to me which distro they shipped these machines with because if it already runs Linux then it's probably a piece of cake to install a different distro. No opinion on whether Lenovo's choice of Fedora would be good/bad for folks new to Linux because a lot of that depends on the user, seems to me. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted April 28, 2020 Share Posted April 28, 2020 And it depends on how they pre-setup Fedora. I doubt that Lenovo would use a vanilla install without some of their branding (wallpaper and themes). Depending on their license, they may include codecs and such as well. I'd be interested to see what choice of applications that they used. 1 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raymac46 Posted April 28, 2020 Share Posted April 28, 2020 Yes if the OEM does a good job the end user should be in good shape regardless of the choice of distro. I believe Fedora has some sort of automatic update feature which could take care of the need to upgrade when the next release comes along. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ebrke Posted April 29, 2020 Share Posted April 29, 2020 On 4/28/2020 at 1:49 PM, raymac46 said: Mageia would be better if you like RPM. Or OpenSUSE. Still plugging for my distro of the last 18 years. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raymac46 Posted April 30, 2020 Share Posted April 30, 2020 I have very limited experience with OpenSUSE as far as installation or configuration goes. In my experience with RPM distros they tend to be a bit harder to configure and update. But maybe that is just me since I have a lot more experience with Debian based stuff. Mandriva used to have something called PLF to get all the nonfree codecs. I think Mageia is a bit more streamlined now. The best distros I've found to get everything running out of the box are MX-Linux and Linux Mint. But as Josh already pointed out, an OEM should be able to get any distro humming along with proper setup on their own hardware. 1 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
saturnian Posted April 30, 2020 Author Share Posted April 30, 2020 I felt that openSUSE was nicer for me than Fedora, but I did enjoy both. openSUSE would really be an excellent and attractive choice for a machine that came with Linux preinstalled. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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