The first consumer-facing Lenovo laptop shipping with Fedora is available to purchase, with several additional forthcoming featuring Fedora, RHEL and Ubuntu. To celebrate the achievement, Red Hat Senior Software Engineering Manager Christian Schaller has penned an enormous and decidedly effusive blog post regarding these new Fedora-powered ThinkPads. Schaller also summarizes Red Hat’s prior efforts to push Linux forward, and teases a few interesting things on the laptop roadmap.
Pictured: The Lenovo ThinkPad P53 with Fedora Workstation, which should be available on the Lenovo ... [+]
Jason EvangelhoSchaller doesn’t waste any time highlighting why Lenovo’s new Linux initiative — years in the making — is a big deal.
“This is a unique collaboration between the worlds largest laptop maker and the worlds largest Linux company,” says Schaller. “What we are doing here isn’t just a minimal hardware enablement effort, but a concerted effort to evolve Linux as a laptop operating system and doing it in a proper open source way.”
That’s an ambitious plan and I’m here for it.
In my recent interview with Lenovo’s Mark Pearson (embedded below), I got the sense that the company truly wants to treat Linux as a first-class citizen, and my experience with the ThinkPad P53 feels like a confident step toward achieving that reality.
As I’ve mentioned before, Lenovo isn’t simply slapping Fedora Workstation on these systems.
“Lenovo made sure to get all of their component makers to ramp up their Linux support and we have been working with them to both help get them started writing drivers for Linux or by helping add infrastructure they could plug their hardware into,” says Schaller.
Part of that infrastructure is LVFS — Linux Vendor Firmware Service — which assures customers that updated firmware gets delivered not just for the laptop, but also for its components such as the fingerprint sensor.
If you’ve ever felt snubbed by a PC purchase because you discovered some of that hardware went completely unsupported in Linux, you’ll no doubt understand the importance of the above.
Schaller also outlined prior work (Wayland, Pipewire audio) and a laundry list of future improvements being worked on by Red Hat and Lenovo, including two that are most welcome:
- Improved power management features to maximize performance and battery life
- Lap detection support (which ensures the laptop won’t run too hot, in part by regulating the strength of components like radio antennas)
Schaller ends the first half of his post on a bold note, ensuring potential customers that buying a Lenovo laptop with Fedora gets them a great system and supports “our efforts to take Linux to the next level, something which I think we are truly the only Linux vendor with the scale and engineering ability to do.”
Woof! Your move, Dell. . .
The Link LonkSeptember 02, 2020 at 12:11AM
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Red Hat And Lenovo Want To ‘Evolve Linux’ As A Laptop OS - Forbes
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