I wonder if Linux will support laptops in my lifetime

Perhaps I will find myself in a world where Linux supports laptops if I someday stop buying Lenovos

They're just so cheap :(

@mcc I'm not sure what you mean. I suspect there is some nuance I'm missing here, but I run Linux on my (Lenovo) laptop just fine. I have an 11th gen Thinkpad X1 Carbon.

@hyperreal if you put it to sleep by closing the lid, how often does it wake up again

@mcc see, you're buying the wrong lenovo. you need to get a thinkpad and install arch and maybe wear some thigh highs

@mcc my Thinkpad is working great! The only problem is that the fingerprint reader sometimes doesn’t come up as an option. But it usually does

@mcc @hyperreal Wait, you can step away from a computer?!

@mcc my Acer is totally supported by openSUSE Tumbleweed. Battery life isn't great, but it's not because of Linux.

@mcc My laptop doesn't go into suspend mode because I have disabled suspend, but the display goes to sleep when I close the lid. I don't recall if there was ever a time where the display didn't wake up after opening the lid.

@mcc @hyperreal hmm, i have a t14gen4 (from work), and that had such a problem for w few months a few months ago but has been totally fine ever since

I have people replying to this by saying that Linux runs fine on their laptop. That doesn't help me unless you're going to sell me your laptop. Linux has significant problems on my laptop

@mcc I run Fedora on a Levono on a i5 220 touchscreen, and Zorin on a newer Yoga i7 touchscreen. Both outperform my Mac Mini M4 in many ways. And they are more secure.

@mcc Latitude seems fair so far

@mcc This is literally a case of "works perfectly on my machine"

@jonfr600 humorously, i bought the amd one specifically because people spoke at such length about how much better supported AMD is than nvidia :(

@mcc useful for finding people to mute I guess, given that you did not ask for advice.

@mcc what about barebones like tinycore, mint xfce, lubuntu, or just vanilla debian?

@mcc I'm sorry I responded that way. But you made a general statement that "I wonder if Linux will support laptops in my lifetime". I interpreted that as meaning all laptops, not just yours.

@darkfigod I am running vanilla debian. It has a significant problem where once or twice a week the act of closing my laptop to put it to sleep results in it kernel panicking. My attempts to interface with debian support have so far been unsuccessful.

@darkfigod Their suggestion is I manually rewind kernels until I find one that doesn't crash, which isn't a terrible idea, but my repro is "use the device normally for three days until the problem happens" so it's tricky.

@mcc i actually run fleets of lenovo laptops of varying specs on linux?

@darkfigod This one is a ThinkPad T14 Gen 3 AMD. There appears to be a chipset-specific, potentially kernel-version-sensitive issue which was present when I first installed Ubuntu on it, then went away, then came back, then I installed Debian and it went away, then it came back.

@mcc
I've run various Ubuntus on ThinkPads over the years. I had to jump through hoops once because of old Intel CPUs. Something about a capability that wasn't properly reported by the processor that the new kernel had to have. Other than that it's been just install and go.

What kind of issues are you having?

@callmeray AMD CPU too new https://mastodon.social/@mcc/115086027868183449 , https://mastodon.social/@mcc/115086036160552394

@callmeray so i guess u need a thinkpad which is a very specific age. old enough the kernel issues have been worked out but not so old the kernel support bitrotted

@mcc Significant problems should not occur on even an older laptop, dual boot can take some expertise with the drive formats. These are over 10 years old and smoke my Mac M4 in so many areas. WHat Linux flavour are you trying : )

@BackFour i'm aware linux works well on older laptops but this is a new laptop and so it works poorly

https://mastodon.social/@mcc/115086027868183449

https://mastodon.social/@mcc/115086036160552394

I'm on Debian Trixie

@mcc
I think many of these problems are actually bugs in the CPU that the PC manufacturer has no incentive to fix for Linux. For Windows they'll actually change stuff on their motherboard to work around them.

@mcc I've come to the conclusion that it really only works well on machines that are designed for it. Some Linux laptop vendors like System76, Framework, Valve and so on.

@mcc Debian is your problem. Try Zorin free version running from a USB stick. just trying to help. I am so old, I remember when installing Linux meant you must be very knowledgeable of terminal commands. Also, using Linux is a choice, something all in the World should have.

@slyecho I am sad to report I conclude the same. Except I find even system76 complaining they can't get chipsets without s0ix.

@mcc You've probably seen this...

@mcc It's sad: ThinkPads (now unceremoniously owned by Lenovo) used to be the goto Linux laptop. Mine goes... OK on Fedora and Debian - but there's still weirdness and unsupported stuff there, even in an older model.

@mcc i am apparently on a lucky streak

@mcc @darkfigod Arch wiki has some potentially useful info about this model's problems with S3 sleep state and other eepy matters. (Which you will almost certainly have seen already... ;-) Also TIL about the delights of "Secure Rollback Prevention" for UEFI updates. Don't even think about downgrading that BIOS... https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Lenovo_ThinkPad_T14_(AMD)_Gen_3

@mcc I hadn't actually thought about this deeply before, but iirc quite a few laptops on the space station run Scientific Linux. I wonder how much time and energy is spent to make sure that actually works. Or if actually those are also deeply broken, but just in ways that don't matter for how those laptops are used (a lot of the audio/video "intensive" and day-to-day communication stuff is already offloaded onto Windows laptops and iPads, and I've seen subtle reference to preferring the iPads)

@m @darkfigod I actually don't consult the arch wiki so much since I stopped using arch

@mcc @darkfigod I've never used Arch but often find useful answers to my weird Linux niggles on their wiki. [Thinks...] Perhaps this is how they lure people in to their mysterious cult?

@mcc you are actually tormenting the hacker World. @2600

@mcc @hyperreal I have P14s G4 AMD (same as T14 G4).
The answer to your question is "every couple of hours on average"

@mcc I have a Lenovo ThinkPad T460 and every aspect of the machine works perfectly. I also have a HP and a Dell, which work perfectly in all aspects.

Sorry to hear you are having problems with yours, but I feel you are letting one bad experience taint your opinion of Linux.

@mcc
It supports laptops, just not ones you own. Please avoid buying the same model as one I own so it continues to work

@mcc seems a little dramatic of Debian to tell you to try previous kernels... when I've had these kinds of issues the troubleshooting starts with getting the system logs for the sleep/wake cycle for successful and, to the extent possible, for unsuccessful attempts. You can usually at least point to the system causing the problem that way.. just `journalctl -k -b0` for the current boot's logs and `-b1` for the previous boot (after panic/reboot).

@mcc I know you're not asking for explanations I'm just confused why step 1 is supposed to be "try older kernels", that's making it weirdly difficult.

@wronglang as far as I can tell, because the hard drive is not awake when the panic happens, there is no chance to write to the journal. The caps lock is blinking. I wish it would just print the message in Morse or something

@wronglang because the problem didn't occur at first and then started happening, implying a kernel update introduced the problem

@phi1997 I'll see what I can do

@mcc @hyperreal Oh yeah, the only machine I've ever had which I trusted suspend/resume was my Mac, it may work fine for all I know in Linux on my Dell and Lenovo but ususally I just shutdown when putting the thing away, so I understand the frustration. Maybe it works well on the few models which are certified for RHEL and Ubuntu, but there isn't enough money to pay for the work needed to make suspend truely reliable on all the models which are shipping with a different OS from the factory.

@IngaLovinde @hyperreal does it ever refuse to wake up, at which time the pulsing light on the Thinkpad logo turns solid red and the caps lock blinks steadily

@mcc I don't see in your posts which machine you're using, would you mind sharing that?

@slyecho @mcc I think aside from the models you mention and a few from Dell, HP, and Lenovo which have paid Linux developers to get the hardware support built, everything else is a volunteer effort as people have time and hardware to test, so support for random models from ASUS or whatever lag by at least a year to get all the hardware basically working, and stuff like suspend might never be reliable.

@mcc @IngaLovinde Now that I think of it from your description, I do recall that happening once. I think it was after I installed an OS and before I disabled suspend. I tried hard rebooting it by holding down the power button but it seemed like it was stuck in suspend mode. The capslock was blinking like that, I didn't notice the Thinkpad logo though. I think I just let it run out of battery, and when I charged it again it went back to normal.

The fact that I don't experience this issue too often is probably because I disable automatic suspend. If it's an issue with the suspend functionality then it definitely does affect Linux on my machine.

@wronglang ThinkPad T14 Gen 3 AMD

@wronglang my previous lenovo laptop that never worked right with linux and quickly got converted to windows 8 was a yoga 3 (NOT a yoga 3 pro)

@m @darkfigod it *is* a very good wiki

@mcc oh wow, there are a few long-standing issues specific to sleep on this laptop:

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=214649

There's various solutions thrown around in the thread but nothing final. The Arch wiki documents the other issue with suspend (in a red box warning near the top of the page)...

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Lenovo_ThinkPad_T14_(AMD)_Gen_3

Yeah, this is one of those where you'd have to know to check for known hardware issues before you buy the laptop.. ouch

@mcc it looks like there *are* a handful of solutions to the issues but they're also not "I just want Debian to work as-is" solutions. It's the kind of stuff that drove me to do Arch and NixOS but I wouldn't wish that on most people.

@mcc so if they partially implemented some solutions in Debian they might be fragile enough to break on updates (not even necessarily kernel updates since some of the solutions rely on time delays to order wake-up activities between the drivers and firmware)

@mcc @hyperreal I remember having plenty of problems like that both with G4 and with G3. Fixed them by using a new kernel and some combination of BIOS settings + using `zzz` command to do sleep at a specific S-level (don't remember which now) + some grub flags to disable SSD power saving (otherwise the system would wake up to readonly root partition). After that, black screen only happened rarely; what happened more often is pipewire on G4 losing wired 3.5mm mic in wake (I could still explicitly record from it with `arecord`, but browsers wouldn't see it until reboot), G3 iirc losing trackpoint (can be worked around by closing lid without sleep and reopening it, sometimes on second or third try), and G4 iirc (don't remember whether this was triggered by sleep or by lid close) displaying black internal screen on Wayland (solved by switching to another tty and back with Ctrl+Alt+F1, Ctrl+Alt+F7; however if you already were on text tty at this moment, the only way to recover is to reboot; but this only happens when external screen is not connected).
And as I said it wakes up from sleep after a couple of hours and just stays on consuming the battery, so I just put it to sleep using a script that initiates sleep every two seconds; so after opening the lid I have to switch to that terminal and press Ctrl+C within two seconds or it will go to sleep again. It still eats the battery (and melts all the chocolate nearby, not a big deal, I keep chocolate in farthest compartment from the laptop), so after around seven hours in that "sleep" the battery is empty, but one can just carry a charger and recharge it while it's "sleeping", to ensure that battery level won't reach zero and it won't just lose power and all the opened stuff.
Oh and like one time out of ten google meet in chrome will crash Wayland (after some graphics glitches) dumping you to login screen (or crashing the entire Linux sometimes), losing all your data, not a big deal. Not sure about Firefox because, even though webrtc generally works fine there, for meetings (be it Google meet, zoom and jitsi) you get extremely loud hearing-damaging white noise instead of the other side sound. So I just keep chrome for calls.
Oh and also 5mp camera works at like 640*360 max, bit that's actually good because people won't be able to ser all the details of my face.

It's all very easy really and works perfectly out of the box once you figure all the workarounds (I probably forgot to mention some), I don't know why people criticize Linux on this laptop, maybe they're just angry that they have to do Ctrl+Alt+F1 and Ctrl+Alt+F7 every time after opening the lid. Sure, sometimes after Ctrl+Alt+F7 you done that Wayland has crashed and all the application data lost, but it only happens like once per month. These people are probably just Linux haters and don't appreciate all the benefits of FOSS, because FOSS gives you control over everything, and some people are just afraid of control.

By the way did you get the internal mic working? It is detected on both G3 and G4 with the latest kernel, but only produces low-level noise and nothing else. I had to buy an USB mic for home (because jack mic is sometimes lost (including after sleep) and cannot be recovered until reboot, so when I'm traveling but have to work, I just disable sleep entirely). But internal mic probably sucks anyway, and also it used proprietary hardware or firmware and is definitely not libre, so good riddance.

@mcc @slyecho I have a modern system76 and even out of the box with popos it has terrible sleep power consumption. in some ways linux laptop experiences are much better than they were 15-20 years ago, others are notably worse. there was a time where s3 sleep actually worked pretty well on random machines, at least ime :/

@astraleureka @slyecho i miss s3 :(

@astraleureka @slyecho just mindblowing the chipset companies have decided we can't have s3 anymore. what if we want s3? no. the company decided and that's that. what if i switch to your competitor? no your competitor decided too

@m @mcc run archcraft

@mcc aha I see

@mcc good advice

@mcc I have a stack of laptops I don't regularly use (old hand-me-downs typically) and many have a post-it with comments like: "linux: backlight goes fucky when waking up" and "linux: PCIe controller loses it mind and the hard drive _eventually_. drive ro after reboot until fs repaired" and so on. On the laptop I am using (Samsung series 5 from 2012) I don't even let it suspend so I don't know how f'd up it really is!

To me, it always seems like there's *something*

@mcc
There is a list of compatibility and discussions at lenovo
https://support.lenovo.com/fr/fr/solutions/pd031426-linux-for-personal-systems
https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Linux-Discussion/bd-p/Special_Interest_Linux

@mcc @wronglang I‌ have a similar model (ThinkPad P15v Gen 3 AMD, has both an AMD iGP and an NVIDIA dGPU), and I have been running Debian Sid since I bought it. It has given me several *hardware* issues (fried mobo a few months after purchase, dead fan the following year), but no big software issue. I haven't upgraded OS in the last month or so, so I believe I'm at around Trixie level software-wise (kernel is 6.12.37+deb13, Mesa is 9.0.0-2+b2).

HOWEVER:

1/2

@mcc @wronglang

HOWEVER, I have a weird setup: I boot to console, not the GUI, with nvidia modules _disables_. When I want the GUI, I startx and only if I need the nvidia GPU (for CUDA, which is the only reason I have it in the first place) I modprobe the corresponding module. So the graphic system (1) is X11, not Wayland and (2) doesn't see the nvidia GPU at all.

I understand this information won't help you directly, but I hope it may be a useful datapoint in your debugging efforts.

2/2

@mcc @BackFour That T14 is old enough for Debian.

My conclusions after a lot of years using Linux on a lot of laptops: I won't buy the "just released!" anything. I look at Thinkpad, XPS, Latitude, and Precision and spend time looking for recurring problem reports with specific models.

Dell and Lenovo Thinkpad release hardware support packages for specific models, usually packaged for Ubuntu. Canonical maintains a site listing "Ubuntu Certified" hardware, fwiw, for those vendors plus HP.

@mcc will laps ever support laptops

@u0421793 it helps a lot to stop buying MacBooks… lenovos do not double as hotplates

@mcc the best trick I've figured out, is to buy the laptops that big Linux companies issue standard to their devs. Because if a kernel dev is made to use a laptop that doesn't work right, that's getting fixed. (The exception is, apparently nobody cares about fingerprint readers. I assume using them is against security policy so they don't get fixed.)

Outside of Lenovo, that means Dell XPS 13 and 15, at least. (To be fair, they used to at least sell a version of the 13 with Ubuntu.) Not sure if there are other models that also fit this criteria. There are also Precision (workstation) versions of these models that have very similar hardware and I'd expect to work, though I haven't bought any to verify. I have no idea what they call new versions of these models now that Dell threw away all its model branding and naming conventions.

Of course, this doesn't address your broader point that Linux support for laptops in general is weak. I have no experience with that, but I have sympathy. Given the weird hardware topology of my laptops and how much it varies between the Dell and Lenovo (yeah I bought a bunch of old laptops instead of buying Chromebooks), I suspect laptops are more varied and weird than desktops, which probably doesn't help...

@mcc there is that (especially my i9 which would probably work for flow soldering).

The other thing though is the totall unergonomy of a laptop on the lap – the arms are hunched in so the shoulders are suffering, the eyes are looking way way down so the neck is suffering – it’s rare to see a laptop actually used on top of a lap, at least for any length

@Specialist_Being_677 @mcc Much like how every year has, somehow, been The Year Of Linux On The Desktop, every single year has also been The Year Linux Continues To Be Wonky On Laptops. I feel like I've seen or been part of this same conversation for decades now.

@Specialist_Being_677 @mcc I had Precision 16 as work laptop and it has been worst working Linux laptop I had. It was from the NVIDIA dual GPU era though, but even after powering off the discrete GPU the Xeon CPU just ate through the battery. Associated (thunderbolt) dock hard crashed often, required firmware updates and updating required Dell support software which worked only on Windows.. that whole saga left a bad taste in my mouth.

@Specialist_Being_677 @mcc As a positive note, it was actually possible to turn off the power through ACPI. Which was a nice thing in the dual-gpu hellscape

@Specialist_Being_677 @mcc you don't even have to go that far, just find stuff that's been out about a year and look for NixOS/Arch power-users and how much they complain about the hardware issues. NixOS has a whole database of laptop-specific tweaks you can pull in but it's still really far from "Linux works on laptops"

@Specialist_Being_677 @mcc I have an XPS 13 9360 which is one they offered with Ubuntu but running Debian instead. Was great for about the first 4-5 years, working suspend and all. That got broken with Debian updates and has stayed broken for years. I guess since it is older all of these used as corporate laptops are retired.

@mcc maybe it helps if you get a laptop which supports Linux? (System76, tuxedo computers, maybe framework)

@double_a_runi so the thing is at the time i bought this laptop a framework cost roughly three times as much…

actually, my next laptop will probably be a framework— i was afraid to pay much for this laptop because i wasn't sure desktop linux would work out (it did)

The thing is, like with all my lenovo devices, it's *almost* perfect, except for that one glaring problem. (i've received replies convincingly arguing that this laptop just has issues and Windows would be failing in the same way.)

@dlharmon @Specialist_Being_677 i need to start keeping a log of when my kernel updates or something lol

@mcc @dlharmon see /var/log/apt/history.log and similarly named files, so you don't have to do it manually

@mcc I was going to suggest a more up to date distro, but I don’t remember what problems you’re having, or what your use case is.

@Taffer I'm using Debian Trixie which was released on 2025 Aug 9 hard to get more up to date than that lol

@mcc *Laughs in Arch*

Hmm, yeah, that should be fine.

How painful would the Windows “fix” (backup, format, fresh install)?

The most cryptic problems I’ve run into have been with supported hardware that needs udev rules that aren’t installed for some reason. Oh, and there’s an AMD iGPU firmware bug that makes half the screen flash white occasionally. Thought I’d have to replace the mainboard…

@Taffer If the problem is kernel compatibility with this chipset, which I believe it is, then a fresh install would not help.

Linux works fine on my laptop except the touch screen doesn't map correctly and if I use Cinnamon my graphics driver crashes

(Which is to say, I feel you)

@november i'd really like to have a working touch screen! mine is… well it's a bit obnoxious just to figure out if it's working or not basically

hope cinnamon is working for you :O

Lmao Cinnamon did not work out, but xfce is fine. It's fine…

@mcc my laptop runs Linux fine, I just need to boot once I to Windows and play a sound, then warm reboot into Linux to initialize the speakers. Then when logging into GNOME, I have to make sure to keep the mouse moving while the login processes so the screen stays on, otherwise it blanks out whenever there's no motion on the screen.

Works great!

(I'm never buying an HP laptop again. Only laptops that are available with Linux pre-installed so I know that all the quirks are worked out by the vendor.)

@mei Asahi doesn't support proper suspend and if you complain they try to convince you that s2idle is good enough even when the battery runs down after a day of suspend.

@wasabi @mcc except it can't be fixed by Docker.

@oblomov @mcc I'd argue that most of the time Docker doesn't fix shit and adds an extra level of unneeded complexity, especially when the people you're working with can't write proper documentation

@wasabi @mcc

I know, I was referencing an internet joke/meme

@oblomov @mcc ah lmao I mean that meme is accurate to my experience with it at least

@mei Which is fair enough but it's been nearly 5 years. My solution thus far has been to simply not use Asahi. Unfortunately it seems like proper suspend doesn't really work anywhere else anymore either these days.