Thinkpads and Tumbleweed

English Hardware
1

*This is not a question about which laptop brand is better.

Hi,
I have 2 HP laptops that ran TW without issues. Unfortunately both died and I am considering getting Lenovo Thinkpads. I have read a bit here.

I’m just asking if there are any cautionary tales with Thinkpads and TW? One laptop would be for media playback (1080p max) and the other just as a system monitor (ssh, man pages etc)

Thanks.

2

I am quite happy with my refurbished Lenovo business Thinkpad running Tumbleweed. I think the build quality is better than average and you can still find the support documents.

3

I have Tumbleweed running on a P16 (21BTCT01WW) bought without an operating system in January this year. The spec of this one is:
i7-1270P; 32GB DDR; 1 TB SSD M.2 2280 PCIe Gen4; 16" WUXGA (1920 x 1200) IPS; Intel Wi-Fi 6E AX211 2x2 AX; Bluetooth 5.1; backlit keyboard; 135W rapid charge
It was offered with an NVIDIA® T550 4GB GDDR6, though I don’t actually bother with it.
Just one cautionary tale…it isn’t cheap…

I also have Leap 15.5 running on an 11-year old Lenovo Z570 and a six-year old Lenovo 320-171KB. The Z570 has a Broadcom wifi card which used to be a pain but now the firmware is available in the kernel no longer; all work like a dream.

Can’t tell you anything about hibernate / suspend, though, I have no use for them.

I hope this helps.

4

I have Tumbleweed running on a 1st gen X13 Yoga (Intel processor), haven’t had any issues with it, picks up the touchscreen perfectly with the built-in pen, the privacy screen function it’s got works as expected too. Appreciate it’s a newer model so it’s got better support, in the past I’ve ran TW on an X220, which again I didn’t run into any issues on.

5

I have a ThinkPad T480 “business laptop” that I’ve been running with TW now for over two years (the company I last worked for when I retired gave it to me).

TW runs flawlessly on it - no glitches during orig install, and to this day … the same as well as my Dell Latitude 5500.

6

Thanks all. I have more confidence now :slight_smile:

7

Sorry to take a slight detour, but my insurance claim for my 2 dead laptops (both damaged by lightning that hit my house) may not cover the costs of 2 Thinkpads.

I have been told the 2 replacements (like for like) would be 1 x HP Elitebook 640 Notebook and 1 x HP Probook 450 Notebook.

Again I’d appreciate if anyone can comment using TW on these 2 laptops.

Thanks.

8

Yes, that makes more or less sense for new laptops but you should be able to get two pretty good refurbished laptops. Linux also typically runs better on somewhat older hardware.