[GTALUG] sale today on ThnkPad T490 and tiny ThinkCentre PCs

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: James Knott via talk <talk at gtalug.org>

| According to what I've read elsewhere, Lenovo is working to make the entire
| ThinkPad line Linux friendly.  I don't know what the situation is with Dell,
| though, IIRC, they have had some Linux models in the past.

That's good.

Generally, the ThinkPad line has always been Linux-friendly, but only
semi-officially.

Most notebooks are fine for Linux, but not by design.  So they can
make bad choices.  My recent experience:

- tablets sometimes cannot sleep (eg. Dell Venue 11 pro)

- older tablets or netbooks built out of an Atom SoC can be oddly
  wired together (eg. Asus T100ta).

- fingerprint readers may be proprietary (I've never investigated)

- NVidia GPUs are the usual horror show.  On my Dell XPS 15, it was
  particularly annoying.  But solved.

Dell once shipped a netbook with Linux that didn't work out well.
There was a binary-only driver for the GPU and so the kernel could
never be updated.  So shipping with Linux was no guarantee in this
case.  The fundamental problem was that Intel licensed PowerVR IP, but
not the right to release specs.  So there was no future that GPU under
Linux.  So it wasn't exactly Dell's or Intel's fault, but it really
was.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_GMA#PowerVR_GPU_based>

When you look at this list, it is amazingly short.