[CentOS] CentOS on new Thinkpads

Michael B Allen

ioplex at gmail.com
Fri Sep 30 16:02:03 UTC 2016


Ok, I see a lot of nice answers here so I would like to try to refine
this a little.

After some research I was going to skip Lenovo. People are clearly
having problems running Linux on Lenovos. I spoke with one person that
had a really hard time with their X250. However, I think a lot of
problems are caused by bleeding edge hardware. My feeling is it takes
at least 1 year before the kernels have the necessary updates. Also,
searching the Internet forums for problems is dubious because people
who don't have problems don't say so on forums. But asking "is model
XYZ known to work" is a good test as evidenced by these great
responses. So I will ask again with some more specific details.

The key features for me are:

* 1080 display or 900 would be acceptable but definitely not 768 (this
rules out Toshiba)
* Good keyboard with mouse buttons (Lenovo has always had superior
keyboards and fortunately that have recently resurrected mouse
buttons, yeah!)
* RJ-45 (this rules out a LOT of laptops including Dell)
* Intel graphics / hardware

The Lenovo T series meets these requirements. My only concern would be
issues mentioned on this list and bleeding-edge issues. I know people
have had a lot of problems with the trackpad, screen flickering and
other things. But I think most of this can be blamed on bleeding-edge
hardware compatibility. For example, I think the synaptics driver is
almost always broken in the latest models (move the mouse and it
deletes everything you've typed!) but if you uninstall it and use
libinput it can work.

So my thought is instead of getting the latest which would be T460, I
could get the previous model which would be the T450. These are sold
out on lenovo.com but they can still be had elsewhere (not sure about
warranty which is hugely important though).

So does anyone have any specific knowledge of the T450, T450s, T450p?

I really appreciate all the answers. Hopefully this helps other folks too.

Mike



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