It’s probably been 15 years since I’ve used Linux and Mint seems to be the recommended distro for people who aren’t all that familiar with Linux like me, but I didn’t know if there was anything I should know with this ThinkPad model that anyone is familiar with. My searching around shows people saying everything from it was painless to install to they had tons of issues and I have no idea how common either one is.

So any advice would be appreciated. Thanks!

  • qprimed@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    7 months ago

    congrats on your foray into linuxland. its possibly one of the better decisions you can make for yourself. mint is a great way to start because its reasonably well polished and the UI is familiar. issues usually arise from extremely old (and likely broken) hardware or from bleeding edge hardware that does not yet have support.

    as others have said, things are likely to work pretty well right from the get-go, but, in the event of an issue, you have support! :-)

  • Diplomjodler@feddit.de
    1·
    7 months ago

    I have a T480 with Mint and everything worked with zero hassle. Just installed it and started working.

  • intelisense@lemm.ee
    1·
    7 months ago

    Thinkpads are great for running Linux, but one thing I’ve noticed is thinkfan is not installed by any distro I’ve tried. You definitely want that, or your laptop’s fan isn’t going to work - that will lead to performance issues or potentially damage your laptop

  • seathru@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    0·
    7 months ago

    IIRC Mint 21.3 had a touchpad driver keyboard issue on some Thinkpads. It looked like a simple fix if you are effected tho.

    Installing Mint on my Thinkpad Yoga was easier than installing Windows. Everything worked right out of the box.

    Edit: keyboard not touchpad.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
      0·
      7 months ago

      Thanks. You don’t happen to know if there’s a list of the models that have that issue and/or a page on how to fix it, do you?

          • Shareni@programming.dev
            0·
            7 months ago

            From what I’ve seen, hardware issues usually come from the hardware manufacturer and not the distro. For example on my t480 the CPU is perma throttled because intel didn’t release a patch.

            • lilith267@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
              0·
              7 months ago

              Did you change your bios settings to performance? I had the same problem but changing both bios and power management to performance finnaly let my CPU boost to advertised speeds

                • lilith267@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
                  1·
                  7 months ago

                  Also t480 - i5-8350u CPU.

                  My process was to update firmware with fwupd -> change TLP to performance(depending on desktop environment you may have a battery life settings panel) -> reboot into bios and change power settings to performance.

                  Ran a benchmark and my CPU was running at full power when it was limiting itself to 2Ghz before.

  • Rinn@literature.cafe
    0·
    7 months ago

    I have a T450, I’m dual booting Windows 10 and Ubuntu (…I know, I know, I’m just too lazy to swap) on it and it works great, I get better performance on Ubuntu than I do on Windows. The fans worked oob.