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by gargravarr 3724 days ago
ThinkPads generally run Linux very well. I use an old X220 with Mint 17 and it fits my needs. ThinkPads are also well suited to business use and will last many years. X series for ultraportables with small screens, T series for high performance machines.

This site collects info on people running Linux on their ThinkPads: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/ThinkWiki

5 comments

An X120 with Fedora (later Arch) saw me through five years of grad school. Based on that experience alone, I'd recommend the ThinkPad. However, SuperFish lost Lenovo a lot of goodwill with me. I'm not sure that today I'd buy a laptop where I suspected that the firmware might be out to get me.

Edit: SuperFish wasn't in the firmware. Why do I associate Lenovo with evil firmware?

Edit2: Right, it was this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10039870

Yeah, pretty much any modern X series Thinkpad runs any flavor of Ubuntu well in my experience. I run Ubuntu 14 LTS on a 6 year old X201. Goes like a champ. You really can't go wrong with Thinkpads, unless you're concerned about that preinstalled malware thing on their newer machines, which... you probably should be.
Came here to say this. My thinkpad works great with Linux mint. Planning to switch to Ubuntu 16.04 when it comes out.
I'm having trouble with the graphics acceleration with an intel graphics card on Debian. This is on an x250. I'm kind of surprised, because it's the first time that the intel chipsets fail me. Usually they work the best because the drivers are free.
That's may be too 'new' of a computer in Debian userland, although I'm probably wrong.
I'm using the driver versioned at 2:2.99.917 from backports, although I see that unstable has added stuff from a recent git branch. Still, if apparently I'm using the latest released driver, shouldn't that be enough?
Have you tried removing the Intel graphics drivers? Based on "It is probably time to ditch xf86-video-intel[1]" I removed the intel drivers from a debian machine and an Arch machine and things have become more stable for me.

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/4cojj9/it_is_pro...

I've been looking at the Lenovo P50 for myself. Looks like the ThinkWiki site is a little out of date with the P-series models.

Anyone have any experiences running Linux with this or the P70 model?

i've used all kinds of thinkpads under various distributions and they were all flawless