Your favorite Linux distro on a Thinkpad? Why?

[skx]

With China and Intel being the most to contribute to Kernel development is interesting for me in this current political environment.

I don't know who is less trustworthy, Intel or Huawei? LOL

I see Columbia will probably install Huawei 5G.

Completely non relevant as we speak about the linux kernel which is fully opensource. Any additional lines of codes can and will be reviewed. Your comment only makes sense for proprietary products of intel and huawei which do not allow any review or auditing. The main reason why companies like Huawei are jumping on the linux bandwagon is because it is saving them billions of dollars software development costs. instead of doing their own mayonaise, they solely add their own needed hardware support in the existing linux kernel tree. i would be happy if all hardware vendors would contribute... instead of fingerpointing intel and huawei, fingerpoint Apple refusing to add 1 line of code!

[shawross]

Yes I don't see Intel or Huawei injecting malicious code but they would have an agenda to adapt the kernel to their products and steer development.

I see linux as the future and obviously so do the major shakers and movers in the world. I find that interesting.

[Glitchy]

I love Arch Linux a lot as it's my first love! but a few days ago got Gen1 X1 Yoga to run FreeBSD but I don't compile packages just using pkg install.
What is working? Touch screen - Yes with Pen as well.
Sim card? have not checked yet but I will as I have a spare sim card just to use on a ThinkPad.
FingerPrint - not checked but im sure it won't work.
Autorotation once in a tablet mode - still looking at how to activate it.
I would use FreeBSD on my P71 but no Cuda for FreeBSD so no P71 with FreeBSD... but running Arch Linux on it.
T61 - Arch. T440p- Arch.X220 - Arch. but all these are used when im bored and I want to try a new OS as sometimes I do distro-hopping lol.

[karotlopj]

Nice to see someone else using FreeBSD. I use hardly anything else. It's just a great well thought operating system and I've had no problems installing it on any of my ThinkPads. Although I have to admit there is something in the BIOS of a ThinkCentre M92 which prevents FreeBSD booting from a GPT disk

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page= ... px=MTIyOTg

Apart from that I've had no problems.

[manafort]

Interesting thread. I've been using unix-based operating systems since 1983 and linux since 1998 for both professional and personal use - I only use Windoz about 1% of the time - usually for administrivia related to my employer. Although I've used thinkpads in the past (mostly from the T6x line) at the moment my personal laptop is a Dell Latitude E6420 with a core i7 CPU + an SSD for storage. Originally I installed 'standard' Ubuntu 14.04 on the computer. Boot time to the login prompt was ~ 8 sec. Then about a month ago I installed Xubuntu 14.04 on a friend's Thinkpad T60. I liked the look and feel of the XFCE GUI and decided to try Xubuntu on my latitude E6420. WOW - boot time to login prompt decreased to ~ 4 sec !! So obviously Xubuntu is what its claimed to be - much more lightweight. I stick with ubuntu because its easy to install and also is more or less required for some of my work-related projects. I didn't like the Unity desktop and the Ununtu software center approach to software package management. These just seem to be an approach to dumbing things down to the Windows level. I preferred the gnome desktop and the synaptic package manager.

Nice to see someone else using Ununtu. I use hardly anything else. It's just a great well thought operating system and I've had no problems installing it on any of my ThinkPads.

[skx]

Hello all, while all windows users are cursing and complaining about the upcoming W11 release, lets all be happy to have the Debian 11 new stable release coming soon yes, we linux users, are happy when new releases are coming our direction

[Omineca]

yes, we linux users, are happy when new releases are coming our direction

Henry V, Act IV, Scene iii: "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;"

The best part is that if I want to be obstinate and keep using the unchanging desktop of LXDE, I can.

[axur-delmeria]

The best part is that if I want to be obstinate and keep using the unchanging desktop of LXDE, I can.

Been using XFCE for more than a decade already.
Tried MATE on a backup machine, it was back to XFCE after a few months.

[Omineca]

Been using XFCE for more than a decade already.
Tried MATE on a backup machine, it was back to XFCE after a few months.

Yeah, I've tried this n' that over the years, but I like a good combination of functionality and simplicity. XFCE's the next-best-thing!

[MisterB]

At the moment, I've got Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on my W510 and Mint 17.2 on my X201T. I like both. Mint is an easier adjustment from Windows. Ubuntu seems a bit slicker. I haven't used either enough to form any deep opinions. I recently worked on a laptop that was running Mint and it made a favorable impression on me because I was tweaking an OS I had no experience with whatsoever and the whole process went very smoothly so I decided to install it on one of my Thinkpads.

The X201T can boot from the SD card slot and I installed Mint on a 32gb SDHC card. I partitioned the card with a Linux system partition, a swap partition and a Fat32 data partition. The only difficulty I had was making the Fat32 partition visible in Windows. The trick was to make it the first partition and make sure the Linux installer saw it as SDA1 and the Linux Ext4 system partition as SDA2. It took me two installs to get that to work right but it is pretty nice now that it works. Windows only sees the Fat32 partition and grub is on the SD card so the main hard disk with Windows is untouched by the Linux install. The SD card feels a bit faster than a USB drive but I haven't done any benchmarking yet.

The last time I tried Linux was over 10 years ago. At the time, I found it a bit lacking for laptop use and gave up on it because I couldn't get ACPI fully working on the Compaq laptop I was using at the time. It has been a different experience with modern distros on a Thinkpad. I have also not been impressed with the latest versions of Windows and the direction Microsoft has been taking so Linux as a client OS has been much more of an attractive prospect to me these days. I am really impressed with how light both distros have been on system resources compared to Windows 7 64 bit. Mint 17.2 is using less than 5gbs of an 8gb system partition and when running with no apps loaded, under 500mb of ram. Just loading Windows 7 64 bit uses over 1gb of ram and the system partition is using around 28gb.

Kind of funny to read this after 9 years. These days I'm a very experienced Linux user who finds Windows to be the difficult OS, any version later than 8.1 is pretty much off the table. I did a couple of years running web, DNS and openvpn VPS servers all set up and administered by command line in SSH shells. I used Debian as my preferred server OS along with one instance of CentOS. That pretty much clinched it for me with Linux. It basically runs both the web and most Internet of things devices out there and the only place that Windows dominates is the desktop. These days I use Debian as my main distro for anything serious that requires security and stability and involves money. I use the Debian derived distros Mint and Ubuntu for media and entertainment with a preference for Mint. I use legacy windows in some of my older Thinkpads and Virutualbox VMs. I still use some Windows apps in Wine as well. And that hard to shake habit is the source of most of my Linux headaches. I rarely have issues with native Linux software but running Windows apps in Wine or Virtualbox creates a lot of configuration issues. I couldn't imagine going back to Windows. Linux is so much faster and simpler to keep up to date. I only have to reboot if I'm upgrading an OS version. Normal updates are done by command line without rebooting and just take a few minutes. And they're done at my convenience, not Microsoft's.