Thinkpads Forum

With the new Thinkpads that have been announced does anyone have any idea at how easy it is going to be to support switchable graphics on Linux?

The implementation on Windows at present doesn't appear to be that smooth. You have to manually go into Power Manager and change it. The screen apparently blanks and it's all over in around 5 seconds, according to another forum post.

Not easy. I'm pretty sure it will involve restarting Xorg, if it ever works. Which is pretty much the same as rebooting IMO.

I follow the graphics stuff on Linux quite closely and nobody's talking about it to my knowledge. It just concerns me since this technology is going to be in consumer's hands very soon hopefully.

Thanks for your answer.

I guess it will take at least 3-6 months before we see the the switchable graphics thing start to work under Linux. On the bright side, Lenovo is switching back to ATI card and since both Intel and ATI is putting some effort on supporting the open source community, at least the Linux developers don't need to take guesses on everything that's going on inside the graphics card driver.

Very true. I'm glad that ATI are now the manufacturer used by Lenovo.