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! :-)
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
I have a T480 with Mint and everything worked with zero hassle. Just installed it and started working.
Awesome, just what I wanted to hear. Thank you!
I'd say it probably works out of the box.
I usually have a look at thinkwiki and the arch wiki. Since they don't have dedicated guides for this model, it usually means it's not supported at all and no one even tried, or it's a smooth ride and there just are no issues. Since it's not a niche product, I'd say it's the latter. And it's an older model without extravagant hardware... it should work fine.
Since they don’t have dedicated guides for this model, it usually means it’s not supported at all and no one even tried, or it’s a smooth ride and there just are no issues.
I feel like if someone went through hell trying to install Linux on some obscure hardware there would be something online. I think the safe bet a majority of the time that it just hasn't been documented yet.
Great to hear, thanks!
I read the other good advice with the firmware (UEFI) update. If there's still Windows on it, maybe run Lenovo Vantage and let it update the firmware.
Windows 10 is on it. I'll do that first, thanks!
lenovo is also one of the companies that provides packaged firmware updates to the linux fwupd project, so you should be able to maintain firmware updatesfrom linux in the future.
That is great to hear.
Oh that's a nice project for them to participate in!
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.
Thanks. Good to hear! I'm glad the other person mentioned the fans just in case though.
Don't be afraid to distro hop. If Mint doesn't feel right for you, then try another distro. Also try different desktop environments if you can. Mint uses Cinnamon, but there are also kde plasma, gnome, xfce and many others to try. Who knows, maybe you like one of them more.
I ended up on mint myself, and am happy enough with it but definitely want to get into Wayland so I can use waydroid. I haven't started digging too deeply yet so apologies if I could find this out in a moment of searching. But kde plasma can install on mint? Anyone know how well it works?
You should be able to install multiple desktop environments and select which one to use on the login screen. It's pretty straightforward and there are many tutorial on how to do that such as this one: https://www.linuxcapable.com/how-to-install-kde-plasma-on-linux-mint/
Does it have dual batteries? My t470s does a hard shutdown instead of switching battery source when the first battery is empty sometimes. It's an old bug and I think the consensus is that no one is really sure why.
Yes - you’ll be well-served by the ThinkPad line in general. My first permanently dedicated Linux machine was a T430 and true to form things largely “just worked.”
That was enough years ago that I might well have needed to seed the network drivers on the usb key, and that was the worst of it.
They’re tanks, and the hw is generally easy and fairly intuitive to swap out the usual memory and HDD.
IIRC my first distro on that was Debian, had plenty of docs about the intersection of the distro and ThinkPad line.
Mint should be perfectly fine given that.
I will say that I try not to do fresh installs on unfamiliar hardware w/o some other available form of connectivity, my phone mostly is quite sufficient for the purpose. It’s just easier not to risk putting myself in a difficult position in the first place.
You’re in for some fun.
IMHO there's no other way to know that something works that trying it by yourself. I honestly don't believe that there's some kind of specific problem with that model that will not let you use Linux on it, maybe some kind of BIOS/UEFI lock but that's usually easy to unlock.
Maybe if you really want to be sure that it works, you can try using Mint from Live Mode (Booting directly from the pendrive without installing the OS) before purchasing it.
I run mint on a T460s and it works like a charm.
Great, thanks!
ThinkPads generally have great Linux support because they're really popular in the community.
One thing though, forget about the fingerprint reader. You can get it to work with some effort, but it's essentially useless because it's not integrated like on win/mac.
Mint is a good choice for beginners (IMO MX > Mint). Just remember to use flatpaks for software you want to keep up to date. Also, if you end up disliking cinnamon, it's probably better to switch distros.
I'd imagine it would work fine. You can always try Mint out from the LiveUSB and see if any issues occur.
The installer's defaults should be enough to get it done without any hassle.
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.
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?
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Laptop/Lenovo#Lenovo
This page from the Arch Wiki might be a good start
Is Arch similar enough to Mint to make any issues there the same?
I'd say for the most part. The Arch Wiki does a decent job at least pointing users in the right direction. The path to solving it may be a bit different. For example you may need to find the equivalent package on Mint and it might have a different name.
Oops, it was a keyboard issue that affected Thinkpads. It's in the release notes https://www.linuxmint.com/rel_virginia.php
I took a quick look at the specs and the T460 has 2 cores and uses DDR3 ram, so even though Linux is much lighter on resources than Windows, this laptop might not last you too long, considering how heavy even basic web browsing is these days. This computer will choke if you have a lot of tabs open, especially if you have things other than the browser open. I also noticed it has TPM, so just double check that you can replace the OS on this particular machine.
An alternative would be the T480, which would give you more mileage but can't usually be had for under $100 like the T460.
Glhf!
There are a bunch of probes in the linux hardware database. You can check what they are like for your exact model.
You may need to update the UEFI firmware.
Thanks, that was the sort of advice I was wanting to make sure I got before I installed Mint. I assume you mean update it via Lenovo and not from a third party... or if from a third party, if you can tell me where, that would be great!
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