Lenovo Thinkpad P1 with Linux
In 2019, my favorite MacBook Pro, a mid-2014, retina, 15-inch MacBook Pro was reaching the end of its service life. It had served me well through the years. I loved it so much that I replaced the monitor 2 times, fixed the mouse and battery several times. I also repeatedly fixed the loosening monitor hinges. I could take the MacBook Pro apart, tighten the monitor and put it back together in about 20 minutes. After 5 years of heavy daily usage, the wear and tear started to show.
I watched the Apple product launches as the years rolled by and nothing made me want to buy a replacement. The touch bar and new keyboards seemed gimmicky and not very well engineered. Every programmer who had a touch bar absolutely hated it. I use vim as my editor. No ESC key was an absolute no go for me.
In my pre-mac days, I generally used gaming or business workstation type laptops and installed linux or freebsd on them. I loved thinkpad keyboards. But at the same time, I remember how much work it was to install and configure linux on a laptop.
It had been probably 6–8 years since I used a laptop with linux on it. I assumed that the install process and hardware support was better by now. I also thought that maybe using Windows 10 and the new linux sub system would be a feasible alternative.
I decided to start my search for a new laptop as I always do. I started doing research on the internet. I quickly found Thinkpad’s top of the line workstation replacement. The Lenovo Thinkpad P1 quickly became the top contender. I quickly made my way to the build-your-own page on the Lenovo site and maxed out all the hardware because that’s the way I roll.
After receiving my order after 1 month of waiting, I excitedly opened the box and turned it on and immediately installed VirtualBox. I then installed Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on VirtualBox.
My hope was that having the latest Xeon CPU, 64 GB RAM, and 4TB of SSD hard drive goodness was going to give me a near metal experience in Linux on VirtualBox. I was wrong. It was not responsive enough.
As a programmer who generally works using vim, I expect very fast responsiveness from my computer. Ubuntu on VirtualBox with 16 GB RAM allocated was just not cutting it for me.
Plan B. I installed Ubuntu 18.04. Not everything worked. I had issues with video adapter, sleep, and other things that made me abort that path within a day.
I briefly considered FreeBSD or Gentoo Linux and then I had flashbacks of compiling custom kernels to get wifi to work and chose to find a less time-consuming os.
Someone once told me that I have a hardware and operating system fetish because I used to spend so much time installing and configuring *nix on a large variety of hardware. I just don’t have time anymore. I run a company, married, have two kids, and discovered golf. I just want stuff that works. I decided to try to find a solution that required the least amount of investment of time and effort.
In my research regarding running Linux on laptops, I found out that many people really liked Pop!_OS. I decided to give it a try.
The install was fairly smooth and most of the hardware worked out of the box. The only annoying thing was that the sleep and hibernate functionality did not work correctly. If I closed the monitor lid, the system would not sleep, freeze and just overheat. It was extremely annoying to have to walk around the office building while keeping my monitor lid open all the time from meeting to meeting.
I did some research and some Linux people were complaining on the Lenovo support site regarding this issue. People on Reddit were also bitching about this as well. Somebody even had a hack to get it to work by flashing your firmware. My tolerance for risk of completely bricking my machine, voiding the warranty or just ending up with another 60-hour project to get the laptop replaced or to work again steered me away from that option.
I elected to have faith in the ability of the Linux community to continue to bitch at Lenovo, debug the issue and try to create patches or solutions and send them to Lenovo or just for Lenovo to do the right thing eventually.
They did!
5 months later, after a firmware upgrade and os upgrade, sleep and hibernate worked.
During that time, I used my Thinkpad every day for work and personal use. I am the Managing Director of Sennalabs, an IT consulting firm. I do everything from DevOps, coding, project management, writing proposals, video-conferencing, digital marketing, and some basic machine learning.
For coding and DevOps, Linux shines. Everything works as it should. But that wasn’t a surprise. That’s Linux’s strength.
I was hoping that the Linux desktop experience had closed the gap with Mac or Windows. In the early 2000s, that gap was like Michael Jordan (Mac) vs Frodo (Linux). In 2019, the gap was more comparable to an Aston Martin Vanquish (Mac) vs a Toyota Camry (Linux). The gap was still just too big.
The Linux alternative to Skitch, Flameshot, is ok but still clunky compared to Skitch. 1Password is a far better experience on Mac. On Linux, there is no native 1Password client; So you’re stuck using the browser version.
I couldn’t sync my iPhone with my Linux laptop either. I lost the ability to edit movies. Final Cut Pro X was incredibly easy to use and create really good content with. There is no viable alternative to Final Cut Pro X on Linux.
Since none of the office software was that good on Linux, I used Google Docs, Slides and Sheets to write proposals and other documents that I needed for work. I sent them to our design team to make them look good. For many people, this would probably not be an option.
Unsurprisingly, I found myself on the Apple website one day and decided to check out the Macbook Pro 16" and spec one out. As I always do, I maxed out the hardware specifications. I was happy to see that they finally offered 64 GB RAM. They only offered 32 when I was shopping for my Thinkpad. Harddrive space was an eye-popping 8 TB! The keyboard had a real ESC key! Ok, it still had that stupid touch bar, but I am ok with having the ESC key.
So now I’m waiting for delivery of my maxed out Macbook Pro 16" that should be delivered sometime in mid-February 2020 due to delays in Chinese factories due to the Chinese New Year. Stay Tuned and Happy New Year!
新年快乐
我只是等不及我的全新Macbook Pro到货了
