It’s probably been 15 years since I’ve used Linux and Mint seems to be the recommended distro for people who aren’t all that familiar with Linux like me, but I didn’t know if there was anything I should know with this ThinkPad model that anyone is familiar with. My searching around shows people saying everything from it was painless to install to they had tons of issues and I have no idea how common either one is.

So any advice would be appreciated. Thanks!

  • @[email protected]English
    3•10 months ago

    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.

    • Flying SquidOP
      3•10 months ago

      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?

        • Flying SquidOP
          2•10 months ago

          Is Arch similar enough to Mint to make any issues there the same?

          • CorrodedEnglish
            3•10 months ago

            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.

          • @[email protected]
            2•10 months ago

            From what I’ve seen, hardware issues usually come from the hardware manufacturer and not the distro. For example on my t480 the CPU is perma throttled because intel didn’t release a patch.

            • @[email protected]English
              2•10 months ago

              Did you change your bios settings to performance? I had the same problem but changing both bios and power management to performance finnaly let my CPU boost to advertised speeds

                • @[email protected]English
                  2•10 months ago

                  Also t480 - i5-8350u CPU.

                  My process was to update firmware with fwupd -> change TLP to performance(depending on desktop environment you may have a battery life settings panel) -> reboot into bios and change power settings to performance.

                  Ran a benchmark and my CPU was running at full power when it was limiting itself to 2Ghz before.

            • Flying SquidOP
              1•10 months ago

              That is not good news. I do not want a perma throttled CPU. I’m not going to be doing anything that would require it. So I hope the T460 doesn’t have that problem.