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On 12/07/2021 22:34, Katie Dumont wrote:
Sorry, I'm usually just a lurker, but thought that I should pass on my views on having a recent gen lenovo thinkpad.
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Hope there's something in there which is useful to know. Katie
Hi Katie, thanks for breaking cover and sharing your experiences with a high end Pro system, you don't see a lot of those on here. I'm more used to Dell series high end laptops but have looked after a lot of £2k+ workstation/ultrabook Pro laptops and owned a bunch myself, always running Linux. Well except for the Macs obviously. Sometimes even those.
I'd be more than happy to work through the minor - but obviously super annoying - issues you mention: Lenovo and Dell have really come on with their Linux certification and support on select Pro systems (I take it you ordered yours specifically with Ubuntu?) but there are always some rough edges. Years back I had a different boss buy me the first Dell "Project Sputnik" Pro laptop, an outrageously expensive Dell M3800 Precision unit that was the first Ubuntu certified unit they ever made. Great laptop, unbearable Linux support (out of the box at least). So don't worry, these Ubuntu certified Pro systems always need a bit of extra help to work smoothly.
Some pointers/questions:1: Ubuntu is 'locked' to various driver and userspace stacks depending on version number unless you go to extreme measures to force in backports (they call them HWE, or hardware entitlements). I highly suspect that most of your issues will evaporate if you upgrade your Ubuntu version to the latest 21.04 variant.
2: This is hopefully trivial for you to test, unless your existing partitioning setup is particularly odd. Free up say 30Gb of space on your ample 1Tb SSD and install a fresh dual boot Ubuntu 21.04 system alongside to compare if you don't want to 'risk' a full blown in place upgrade.
3: What kernel are you currently using? Simply upgrading the kernel can have dramatic effects on hardware glitches and a modern machine like yours practically demands the newest kernel you can get your hands on. You are undoubtedly not being served well by the default 20.04 LTS kernel as it won't have decent support for your laptops subsystems. Even if you leave the rest of the Ubuntu system at 20.04 instead of upgrading, bumping the kernel will have the most radical effect of all and will likely fix several of your problems.
4: The suspend to RAM and waking up again and blank displays on hotplugging are related and a known issue. See above: upgrading will probably fix both, or at least mitigate it largely.
5: Nvidia drivers, the curse of Linux users everywhere. There is a lot of room for fiddling here, especially as you have Quadro GFX. Do you know what Nvidia driver you are using?
6: Speaking of which, are you using the HDMI from the dock you use? Is your external monitor DisplayPort capable? The P53s has DisplayPort capable USB3 I believe and your dock may have a regular DisplayPort connection. If your monitor supports it, switch to DP rather than HDMI.
7: VirtualBox. More room for improvement here and your system should effortlessly run a Win10 VM at blazing speeds. Are you using the variant from the Ubuntu repos or the official Oracle one? You want to use the Oracle one I'm afraid, with the (not free) extension pack enabled.
8: sysctl tuning will do your laptop a lot of good, if you know which bits to fiddle with. Setting your scheduler(s) particularly.
Get back with some info and I bet we can get that P53s running much, much more happily.
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