koldfront

New laptop #hardware

Almost 5 years ago I switched from a 14" Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon gen 3, which I liked a lot, to a 16" Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Extreme gen 2. That was quite a change - more than ½ kg heavier and a larger screen. Also a hybrid GPU setup with an nVidia chip, which was a pain to figure out to use, and then to turn off. Never. Again.

Recently the battery started going flat while the laptop was off(!) and the hinge is kind of floppy (some day I will try fixing that), so I decided I would treat myself to a new laptop.

Somewhat inspired, I found that currently the Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon gen 12 was available without a pre-installed operating system (thus avoiding the "Microsoft Tax"), so I ordered one.

I was thinking of getting the ARM-based Thinkpad, but they're the first generation of Lenovo ARM laptops, so I got lazy and opted for the safer solution this time.

I like high resolution screens, so I got the 2880×1800 one, and since RAM can't be expanded later, I opted for 64 GB, which meant I had to get the more expensive CPU (usually I go for the slowest possible, thinking it might use less power).

Ordering it with the smallest nvme SSD (0.25 T) and buying a 2 TB nvme SSD seperately was much cheaper, so I did that. The Samsung 990 PRO I had my eyes on was not available the same day, so I went with a WD Black SN850X which seemed to be almost as performant, and a bit cheaper, but most importantly available immediately!

I copied the contents of the two nvme SSDs in the old laptop to the new one and got to work: installing a newer kernel from Debian bookworm-backports and copying some firmware from the kernel linux-firmware git-repository.

As I was still struggling to get the graphics accelerated (checking with intel_gpu_top) I installed mesa and driver packages from Debian trixie (current testing), and also sof-firmware for sound.

After fiddling around a lot and not getting anywhere, I finally got it working by adding /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf and choosing the modesetting (not intel) driver:

Section "Device"
  Identifier "Intel Graphics"
  Driver "modesetting"
EndSection

After adjusting various font-sizes and my image scaling advice in Emacs, the laptop is now working pretty well.

I like that the aspect ratio of the screen is a little less extreme (the pixel area height of this 14" screen is the same as the old 16"!), even though the resolution is lower. Also the matte surface is nicer than the glossy.

The lower weight is very nice - walking around with 1.1 kg instead of 1.7 kg is much easier.

I did make some mistakes as well.

I ordered with the "haptic touchpad", because I wasn't thinking. Well, I thought "it's more expensive, so it must be better," which was a mistake. The haptic touchpad doesn't have the nice separate "mouse"-buttons that all Thinkpads usually have!

Luckily the - to me, very important - middle button "area" is marked with some tiny nobbly protusions, so I think I'll live. And I tell myself that it's a step in getting used to not have the physical "mouse"-buttons, which makes my options for laptops in the future much bigger.

The other mistakes I made were trying to switch around the physical Ctrl and Fn-buttons, which are in the opposite place from the previous laptops. I managed to break the little butterfly-things under the buttons, and while trying to figure out what to do, I pulled off the right shift button and wasn't able to put it back properly. Me. So. Stupid.

Anyway, I have ordered some replacements - and an extra key to replace the fugly Microsoft Windows button - hopefully the right kind, as the ones I pulled off various laptops in the scrap pile at work were other types.

Oh, I got the fingerprint reader working for login with lightdm, fancy!