On Mon, Dec 02, 2024 at 03:19:01PM -0500, Lennart Sorensen via talk wrote:
I decided it was finally time to get a new laptop after 12 years.
The old machine has lost the NVIDIA chip (forcing it to run only on the intel video works, but don't even think about running 3D games and the external monitor port does not work). Also the fingerprint scanner and color meter haven't worked in years (not that I really cared much about those two things). Also the top of the screen has a chunk of dead pixels showing white all the time. I guess it was time.
So my choice that I ended up with using the cyber Monday discounts and rakuten was a Thinkpad P1 Gen 7.
21KV001CUS which is:
Intel Core Ultra 9 185H NVIDIA RTX 4070 Mobile 8GB 64GB LPDDR5 CAMM2 2TB NVMe 16" 2560x1600 IPS 165Hz 5MP Camera Fingerprint scanner (Seems those are just standard) Backlit US keyboard 2x2 WiFi 7 and Bluetooth 5.3
I think I am set for another decade or so.
I will have to try putting Debian on it to see how well supported the hardware is, although it will most likely only ever end up running it in WSL for the most part. I have other systems dedicated to running Linux.
Cyber-Monday deal knocked 59% of the list price (do they ever sell for list price?) and then rakuten provided 15% cash back after that. Still not cheap, but I don't buy computers very often.
So I finally got around to trying a Debian install on the new laptop just to see how well (or not well) it is supported. The answer appers to be surprisingly well. I used the latest Debian testing installer image. Not sure how well stable would have done, I suspect it would not have had the firmware for the wifi at all. Installer complains about not finding iwlwifi-gl-c0-fm-c0-93.ucode even though iwlwifi-gl-c0-fm-c0-92.ucode was successfully loaded. The driver accepts either and is working. No idea how to get wifi configured in installer. I have never tried that before since this is the first machine I have ever installed Debian on that did not have a wired network port. Wifi works fine from gnome after installing. Maybe wifi support has never actually existed in the installer, although I see wpa_suplicant in the installer, so not sure what that is about. If it is supposed to detect wifi and ask, it certainly didn't. I guess I could have found a USB network adapter (I have one somewhere) and used that. Instead I spent 15 minutes downloading a 24GB BD-1 install image, and then waited 3 hours as my poorly chosen USB key wrote it at 6MB/s. I had no idea anyone made USB keys that slow anymore. Audio requires installing firmware-misc-nonfree for tas2781 firmware. After that audio and volume keys and such works fine. Webcam is working. SD card reader works. Fingerprint scanner appears to be detected and working with fprintd. At least fprintd-enroll seems to recognize it. Screen resolution is detected correctly at 2560x1600@165Hz and seems to have chosen to run X11 with nouveau driver which seems to be working fine. Brightness keys work fine. Wayland works too. I did not have to mess around with bumblebee or any of the other swithing between intel and nvidia graphics stuff. I have no idea how that works these days, it just appears it does. Hibernate appears to work, and detects the screen being opened and closed. Battery status and charging status appear to work too. I have not tried HDMI external screen yet, and I don't think I have anything to test thunderbolt with. So overall quite successful for an install on new hardware. Only missed installing the audio firmware file and the installer not doing wifi configuration (but maybe that's expected and not a problem). I was surprised all the hardware actually seems to be fully supported. I haven't decided if I will keep the debian install or not, given I have a dedicated server around to do most tasks, and I have Debian in WSL which handles most of what I ever need and Windows has a lot better support in games. Maybe I will make a small 500G Debian install and keep it around to play with. The default console font of 8x16 is crazy. 320x100 text on a 16" is a bit on the small side, but very clear overall. -- Len Sorensen