> All the other hardware (including power management) Just Works.

Well, a year or two ago, at least T440s ThinkPads came by default with a Realtek wifi card, for which there were no good Linux drivers [1]. Lenovo had an option for intel wifi card at no extra cost, but you had to be clever enough to choose that option when ordering the laptop.

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1239578

From my experience, this statement is far from true. I have both X1 Carbon (no NVIDIA) and a T460p (with NVIDIA) running Ubuntu 16.04, and some of my colleagues have X1's running Fedora.

There are various issues such as the laptop freezing when plugging in an external monitor (this can be fixed through a kernel update), crashes when waking from suspend / lock, Trackpad issues, problems with Bluetooth, problems with supporting 4k monitors through MiniDP, ...

So I'd say the stability of Linux on the new Skylake Thinkpads is far from optimal, although most of the hardware seems to be supported and runs.

it is because Intel borked skylake. Even windows users have issues.

How exactly did they "bork" Skylake? I haven't head anything about this

Something is wrong with the drivers for it. There's a long running "sleep of death" issue with Surface Pro 4s, for example, because of this.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/4nu355/finally_fix...

Yeah Skylake has LOTS of issues. External 4k screen with SKL keeps crashing, works fine with anything else.

My experience over the past decade doesn't quite agree with this. For ease of setup and use, I find that it's usually Intel > nVidia >>> AMD.

When my workplace gives a developer a new desktop (one of Dell's Ubuntu offerings, seems to always use AMD GPUs), that person's first day is normally setting up dual head.

Is it really very difficult to get nVidia GPUs working with linux?

I wanted to buy a laptop with a GPU for CUDA experiments.

I was looking at Lenovo Yoga 710 (14 inch with nvidia gpu). Am I going to have a bad time dual booting a linux distribution?

I've had mixed experiences with different GPUs very hard to tell. Laptop Quadro Series? Yes 750ti desktop? No 970 desktop? Sorta. It's unfortunate but it really seems to depend not only on platform but specific version of platform.

It's a mess.

Someone else in the thread said what I completely agree with if possible just get the latest Intel HD series it works pretty much flawlessly.

For desktop PCs, not at all, Nvidia GPUs are very easy to get working and will give the best performance.

In modern laptops, you usually have the complication of 'optimus' which allows you to switch between the onboard Intel graphics and the Nvidia GPU. This can be a bit awkward to get working, but it's improved recently. I've had plenty of issues getting it working right on Windows too.

Yeah... the optimus crap has serious problems. It causes my GPU driver to crash on Windows while I'm trying to give demos at work (not exactly a great look when your screen goes black and then your application's 3d display dies). It's not exactly the most stable thing, but can be great for power consumption.

On my T530, there's a firmware option to set the graphics to discrete-only, integrated-only, or optimus. The downside to discrete-only is the power usage. The downside to integrated-only is that the displayport won't work.

All three work great in Windows of course. For Linux, integrated-only is best, followed by discrete-only, and I've never had success with optimus.

I have a W530 that allows you to set it the same way. In my experience, you are ALWAYS better off to pick one or the other and leave it there. Some folks have had success with Bumblebee [0], however.

It's my understanding that newer Thinkpads don't have the BIOS option to switch and that this is much more of a PITA to get working.

[0]: http://bumblebee-project.org

I have a T460p with a dedicated NVIDIA graphics card, and it runs just fine under Ubuntu 16.04 with the newest drivers. Steam also runs fine.

With AMD/ATI, the problem was driver fglrx driver bitrot more than anything else, but that's been deprecated in favour of the newer amdgpu drive, which actually has some hope of being maintained due to its open source nature.

You shouldn't have issues with Nvidia hardware though.

> ...as long as you avoid nVidia GPUs

You also want to avoid AMD Radeon, which is even more problematic than nVidia. I think the best advice is "as long as you go for Intel graphics".

Absolutely true, but I haven't seen any ThinkPads with AMD graphics.

They were far more common in previous years. Currently the Thinkpad E series ships only with AMD graphics. In the past ATI/AMD Radeon graphics were also found in the Thinkpad A, L, R, T, X, Z series.

Actually it works fine even with Nvidia. You don't get all of the performance benefits but you can reliably disable and even use it using either PRIME or Bumblebee.

Looking on the site, they seem to all have Nvidia?

Look at the T and X series. Unless you are buying the very high end with discrete GPUs, they all have Intel.

Are you sure you want to risk buying a post-2014 Lenovo laptop? If they pulled shenanigans once, they are likely to do it again.

I'd never buy a non-ThinkPad from them. But I have yet to find something as well built as a ThinkPad from anyone else. (With the exception of Purism, but they can't offer warranties yet, which is a hard requirement for me.)

Just curious, why is a warranty a hard requirement for you?

Do you have any suggestions? I'm currently leaning towards the Lenovo X260 or an older X220.

I've been running Linux on the X220 (tablet) for 4+ years at this point; it's still a great machine (although I need to boot it up and clean the insides soon...), although obviously slightly dated in terms of hardware.

The X260 will likely work as an exact replica, but I haven't updated to Skylake yet so it's hard to say (ISTR there being some GPU buginess with Skylake at first). Otherwise everything should work almost perfectly out of the box, in my experience, though you'll probably want to tweak your power settings. The X260 will have a far superior screen, which if you're coming from a Macbook or anything will probably be important.

One of these days I'll upgrade and take my X220 down to the local hackerspace and get Coreboot put on it probably...

While I loved my X220, I don't see a good reason to get an older laptop today.

I'm a huge fan of the X1 series, which has about the same weight as the X260 but a bigger and higher-resolution screen. The X260 has the advantage of a hot-swappable, externally chargeable battery, and a better docking station; if you don't need either of those, go with the X1 and its awesome screen.

Get a T450s / x250 - they are very well supported.

That's the problem. I'm aiming for a 17".

That's where System76 comes in for me.

Dell's Precision 7100 workbeast comes with Ubuntu as a preinstall option.

Yep. After going through the configuration, this looks like exactly what I'm going to be getting at some point soon. Thank you.

That looks like what I need right there. Thank you.