I forgot to mention in the parent post that the SD card reader can't detect insertion/removal at times, yeah, so I have a script to reload the rtsx_pci_sdmmc kernel module to force it to recheck.

All the builtin radios, cameras, microphones, and sensors in modern laptops make them ideal for stealing your private data. I already have an untrusted cell phone, I want my personal laptop to be something I can feel comfortable keeping my data on. Because I can't personally audit every chip, that means I need some level of trust, and Lenovo has demonstrated over and over and over again that they cannot be trusted.

i don't care what they put on the default windows partition (i replace it on arrival) and the uefi issue was a production mistake where they imaged with a nonproduction image.

they're still used widely by serious people in academia, open source and security sensitive industry.

i suspect a lot of the bad press they get comes from the fact that there's a lot of very sharp eyes making use of their gear and that similar issues happen in other lines but just go unnoticed.

if you're truly paranoid, a pine arm machine or fully open source risc-v may be your jam. everything else is going to be loaded up with proprietary blobs everywhere along with overcomplicated supply chains and overzealous marketing departments cross selling adware onto that default image you should be tossing anyway.

No, it's really just them. They worked hard to earn that bad press. It's not even that they keep pre-installing malware, but how they've handled it when they're caught speaks volumes.

When the truth about superfish came out first they fiercely denied there was any security risk to anyone ("we have thoroughly investigated this technology and do not find any evidence to substantiate security concerns”), then eventually they admitted it was a problem and said they'd stop shipping devices infected by it, but continued to anyway more than a month later (https://arstechnica.netblogpro.com/information-technology/20...) and the instructions they gave users for removing the offending software still left systems vulnerable while giving people a false sense of security. When they were caught doing that they issued new instructions and those still left users vulnerable!! (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/20/lenovo-ap...)

Even swapped out the Framework mainboard after a long back and forth with support. Just some poor battery unloading or similar causing shorts. I was very close to committing my company to using them until this started happening to my tester unit and my lead engineer's tester unit.

I hope the best for Framework -- I really love their repairability promise -- but before I can commit my company to them I need them to not be lemons.

Try out Memtest86 - I think it's also usually an option in the boot menu on Ubuntu live-DVDs.

Let it run overnight, I've had crashes like that before where the RAM only starts failing after a few hours of memtesting.

I guess next step would be Memtest! Thanks for the reminder.

How long in months was “really quickly”?

System76 is looking into making their own hardware now too so I'm really looking forward to seeing what they come up with in-house.

They do make their own desktops and minis now. I think they use Clevo for laptops, and those do get more complaints here on HN than the desktops (but I think the consensus is they are getting better). They have more laptop models, so making their own would be a huge task.

Lol thats rich. They did it like 2 or 3 times for the windows laptops they sold most of the time not part of the thinkpad line. So yeah. Long history it is. You also have a long history of making bad comments then?

Dell XPS is the latest addition to this group.

Consumer laptops come with a lot of trickery analogous to WinModems of the era, which require Windows specifically. Hence these cost saving measurements create a lot of problems.

Some higher end devices of course need it (esp. in the biometrics department), but rest is automagic now, as far as I experienced.

My Dad's Lenovo Ideapad comes with a soft-raid of two SSDs for example, since a faster and twice bigger would be much more pricey.

Also, I've seen non-standard GPUs, tons of broken BIOS tables, vendor specific devices with weird quirks and whatnot over the years.

Maybe these things still happen but newer kernels know how to deal with this better, I don't know.