All Linux Things

Decided to take a risk, bought a new LCD to try to put in the K14. The original is a 250-nit, 46% NTSC color accuracy LCD. The new is a T14 Gen1/T14 Gen2 400-nit, 74% NTSC color accuracy low power LCD. PERFECT fit. Turns the K14 into one of the nicest laptops I own now, with how small, lightweight and portable it is.

After culling my laptops down to just 6, Ive gone back to using desktop systems primarily. Mini-pcs are being used for tv entertainment in various rooms.

Going to use my second Dell Optiplex 7010 as a distro tester as I really dont use my laptops that much and will be giving away to charity more of my older systems. I prefer to test distros on hardware and not thru VM and this wil give me a nice setup and a much larger display which is far easier to work with.

I played a tiny bit of distro-wandering after ordering the new desktop. I'm going to get rid of the T14 Gen1 AMD, so moved OpenSUSE (with backups so it's exactly the same settings) onto the 445 G8 (previously Endeavour), as I'll put EndeavourOS on the G9. Then to keep the 2TB drive that was in the T14 Gen1, I put that in the L14 Gen1 AMD and reinstalled Neon onto that (I backed it up before removing it so it has all the same settings). I'm thinking about trying out Debian SID on the T14s G3 AMD now that it's been out +6 months, but haven't made up my mind yet.
Then while installing Windows on the T14, I discovered that the Sabrent Rocket Q that I swapped into there has a firmware issue. Only with certain laptops, it will not see the Windows Boot Manager as bootable after a REBOOT (works fine with grub, just Windows that has an issue). Works just fine from a cold boot. So downloaded the Sabrent Toolbox to upgrade my firmware, and SAbrent apparently hard-coded an IP in for where to check for firmware updates. But they have since changed their site....so the IP goes nowhere. So can't download the updated firmware. Ugh...fine. Put the Mushkin Helix-L 1TB in there, reinstalled Windows AGAIN, and all is well with the world. Probably will upgrade to Win11 before I list it.

Ive been distro looking a lot lately. Just switched over to Spiral Linux and dropped Q4OS, MX Linux and Peppermint.

Did you happen to try Linux for firmware updates? I am not sure how they actually work, but on the T580 Discover picked up a three firmware updates for bits of hardware. One was the platform firware (BIOS?). One was the network card and the other was a storage driver update. I have no idea where the updates are downloaded from, but they downloaded and setup in Discover then on reboot, it looked as if the actual updater was part of the (BIOS) because it appeared that it was Lenovo software that did the actual firmware update. It was my first experience having a linux only machine do that sort of thing and for that brief moment almost seemed that Linux was treated like a first class mainstream OS.

I imagine though when selling it it would be easier to find buyer who want Windows, but I will say back when I sold on ebay, I had very good luck selling laptops with a preconfigured Linux on them. I suppose it made them unusual and perhaps attracted the attention of folks wanting to try Linux, without the hassle of setting Linux up. That was 15 years ago and Linux was a bit more cumbersome to get configured for the hardware.

Those updates are handled (in the background) by the fwupd program. The direct way to access it is via the fwupdmgr program, but the various management gui's on some OS's have the ability to interface with it automatically. It is nice to get those updates through the Linux OS, although it's still not perfect, as my last few I've gotten from Lenovo (various laptops) failed to properly apply.

Since moving to Windows 10/11 they offer the bios updates as well as other firmware updates regularly(optional updates) and can be installed easily. No searching for bios updates any more. In Linux Ive only seen driver updates mainly for storage and network and of course the cpu updates due to security issues.
I do my bios updates either thru the bios(network connection) such as with the HP Elitedesk or by downloading and running it separately. The Dells and HP allow updating independent of the OS which is a nice feature.

Technically Lenovo offers that on ThinkPads as well, being able to download an update .iso that can be run from CD/DVD, or with the geteltorito script that's available in most distributions it can be used to create a bootable USB. However, Lenovo only offers that for their premium business ThinkPads, Thinkbooks, IdeaPads and the other consumer lines don't offer it.

edit: talking about this made me remember that I hadn't checked my 445 G8 for bios updates in a while. It did indeed have one and is updating as I type this (on another machine, obviously).

The HP Elitedesk mini for Linux users is a great system as it makes many things so easy with its advanced bios. It does take time to get use to though.