At the recent DebConf22 conference in Kosovo, Mark Pearson, who is responsible for Lenovo’s Linux-related initiatives, gave a personal perspective on the upgrades the company has received over the past few years and the progress of its platform support for Linux in 2022.
In his presentation, Pearson also shared some of Lenovo’s achievements in advancing Linux, saying that by 2022 it is estimated that more than 30 notebook and desktop platforms will support Linux, including the L, E and Z series. These new platforms include Intel Alder Lake S/P/H, AMD Rembrandt, and several AMD Barcelo models. Lenovo is starting to offer Debian on these devices in addition to Ubuntu and Fedora as part of its Linux pre-installation.
Lenovo’s Linux engineers have faced several challenges over the past year, including panel refresh issues, WiFi changes, Intel network driver issues, AMD power consumption issues, NVIDIA driver issues for energy certification, and supply chain shortages. The good news, however, is the increased support and compatibility with Linux through closer relationships with OEM hardware suppliers.
The recent issue surrounding the new Lenovo systems is the inability to boot to Linux by default due to the disabling of third-party UEFI CA certification. It is mandated by Microsoft, but Lenovo allows it to be easily changed from the system BIOS.
During the presentation, Pearson also mentioned the introduction of Linux support for the Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC-equipped ThinkPad X13s. Linux Kernel 5.20 will Mainline Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 and support the ThinkPad X13s Arm version.
