The Reg FOSS desk took Lenovo’s new Alder Lake-powered govt laptop computer for a spin. It is a pretty machine… however with some important limitations.
Lenovo ThinkPads have lengthy loved a powerful following amongst Linux varieties, and the Thinkpad X1 is among the many most coveted. The X1 Carbon is the thinnest and lightest, and the Gen 10 newest mannequin is Ubuntu certified. Lenovo provided The Reg one to have a look.
The mannequin we acquired is a powerhouse: twelfth Gen Intel Core i7-1260P, 32GB of RAM, and a 1TB NVMe SSD. As you’d anticipate for a present machine, it got here with Home windows 11. We ran Home windows Replace instantly, and located a whopping 53 excellent, together with a number of drivers. As typical for Home windows, as soon as these had been put in and the machine rebooted, there have been some extra updates. After going by means of the cycle just a few occasions, it claimed there have been none excellent. Then it was off to the Home windows Retailer to put in the couple of dozen excellent updates hidden in there, which Home windows Replace would not let you know about. After that, it was a fast visit to Ninite to install some standard apps. The entire course of took barely a working day. That is the sort of match and end that working a state-of-the-art professionally written working system will get you, after all.
Then, earlier than a lot as booting a Ventoy key, we did some important preliminary steps which we described last year: disabling Bitlocker, disabling Safe Boot within the firmware settings, and so forth. That is why we put in all out there Home windows updates first – to make sure the newest firmware was put in earlier than we started. This achieved, we began making an attempt some Linux distros on it.
The X1 Carbon Gen 10 has an “Alder Lake” CPU, that means 4 P (for Efficiency) cores, every of which may run two threads, and eight E (for Effectivity) single-threaded cores. The CPU reveals as having 16 cores within the activity supervisor. The snag with that is that the OS must be conscious that absolutely half of those are low-powered effectivity cores, and that solely low-priority, non-performance-critical duties ought to be scheduled onto these.
This is a matter that Apple already confronted with macOS on its in-house Apple Silicon containers, which have an identical performance-versus-efficiency cut up amongst their CPU cores – as Arm processors have for over a decade. Apple’s OS is conscious of the various kinds of cores, and schedules duties appropriately – which is kind of a complex activity. Since Alder Lake CPUs got here out, Linux has had to adapt to this as well, modifications which appeared in kernel 5.15.35 and had been, in theory, backported into Ubuntu 22.04’s secure kernel final April.
Given this cutting-edge equipment, we began with the newest Ubuntu, 22.10. We selected the default GNOME version, because the X1 Carbon has a 16:10 HiDPI (2880×1800), excessive refresh fee (90Hz), excessive dynamic vary display screen, that means that you’ll want a desktop setting that helps fractional scaling. Ubuntu “Kinetic” put in easily and picked up all of the machine’s {hardware}. It registered the high-definition show and defaulted to 200 per cent scaling, which does appears superbly sharp – however the massive textual content and graphical parts do not depart a lot room on the machine’s 14-inch display screen. Enabling fractional scaling within the show settings and dropping it to 175 per cent provides a bit extra respiratory room; 150 per cent, and whereas issues are getting slightly small, you start to understand that this can be a very high-resolution show.
Nonetheless, we discovered that it did not run easily. The 2022 variations of Ubuntu default to the Wayland show server, however we noticed noise and transient bands of corruption on the display screen. The default GNOME version of Ubuntu affords the selection of Wayland or Xorg. After typing your password, do not press Enter – as a substitute, click on the cogwheel on the login display screen to decide on the setting you need. Then press Enter.
This can be a good motive for not selecting computerized login. And whereas we’re speaking concerning the login display screen, the Gen 10 has a function to assist there: a built-in fingerprint reader, artfully hid within the energy button. GNOME detected this and it labored completely.
We tried GNOME on Xorg as a substitute. It was higher, inasmuch as there was no show corruption, however it felt laggy and unresponsive. The mouse pointer did not transfer easily, and shifting or resizing home windows felt hesitant. Even letters showing on display screen usually lagged behind typing. Simply in case there was some problem with this short-term launch, we tried once more with 22.04.2, the present model of the LTS – which now has the same kernel version, 5.19. It was no higher.
To strive a extra present kernel, we put in the newest openSUSE Tumbleweed. On the level we put in it, this included kernel 6.1, and ran rather more easily, however it revealed completely different points. Firstly, there was no sound: to get that working, we needed to set up the sof-firmware package deal, which can be an issue with Fedora on this mannequin. A worse downside is that international show scaling didn’t work in KDE 5.27 on Xorg, even after a restart. We had to decide on Wayland on the login display screen with the intention to get show scaling to work, which is a necessity for the HiDPI show: with out it, at its native decision, textual content is simply too small to learn. Throughout testing, we acquired an improve to kernel 6.2, which additionally labored effective.
To provide a non-systemd-based distro a whirl, we additionally gave our preferred systemd-free distro MX Linux a go. Our first try went unsuitable – we suspect that auto-detection of the UEFI system partition was confused by Ventoy – and rendered the machine unbootable, necessitating a full reinstall, beginning with Home windows 11 22H2. The generic Home windows ISO from Microsoft’s obtain page threw up an entertaining problem: Home windows can not detect the Gen 10’s Wi-Fi adapter. This, after all, means which you can’t go browsing to obtain the driving force. Worse nonetheless is that this £1,870 ($2,195) laptop computer – £2,250 with VAT – has no Ethernet port. It is a slimline machine, however there may be loads of room for a folding port like within the Tuxedo Stellaris G4 we reviewed last year. A part of the explanation that there is a lot room alongside the machine’s edges is that the X1 Carbon solely has 4 USB ports: two sort A and two sort C, plus HDMI, a headphone socket and a SIM slot. Thankfully, we had a USB-C mini-hub with an Ethernet port at hand, enabling us to reinstall all these Home windows updates – now nicely over 60, together with varied drivers.
Mint MATE at one hundred pc scaling. It really works, however all the pieces is so small it is onerous to learn
Then we reinstalled some Linux distros: Kubuntu 22.10, which had the identical problem as openSUSE of scaling not working in KDE on Xorg, and MX Linux 21.3, the newest “Superior {Hardware} Help” version with Xfce. Right here, too, show scaling did not work proper. The truth is, the bigger the scaling issue we tried, the smaller all the pieces acquired. After appreciable experimentation, we found a workaround: for those who choose a customized scaling issue, a brand new field seems permitting you to enter a quantity. Enter a worth lower than one and it really works: 0.8 was moderately small, 0.7 affordable and 0.6 verging on too massive.
Xfce at 200 % scaling, making your £2,000 laptop computer seem like it has a Nineteen Nineties 800×600 display screen
Lastly we tried the trusty Linux Mint 21.1 with Cinnamon. We selected that desktop for its fractional scaling help, which labored completely, as did sound, Wi-Fi, and all the pieces else, even on kernel 5.15. The one exception is the built-in webcam, which is at the moment unsupported. For completeness’s sake, we additionally tried Xfce and MATE on Linux Mint. Xfce scaling labored the identical because it did on MX Linux, whereas Mint provided a alternative of solely 100 per cent (too small) or 200 per cent (too massive).
Cinnamon at 150 % scale however full decision, which for us is a wise compromise – which MATE cannot provide
Only for comparability, we put the newest kernel on Ubuntu 22.04, Kubuntu 22.10 and Mint 21.1, using the method we described last week, and in addition for the sake of experiment, using the Liquorix kernel. Each variations labored effective, and when the distro had been displaying any problems with lagginess, sluggish response, show corruption and so forth, each kernels resolved them. GNOME on Wayland was the one exception: it froze on login. Mint had no such issues (till we experimentally installed the HWE kernel from Ubuntu), however the newer kernels labored completely anyway.
Conclusions
The “Alder Lake” Core i7-based X1 Carbon is an attractive pocket book laptop, for those who do not thoughts Lenovo’s fashionable chiclet keyboards. For this specific vulture, the older seven-row design was vastly higher, and we concur with our colleague who decried the trendy “godawful chiclet six-row keyboard.”
Like different latest ThinkPads, this model has a mix of three bodily buttons for the Trackpoint, plus a buttonless trackpad with gesture help, which is a superb mixture. Even with 32GB of RAM and a terabyte of SSD, it is one of many thinnest, lightest laptops we have ever tried, and working Linux, with out the burden of Home windows, it runs in complete silence more often than not. If the followers are turning, we won’t hear them, and the underside turns into simply barely heat to the contact after some time. After working on battery for hours, the facility gauge nonetheless confirmed hours left and we suspect it is good for an entire day’s use and perhaps extra.
The Intel 12th generation chipset is still too new for most stable Linux distros: assymetric core scheduling, its integrated Xe GPU, the webcam, and maybe worst of all, the necessity for fractional show scaling with such a high-DPI display screen, which induced issues for GNOME on Wayland on kernel 5.15, and each Xfce and KDE on Xorg. Its integration of fractional scaling is a key benefit for the Cinnamon desktop and Mint usually, and the poor HiDPI dealing with of MATE and Xfce will show to be crucial weaknesses for these older desktops as such shows turn out to be extra widespread, until the initiatives make fast enhancements on this space. A minimum of KDE has the workaround of utilizing Wayland to get fractional scaling working.
There’s rather a lot you are able to do to enhance the expertise, however it should not be needed. To be honest, although, we’re certain that it will enhance markedly in a 12 months or so.
We’ve seen some rave opinions of the Gen 10 X1 Carbon, together with one which referred to as it one of the best laptop computer ever made. We can not agree. For the value level, we would favor to see extra ports: say, yet another of every measurement of USB port plus an Ethernet port. And with out the exterior dongle as used on another ThinkPad fashions, thanks. A card reader would not go amiss both. It is usually a disgrace that the battery will not be detachable, and there is no hatch for RAM upgrades or replacements. A few of these compromises are needed for such a skinny machine, however not all of them.
Even so, this can be a considerably higher laptop computer than the 2 thin-and-light Dell Latitudes which have hung out on The Reg FOSS desk not too long ago. Whereas all ThinkPad keyboards are far inferior to Lenovo’s personal keyboards of 12 years in the past, they continue to be considerably higher than nearly some other chiclet keyboards available on the market, and the Trackpoint is a greater pointing machine, which allows you to hold your arms over the house keys.
Linux helps the machine nicely, except the webcam – and we’re assured that can get sorted quickly. For now, you would possibly need to use Linux Mint or a rolling-release distro similar to openSUSE Tumbleweed, Debian siduction or Garuda Linux, till newer variations of Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora seem. ®
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