Introduction

8 Jul 2015

Here is a brief summary of hardware:

The notebook build quality is absolutely superb. Every detail has been put together with great attention.

The IPS screen is bright and precise.

The keyboard, although different to previous ThinkPad incarnations, is very pleasant to use. Light touch is sufficient and it gives nice tactile feedback.

Fedora 41

Fedora 41 is a GO as of 25 Oct 2024, so I upgraded this laptop to it with dnf. The upgrade itself was done with dnf4, but the new package manager is dnf5, which is very fast and works well. Pretty much everything I tried thus far works without any issues.

Transcend SSD M.2 2242

Storage requirements have grown in 2024, so this laptop now has TS512GMTS430S solid state disk in the M.2 slot. This is obviously a SATA III drive (NGFF) and not NVMe, which is not supported on this laptop. Fedora 40 boots fine from it, in secure boot mode. Intel Rapid Start has been disabled in the UEFI setup.

Fedora 40

Probably one of the smoothest upgrades with dnf, this time to pre-release of Fedora 40. I have not noticed anything yet that does not work on this laptop.

Fedora 39

Smooth upgrade with dnf to Fedora 39 pre-release. There are persistent crashes of gnome-shell, for which the bug is already opened. It appears these crashes are actually caused by package gnome-shell-extensions, more specifically, by workspace indicator. Removing this extension appears to help with crashes (hopefully).

Fedora 38

Smooth upgrade with dnf to Fedora 38 pre-release, which was pronounced GO today (14 Apr 2023). The only problem I encounted thus far is bijiben Gnome note taker crashing. Removed for now, given I do not use it.

Fedora 37

Very smooth upgrade with dnf to Fedora 37 pre-release. Everything still works.

Fedora 36

Easy upgrade with dnf to what will be Fedora 36. Everything seems to work.

Fedora 35

Fedora 35 runs nicely on this laptop. Another flawless upgrade with dnf.

Fedora 34

Fedora 34 runs without any issues. Upgrade to what will become the official release was done with dnf.

Fedora 33

Fedora 33 runs well on this machine. Upgrade to what will become the official release was done with dnf.

Fedora 32

Fedora 32 runs without any trouble on this machine.

Fedora 31

Fedora 31 (pre-release) runs without much trouble on this machine. The only problem I encounted thus far was bug #1757224 which made Kerberos tickets unusable. Workaround was straightforward - remove sssd-kcm RPM. Fix is also in the works, about to hit updates-testing.

Fedora 30

Fedora 30 (pre-release) runs without much trouble on this machine. Tracker inside Gnome was segfaulting, but that was easily fixed by removing ~/.cache/tracker directory. The upgrade from F29 was painless.

I did have to use some additional tweaks for GTK CSS, so that terminal doesn't eat too much vertical space.

~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css to get relatively normal window headerbar sizing with GTK 3.24.8:

headerbar {
    padding-left: 2px;
    padding-right: 2px;
    min-height: 0;
}

headerbar entry, headerbar spinbutton, headerbar button, headerbar separator {
    margin-top: 1px;
    margin-bottom: 1px;
    min-height: 0;
}

Fedora 29

Fedora 29 runs without any trouble on this machine. The upgrade from F28 was painless.

Fedora 28

Fedora 28 runs very smoothly on this machine. There are ocassional artefacts left on the screen (probably something to do with i915 graphics), but that's about the only thing that isn't quite right.

Fedora 27

Upgrade to Fedora 27 pre-release using dnf --distro-sync was relatively easy. There were some packages for which there was no upgrade path in my installation, so I simply removed them before the upgrade.

The font metrics were changed, so everything looks a little bit different (taller). But, that's the price of progress, I guess.

Apart from all this, Fedora 27 runs pretty smoothly on this machine. Some folks are experiencing gnome-shell crashes (currently marked as proposed blocker), but I haven't had any yet. YMMV.

Fedora 26

Upgrade to Fedora 26 Beta using dnf --distro-sync was relatively easy. There were some packages for which there was no upgrade path in my installation (devassistant lot, which I don't even use), so I simply removed them before the upgrade.

After the upgrade, I had to link /etc/fonts/conf.d/10-hinting-slight.conf to /usr/share/fontconfig/conf.avail/10-hinting-full.conf, becuase it was causing my fonts to be rendered in a pretty ugly way. Once relinked and with auto hinting turned on, everything was nice again. :-)

Fedora 26 runs very smoothly on this machine, nothing to report apart from the above.

Fedora 25

Upgrade to Fedora 25 using dnf --distro-sync was easy.

Fedora 25 runs very smoothly on this machine, nothing really to report.

Fedora 24

Upgrade to Fedora 24 using dnf --distro-sync was easy.

Fedora 24 runs pretty smoothly on this machine, but there are some minor issues. For instance, systemd reports that some of the early services didn't start properly, but I cannot find anything broken as a result of that.

Kernel 4.5 broke my bluetooth mouse, so now I have to restart bluetooth service every time I resume the system from suspend (this same problem affects Fedora 23 with kernel 4.5 as well). This problem has been fixed in kernel 4.6.3, which is in testing as of this writing.

I now run my graphical session under Wayland. There is a bug in gnome-terminal (or wayland, not quite sure), that affects the initial size of the terminal window. In order to get 80 x 24 size with my custom font, I had to set the initial terminal size to 73 x 20. A bit bizarre, but works around the issue.

Gnome 3.20 changed its CSS, so I now have to do this in ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css to get relatively normal window title sizing:

headerbar.titlebar {
    padding-top: 2px;
    padding-bottom: 2px;
    min-height: 0;
}
headerbar.titlebar button.titlebutton {
    padding-top: 1px;
    padding-bottom: 1px;
    min-height: 0;
}

Fedora 23

Due to obnoxious Lenovo/Samsung practice of not releasing bootable ISO images for SSD firmware updates and providing only Windows executables, I had to create dual boot configuration on this laptop after all.

So, in order to do that, Windows 8.1 was restored to the machine, followed by a Windows 10 upgrade. After that, the disk was repartitioned, with NTFS file system shrunk to make space for Fedora.

Installation of Fedora 23 was smooth, but grub entry to boot Windows did not work. This, of course, is not really important on an UEFI machine, because both operating systems can be booted directly from the UEFI menu. So, grub Windows entry was removed.

Fedora 23 runs smoothly on this machine. Things are fast and seamless.

UEFI BIOS Update

Given that I only have Fedora on this laptop (no longer true - see Fedora 23 section above) and a new BIOS was released on 29 Jul 2015, I went ahead and downloaded the bootable ISO image. The machine has no optical drive, so I used a USB stick to do this. The ISO image has to be processed first, using the geteltorito.pl script. Like this:

./geteltorito.pl -o jbuj51wd.img jbuj51wd.iso

I downloaded this Perl script from Arch repositories: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/geteltorito/. I could not find it in Fedora repositories, but I didn't really look that hard. :-)

I then wrote the resulting image to the stick, which happened to be /dev/sdb on my laptop. Like this (as root):

dd if=jbuj51wd.img of=/dev/sdb bs=1M

After that, I rebooted the laptop, went into the setup and disabled secure boot (this is required, otherwise boot from that USB stick will not work). I then booted from the USB (F12 on boot brings up boot device selection).

A few steps and minutes later, the laptop was updated to UEFI BIOS 1.16 (JBET51WW) and ECP 1.01 (JBHT14WW).

Subsequently, I reverted the machine to use secure boot and started Fedora again.

The same process also worked for recently released (15 Sep 2015) UEFI BIOS 1.17 and 1.18 (28 Sep 2015).

Fedora 22

I installed Fedora 22 (x86_64) on this laptop using Live image, which was written to a USB stick on my old ThinkPad laptop, using Disk Image Writer. The installation process was completely painless. In fact, I think this was the easiest Fedora installation I've ever done. I did not have to change any BIOS (well, UEFI) settings at all, including secure boot options - everything just worked.

Fedora runs smoothly on this machine. Nothing really to write home about. Things are fast and seamless.