Considering Thinkpads are Lenovo's business line and Lenovo already has good firmware update support (
https://fwupd.org/lvfs/devices/), Lenovo should be able to learn lessons from previous OEM attempts to provide good support.
This feels very different from before where Linux was relegated to cheap computers (remember Moblin?), giving people the impression that Linux was a low quality OS. Now we're seeing big players cooperate to provide official support on premium computers, with official packages to boot!
I think Fedora on its own is a great choice for a pre-installed distro too. Fedora is very upstream-friendly, and since it has a policy of updating the kernel and drivers quickly with few modifications, it's generally a good indicator of overall Linux distro support.
-Josh
For full disclosure, I purchase all of my laptops new (not used), all "top of the line" and ALL have been Thinkpads for the past quarter century, ever since I saw that Ted T'so was using one.
md
No idea, but since IBM now owns Red Hat, and since the President of IBM is now Jim Whitehurst who was the former President and CEO of Red Hat, I will assume that even though IBM no longer owns Lenovo that there may be a range of laptops that run Fedora, not just "the low end".
Just guessin'
md
Do we think Lenovo will apply Dell's lessons learned from the early 2010s back when they tried to ship Ubuntu on their entry-level laptops?
Hi,
In theory this will help other GNU/Linux distros too, since eventually the device drivers for all of the parts of the laptops will go upstream and down to the distributions.
My findings with Lenovo (and IBM before them) was that they had pretty good support for the devices anyway, it is just that you might have to "dicker" with them to get the support working. I always attributed this (in the beginning anyway) to Ted T'so working
for IBM and using Thinkpads as his own, personal laptop...but that might just be urban legend.
Good news in any case.
md