The ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10 as a Linux laptop computer • The Register
Fingers-on The Reg FOSS desk took Lenovo’s new Intel Alder Lake-powered government laptop computer for a spin. It is a beautiful machine… however with some vital limitations.
Lenovo ThinkPads have lengthy loved a robust following amongst Linux sorts, 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 supplied The Reg one to have a look.
The mannequin we obtained 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 ordinary for Home windows, as soon as these have been put in and the machine rebooted, there have been some extra updates. After going by way of the cycle a number of instances, 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 does 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 form of match and end that working a state-of-the-art professionally written working system will get you, in fact.
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 obtainable Home windows updates first – to make sure the most recent firmware was put in earlier than we started. This finished, we began making an attempt some Linux distros on it.
The X1 Carbon Gen 10 has an Alder Lake Intel Core processor, which means 4 P (for Efficiency) cores, every of which might run two threads, and eight E (for Effectivity) single-threaded cores. The CPU exhibits as having 16 cores within the activity supervisor. The snag with that is that the OS needs to be conscious that absolutely half of those are low-powered effectivity cores, and that solely low-priority, non-performance-critical duties must be scheduled onto these.
This is a matter that Apple already confronted with macOS on its in-house Apple Silicon containers, which have an analogous 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, adjustments which appeared in kernel 5.15.35 and have been, in theory, backported into Ubuntu 22.04’s secure kernel final April.
Given this cutting-edge package, we began with the most recent Ubuntu, 22.10. We selected the default GNOME version, because the X1 Carbon has a 16:10 HiDPI (2880×1800), excessive refresh price (90Hz), excessive dynamic vary display, which means that you’ll want a desktop surroundings 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 fantastically sharp – however the massive textual content and graphical components do not depart a lot room on the machine’s 14-inch display. Enabling fractional scaling within the show settings and dropping it to 175 per cent offers a bit extra respiratory room; 150 per cent, and whereas issues are getting a bit of small, you start to understand that this can be a very high-resolution show.
Nevertheless, 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. The default GNOME version of Ubuntu affords the selection of Wayland or Xorg. After typing your password, do not press Enter – as an alternative, click on the cogwheel on the login display to decide on the surroundings you need. Then press Enter.
This can be a good motive for not selecting computerized login. And whereas we’re speaking in regards to the login display, 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 an alternative. It was higher, inasmuch as there was no show corruption, nevertheless it felt laggy and unresponsive. The mouse pointer did not transfer easily, and transferring or resizing home windows felt hesitant. Even letters showing on display recurrently lagged behind typing. Simply in case there was some subject 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 most recent openSUSE Tumbleweed. On the level we put in it, this included kernel 6.1, and ran far more easily, nevertheless 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 also 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 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 wonderful.
To offer a non-systemd-based distro a whirl, we additionally gave our preferred systemd-free distro MX Linux a go. Our first try went fallacious – 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 subject: Home windows can’t detect the Gen 10’s Wi-Fi adapter. This, in fact, means that you would be able to’t go surfing to obtain the motive 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’s 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 handy, enabling us to reinstall all these Home windows updates – now effectively over 60, together with varied drivers.
Mint MATE at one hundred pc scaling. It really works, however every little thing is so small it is laborious to learn
Then we reinstalled some Linux distros: Kubuntu 22.10, which had the identical subject as openSUSE of scaling not working in KDE on Xorg, and MX Linux 21.3, the most recent “Superior {Hardware} Help” version with Xfce. Right here, too, show scaling did not work proper. In truth, the bigger the scaling issue we tried, the smaller every little thing 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 price lower than one and it really works: 0.8 was slightly small, 0.7 cheap and 0.6 verging on too huge.
Xfce at 200 % scaling, making your £2,000 laptop computer seem like it has a Nineteen Nineties 800×600 display
Lastly we tried the trusty Linux Mint 21.1 with Cinnamon. We selected that desktop for its fractional scaling assist, which labored completely, as did sound, Wi-Fi, and every little thing else, even on kernel 5.15. The one exception is the built-in webcam, which is presently 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 MATE supplied a selection of solely 100 per cent (too small) or 200 per cent (too huge).
Cinnamon at 150 % scale however full decision, which for us is a wise compromise – which MATE cannot provide
Only for comparability, we put the most recent 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 wonderful, 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 a wonderful pocket book laptop, for those who do not thoughts Lenovo’s fashionable chiclet keyboards. For this explicit vulture, the older seven-row design was vastly higher, and we concur with our colleague who decried the fashionable “godawful chiclet six-row keyboard.”
Like different current ThinkPads, this model has a mixture of three bodily buttons for the Trackpoint, plus a buttonless trackpad with gesture assist, which is a good 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 whole silence more often than not. If the followers are turning, we will not hear them, and the underside turns into simply barely heat to the contact after some time. After working on battery for hours, the ability gauge nonetheless confirmed hours left and we suspect it is good for an entire day’s use and possibly extra.
The Intel 12th generation chipset remains to be too new for many secure Linux distros: uneven 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, which brought on 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 generally, and the poor HiDPI dealing with of MATE and Xfce will show to be essential weaknesses for these older desktops as such shows grow to be extra frequent, except the initiatives make fast enhancements on this space. Not less than KDE has the workaround of utilizing Wayland to get fractional scaling working.
There’s loads you are able to do to enhance the expertise, nevertheless it should not be vital. To be truthful, although, we’re certain that this can enhance markedly in a 12 months or so.
We now have seen some rave opinions of the Gen 10 X1 Carbon, together with one which referred to as it the perfect laptop computer ever made. We can’t agree. For the value level, we would like to see extra ports: say, 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 is just not detachable, and there is not any hatch for RAM upgrades or replacements. A few of these compromises are vital 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 lately. 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 virtually some other chiclet keyboards in the marketplace, and the Trackpoint is a greater pointing system, which lets you preserve your palms over the house keys.
Linux helps the machine effectively, except the webcam – and we’re assured that can get sorted quickly. For now, you may 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. ®