I switched my main computer and this time I opted for Lenovo’s Thinkpad T14 that comes with an AMD Processor. It’s the first time that I have 8 cores in my laptop with this AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 4750U CPU and it gives a real performance boost together with the 32GB of RAM.
Despite the fact that it’s a laptop I use it mainly on my desktop where it’s now connected to the “USB-C Dock Gen2” so that I can connect it with a single USB-C cable to power/ethernet/keyboard/mouse and two external displays. I use the display port output and I had some hiccups with the HDMI output where the screen would become blank for a few seconds…
The Linux support of this hardware is rather good so far but I went through a few hiccups when I started using it, in particular I’m not sure what made the external display work as they were not working after the initial install but they ended up working after installing all the packages that I had on my former computer. But the suspend/resume works fine… even when you unplug the laptop from the dock with the lid closed. It might be seen as a given but the suspend/resume was broken on my old X260 (at least on recent kernels, I was able to keep using Linux 4.19 where it worked).
I tried to document relevant information in the wiki, have a look at https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Thinkpad/T14 and I have uploaded a Linux hardware database probe if you want to look the gory details including the firmware version that I upgraded to before starting any setup.
Great work! I would like to ask you a question. My laptop runs Debian 9 with architecture x86-64 and kernel version 4.9.0-14-amd64. I’m thinking to change it for ThinkPad T14 Gen 2 with Intel Core i7-1165G7, 16GB DDR4 3200 Mhz, UHD IPS Display and NVIDIA GeForce MX450. Can I clone my old SO to that ThinkPad with Clonezilla? What do you think about? Thank you very much,
Luigi from Italy
I’m running Debian on a T14s as well. I wonder if you’re experiencing the same issue I do, namely: the battery drains pretty fast even when the machine is shut down. I.e. if I shut the laptop down for 12hrs, the battery is at 85% when I boot it up again. Leave it powered off for a few days, and the battery is empty.
Do you have the same issue?
My laptop is always powered on except when I travel so I don’t know whether I have this problem. But it’s possible, I have read Mark Pearson speaking of some issue where the CPU is not going in a sufficiently idle state. Maybe a future UEFI update will fix this.