I'm relatively unfamiliar with Linux. I'm getting a ThinkPad T460 and want to install Mint on it. Is there anything about the T460 I should know?

LemonLord, 2 months ago

Installing Mint or Ubuntu on laptop is an easy thing. Even with few knowledge. I think it’s important to know wich window manager you prefer. In before, because changing this is a little stressful for beginners. I started with Gnome, I didn’t like. KDE was fine, but in the long term too slow. Xcfe is the best for me. But I didn’t know in before and this costs time.

Twig, 2 months ago

I’d imagine it would work fine. You can always try Mint out from the LiveUSB and see if any issues occur.

The installer’s defaults should be enough to get it done without any hassle.

Rand0mA, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

I use a T460 as my daily in the living room.

Mine has an internal battery as well as a removable, large removable is a beast, literally lasts me all day and this machine is like 2017 or so. Backlit.keyboard. not sure they all have it but mine has a sim card slot and wan card built.l in. So internet is easy on a data only sim without tethering. Those wan cards are cheap too if it doesn’t come with.

BIOS has TPM and all that so its easy to secure. Also handles virtual machines well (supports vtx, vtd, Intel text, or and iommu - hyperthreading etc). Typically lenovos T series always have these. I expect most people having issues probably don’t set the BIOS options correctly. Efi supported as expected. Passes all the requirements for w11 if thats your jam. The machine is solid.

I run fedora 39 with sway/hyprland/KDE options. Installed from ‘fedora anything’ image was a breeze via usb. saying that, the only real hindrance these days is lack of usb3.0. So installing from USB is alright the once, but use network for transfers instead of usb sticks if you can.

Resuming from standby isn’t an issue on fedora or arch but it was on debian. If you have any issues, you can send me a PM. The resume from standby issue on Debian was the only thing I never solved reliably.

Oh has ddr3, but those sticks are cheap so you can throw in dual 8gb sodimms for less than 50quid/Euros. I’m sure it’ll take 32gb (dual 16gbs) but I haven’t bothered. I’m running 1600mhz sticks, but it should support up to 2133mhz sticks… have a 1tB ssd slotted in for under 100.

FlyingSquid, 2 months ago

Awesome, thanks for the info. I’m cool with the RAM it has. It’s not going to be doing anything intensive.

onlinepersona, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

There are a bunch of probes in the linux hardware database. You can check what they are like for your exact model.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

FlyingSquid, 2 months ago

Thanks!

bartolomeo, 2 months ago

I took a quick look at the specs and the T460 has 2 cores and uses DDR3 ram, so even though Linux is much lighter on resources than Windows, this laptop might not last you too long, considering how heavy even basic web browsing is these days. This computer will choke if you have a lot of tabs open, especially if you have things other than the browser open. I also noticed it has TPM, so just double check that you can replace the OS on this particular machine.

An alternative would be the T480, which would give you more mileage but can’t usually be had for under $100 like the T460.

Glhf!

FlyingSquid, 2 months ago

It’s what I could afford.

gerdesj, 2 months ago

Mint is lovely, as are all other Linux distros. However, if you want the latest stuff without going off piste and compiling it yourself, then a rolling, bleeding edge distro might appeal to you. You do mention that you have prior Linux experience.

I own a UK based IT company (as you do) with two other partners (I’m MD and not a doctor) and a slack handful of (lovely - obvs) employees. I personally like Arch on my gear. I used to sport Gentoo but my nadgers complained about being overheated too often. I still have a fair few Gentoo VMs lying around the place.

You might like to try a manjaro.org effort - I prefer the Plasma desktop spin (KDE). That’s Arch with a few more GUIs. Their Konsole is quite something with zsh and a very stylish prompt.

So far I have managed to get Linux to work on everything I have access to which is rather a lot of hardware. Back in the day wifi was a bit wanky and there was ndiswrapper but nowadays I generally find that laptops from HPE and Dell are just as well supported with Linux as Windows, often better.

I finally ditched Windows on my stuff at Windows 7 - that was my wife’s laptop - a GPU update screwed up and that was the final straw. She has been an Arch user for a good seven years and could not give a shit about what is running on her laptop, provided it works and does stuff.

FlyingSquid, 2 months ago

Thanks, but I think Mint will be fine for my purposes. This isn’t going to be a workhorse machine or anything. And I’m not really a gamer either.

____, 2 months ago

Yes - you’ll be well-served by the ThinkPad line in general. My first permanently dedicated Linux machine was a T430 and true to form things largely “just worked.”

That was enough years ago that I might well have needed to seed the network drivers on the usb key, and that was the worst of it.

They’re tanks, and the hw is generally easy and fairly intuitive to swap out the usual memory and HDD.

IIRC my first distro on that was Debian, had plenty of docs about the intersection of the distro and ThinkPad line.

Mint should be perfectly fine given that.

I will say that I try not to do fresh installs on unfamiliar hardware w/o some other available form of connectivity, my phone mostly is quite sufficient for the purpose. It’s just easier not to risk putting myself in a difficult position in the first place.

You’re in for some fun.

FlyingSquid, 2 months ago

Awesome, thanks!

Phil35, 2 months ago

@FlyingSquid
Hi,
congratulations
I am a linux user on thinkpad since decades: T40 (2004), T42, T420, T450, T480 and now as I am retired, I bought a T470.... still happy
About firmware, the T470 runs with ubuntu and firmware is updated when needed. I don't know with Mint.
be happy with the 🐧
@linux

Rinn, 2 months ago

I have a T450, I’m dual booting Windows 10 and Ubuntu (…I know, I know, I’m just too lazy to swap) on it and it works great, I get better performance on Ubuntu than I do on Windows. The fans worked oob.

FlyingSquid, 2 months ago

Thanks. Good to hear! I’m glad the other person mentioned the fans just in case though.

Grimpen, 2 months ago

I’m with you.

I sort of petered out distro-hoping 10-ish years ago, I’ve just used boring old Ubuntu LTS ever since. All the Unity/Gnome/KDE, Snap/Flatpak and systemd stuff I’ve successfully ignored.

I have no doubt that there are “better” distros out there, but Ubuntu works.

pmk, 2 months ago

Does it have dual batteries? My t470s does a hard shutdown instead of switching battery source when the first battery is empty sometimes. It’s an old bug and I think the consensus is that no one is really sure why.

FlyingSquid, 2 months ago

Yes, it does have two batteries. That kind of sucks. But I don’t need all-day battery life, so hopefully that won’t be a huge issue.

GlenTheFrog, 2 months ago

I can’t speak for the T460, but I have a T480 with dual batteries and battery swapping works just fine. With a bit of tinkering I was even able to get the fingerprint sensor to work as well

FlyingSquid, 2 months ago

Much like my searching, it seems like it’s all over the map in terms of experiences, although in general, it seems like the issues people have encountered are minor.

Rand0mA, 2 months ago

Fwiw I never had a problem hotswapping batteries out

pmk, 2 months ago

Hopefully you won’t get bitten by this bug. It seems like a combination of Lenovo firmware, upower, and the DE.

FlyingSquid, 2 months ago

I hope not, but if it is an issue, it doesn’t sound like it will be a huge one most of the time at least.

Certainity45, 2 months ago

Is your internal battery dead? I’ve never seen such problems with dual battery Thinkpads.

pmk, 2 months ago

No, both work, it’s the switching over that often does a hard shutdown.
gitlab.freedesktop.org/upower/upower/-/issues/62
I’m using the latest Lenovo firmware and have the same issue in any Linux version I’ve tried. Bad luck I guess, but I’m out of ideas.

Shareni, 2 months ago

ThinkPads generally have great Linux support because they’re really popular in the community.

One thing though, forget about the fingerprint reader. You can get it to work with some effort, but it’s essentially useless because it’s not integrated like on win/mac.

Mint is a good choice for beginners (IMO MX > Mint). Just remember to use flatpaks for software you want to keep up to date. Also, if you end up disliking cinnamon, it’s probably better to switch distros.

FlyingSquid, 2 months ago

That’s fine about the fingerprint reader. I’m not too concerned about that.

Please excuse my ignorance as I’ve not used Linux in a very, very long time… what is a flatpak?

TheCMK, 2 months ago

Here’s a pretty good video about the different packaging formats on linux: <a href="">https://piped.video/watch?v=ikBPnYwnUMU</a>

What I wish I knew when i first installed a flatpak is that they, by default, do not have access to all the files in your file system. You can change their permissions with an app called flatseal (it should be available in the mint software app). Even then, I would avoid using them for things that need access to system files and libraries, such as IDEs.

FlyingSquid, 2 months ago

I’ll give it a view. Thanks!

redcalcium, 2 months ago

Don’t be afraid to distro hop. If Mint doesn’t feel right for you, then try another distro. Also try different desktop environments if you can. Mint uses Cinnamon, but there are also kde plasma, gnome, xfce and many others to try. Who knows, maybe you like one of them more.

FlyingSquid, 2 months ago

Much appreciated. I will definitely not give up if I don’t like Mint. But since it seems to be a good intro distro, it seems like a good way to start.

SidewaysHighways, 2 months ago

I ended up on mint myself, and am happy enough with it but definitely want to get into Wayland so I can use waydroid. I haven’t started digging too deeply yet so apologies if I could find this out in a moment of searching. But kde plasma can install on mint? Anyone know how well it works?

redcalcium, 2 months ago

You should be able to install multiple desktop environments and select which one to use on the login screen. It’s pretty straightforward and there are many tutorial on how to do that such as this one: linuxcapable.com/how-to-install-kde-plasma-on-lin…

Head, 2 months ago

I run mint on a T460s and it works like a charm.

FlyingSquid, 2 months ago

Great, thanks!

intelisense, 2 months ago

Thinkpads are great for running Linux, but one thing I’ve noticed is thinkfan is not installed by any distro I’ve tried. You definitely want that, or your laptop’s fan isn’t going to work - that will lead to performance issues or potentially damage your laptop

FlyingSquid, 2 months ago

Thank you, that is vital!

signofzeta, 2 months ago

My T470 worked just fine without thinkfan installed. Is that just something model-specific?

intelisense, 2 months ago

It’ll work, but the fan won’t speed up when the CPU is hot.

seathru, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

IIRC Mint 21.3 had a touchpad driver keyboard issue on some Thinkpads. It looked like a simple fix if you are effected tho.

Installing Mint on my Thinkpad Yoga was easier than installing Windows. Everything worked right out of the box.

Edit: keyboard not touchpad.

FlyingSquid, 2 months ago

Thanks. You don’t happen to know if there’s a list of the models that have that issue and/or a page on how to fix it, do you?

seathru, 2 months ago

Oops, it was a keyboard issue that affected Thinkpads. It’s in the release notes www.linuxmint.com/rel_virginia.php

FlyingSquid, 2 months ago

Thanks!

CorrodedCranium, 2 months ago

wiki.archlinux.org/title/Laptop/Lenovo#Lenovo

This page from the Arch Wiki might be a good start

FlyingSquid, 2 months ago

Is Arch similar enough to Mint to make any issues there the same?

Shareni, 2 months ago

From what I’ve seen, hardware issues usually come from the hardware manufacturer and not the distro. For example on my t480 the CPU is perma throttled because intel didn’t release a patch.

FlyingSquid, 2 months ago

That is not good news. I do not want a perma throttled CPU. I’m not going to be doing anything that would require it. So I hope the T460 doesn’t have that problem.

lilith267, 2 months ago

Did you change your bios settings to performance? I had the same problem but changing both bios and power management to performance finnaly let my CPU boost to advertised speeds

Shareni, 2 months ago

Also t480? This is the only solution I found online, but I didn’t try it out.

lilith267, 2 months ago

Also t480 - i5-8350u CPU.

My process was to update firmware with fwupd -> change TLP to performance(depending on desktop environment you may have a battery life settings panel) -> reboot into bios and change power settings to performance.

Ran a benchmark and my CPU was running at full power when it was limiting itself to 2Ghz before.

CorrodedCranium, 2 months ago

I’d say for the most part. The Arch Wiki does a decent job at least pointing users in the right direction. The path to solving it may be a bit different. For example you may need to find the equivalent package on Mint and it might have a different name.

FlyingSquid, 2 months ago

Great, thanks!