(If you’re not into Linux and don’t know\u00a0what “Wayland” is, I’d suggest you to skip this post.)<\/p>\n
I’ve bought a new laptop to replace my aging Dell XPS 15, a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 9. The XPS is good, make no mistake about it, but I\u00a0wanted something lighter with a better battery life on Linux, and the X1 Carbon fit the bill. I also went full Linux this time. No Windows partition this time, just the latest Ubuntu, even though I’ve been trying out different desktops because I want Wayland rather than X11, and Cinnamon is not moving to Wayland anytime soon.<\/p>\n
A few obstacles:<\/p>\n
The Lenovo customer support is atrocious. My 4k screen was delivered with the standard black lid rather than the carbon fiber woven one, which does seem like a very minor complaint, and initially I treated it like one. Lenovo\u00a0did the same. First no-one wanted to take responsibility, then I was told I was wrong because a screenshot of the current state of the Lenovo web shop suggested otherwise, and finally I was sent back and forth between sales and support, and this is where I am right now. They’ll get back to me really soon now, I’m sure.<\/p>\n
The new Intel graphics chip is not well supported on Linux. It lags behind, with a characteristic\u00a0wait-what-did-he-just-click-on<\/em> half a second when deciding to use the touchpad. A mouse connected through a dock doesn’t have this problem.<\/p>\n Gnome 40 (which I installed through a PPA since Ubuntu 21.04 doesn’t include it) is just too different. I like the gestures, and the Wayland implementation actually feels like it’s getting somewhere, but the PPA is buggy and the DE is just too different.<\/p>\n KDE 5.22 on Wayland (installed through a backport PPA) is very cool but XWayland doesn’t seem to scale properly if your laptop is HiDPI, which mine is, so anything rendered through it is blurry if scaled. Non-scaled output is great, though. KDE 5.22 on X11 does look good, though, and I am thinking about moving back to KDE again.<\/p>\n Cinnamon looks great on X11, of course, but there is no Wayland. Also, there is that weird lag.<\/p>\n I guess 2021 won’t be the year of the Linux desktop either.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" (If you’re not into Linux and don’t know\u00a0what “Wayland” is, I’d suggest you to skip this post.) I’ve bought a new laptop to replace my aging Dell XPS 15, a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 9. The XPS is good, make no mistake about it, but I\u00a0wanted something lighter with a better battery life on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[38,214,114,143,215,171,216],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=596"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":597,"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596\/revisions\/597"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}