Monthly Archives: June 2021

Lenovo Customer Support, Part Two

After a month of very little action but me being sent back and forth between support and sales at Lenovo to address what should have been a trivial problem for them to solve, I decided to write a review. See, they’ve sent me these “Following your recent purchase…” emails about once a week after I bought the laptop in April, asking for a few words to be published on their website, and I decided to comply:

Great Laptop But Abysmal Customer Support
The laptop as such is great, but Lenovo’s customer support is among the worst I have ever experienced. They’re slow, they like to pass around your case to each other to cover their tracks and play the blame game, and they don’t respect European consumer legislation. You’d think paying for 3-year premier support would help you avoid this sort of thing, but apparently not.

Of course, they turned it down. I replied to ask them what they thought was inaccurate in my review, but of course, the reply-to email address bounced. They encouraged me to write more content, though, so I copied the original review and my follow-up questions into one, and hit Publish.

They refused it again, using the same form letter and the same no-reply address, so I figured it’s all worth a blog post, at the very least. Lenovo, if you’re reading this, I will make my best effort to spread the word.

New Laptop

(If you’re not into Linux and don’t know what “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 wanted 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.

A few obstacles:

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 did 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.

The new Intel graphics chip is not well supported on Linux. It lags behind, with a characteristic wait-what-did-he-just-click-on half a second when deciding to use the touchpad. A mouse connected through a dock doesn’t have this problem.

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.

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.

Cinnamon looks great on X11, of course, but there is no Wayland. Also, there is that weird lag.

I guess 2021 won’t be the year of the Linux desktop either.

 

Sublime Text Part Two

Having spent a couple of days trying to get used to Atom, I decided to simply upgrade Sublime Text. While full of neat features, Atom was huge. Also, the Markdown customisations were simply too different from what I am used to.