I just switched to Kubuntu for my ThinkPad (not my first choice but hardware incompatabilities) over the last few days, and it still very much is a terminal-based system. It took me ~4 days to set everything up, and nearly every step aside from “change things in the settings UI” was “in a terminal, type…”
I dipped my toes into Linux… 19 years ago? As someone who likes windows up until 10, and heard all of the ‘it’s so amazing’ gospel from Linux users, two decades later I’m like: “it’s still not ready”
Shit, I wanted to install Debian 12(.5) with KDE on this TP. It has a snapdragon X55, that I need working, and previous attempts at getting it working (year+ ago) failed. I read docs, did more research, I was ready. Made a live USB, install it in the live environment, restart, and… it hangs during boot. Research, ‘use the option presented at the boot menu’. Okay. “no network” errors, that’s fine, it’s not a net installer. Done, restart. Hangs. Research. “use rufus, it solved my problem”. Rinse, repeat, hang. Isn’t Debian supposed to be super reliable? And Kubuntu booted fine, like what the hell?
Then cue the 4 days of setup. This machine is a very light use box, mostly to be a hotspot. Browser, email, password manager. Btrfs for snapshots (WHY IS THERE NO SNAPSHOT UI IN ANY DISTRO I TRIED?!). I’m far from a novice, been trying to switch for two decades. This will be easy.
deep breath
WHY IS GRUB NOT TAKING MY UPDATED SETTINGS (it’s a known bug in Ubuntu since 20.04?!)? WHY CAN’T I GET HOWDY TO INSTALL? WHY AM I GETTING APT ERRORS ON A FRESH INSTALL? WHY IS BITWARDEN FAILING TO SYNC? WHAT IS THE NEW-NEW-NEW METHOD OF SETTING UP NEXTDNS? WHY CAN’T I RESIZE A PARTITION (/) LIVE? WHY DOESN’T MY HOTSPOT WORK WHEN I USE WPA3 (still broken, actually, and WPA2 isn’t an acceptable solution imo)? WHY DON’T I GET ANY ERROR MESSAGES WHEN THIS HAPPENS (a recurring theme)? WHY DO I HAVE TO SIFT THROUGH 3 DIFFERENT LOGS? WHY IS SEVERAL HUGELY-POPULAR PROGRAMS NOT IN THE DEFAULT REPO (omfg - Librewolf, Telegram, Element, Signal, Discord, Bitwarden…)? WHY DO THESE ALL TAKE DIFFERENT STEPS TO INSTALL ON MY SYSTEM WHAT THE FUCK WE HAVE A SYSTEM FOR THIS SCREAMS
E: WHY DOES KDE CONNECT JUST DECIDE THAT IT’S NOT GOING TO CONNECT TODAY UNTIL I TROUBLESHOOT FOR 3 HOURS, CHANGE NOTHING, THEN WORK?
And then, the 5G modem. Why in the shit doesn’t the fcc unlock tool just fucking detect, and unlock, automatically. Why. WHY. This is simple, the installer is already detecting hardware. It’s right there. This could be easy. Instead I had to dig through pages of solutions that didn’t work, until I landed on a page for my laptop (but seemingly a different architecture?) for Debian 13 (unstable) talking about needing to edit the installer with commands (omfg what) or the screen will just show nothing on boot, that you need to change wifi and bt stuff or they don’t work, etc etc… But in this heap of “I should just revert”, there was one line, the line I needed, to run this stupid fucking fcc unlock tool - and how to find the hardware address. Enter both, nothing (a ‘success’ message would be nice…). No further instructions in the doc. Luckily, I am persistent and went into the networkmanager anyway, tell it to connect to mobile broadband. Fill in my apn. Save. It works.
There’s a ton of stuff I glossed over, but it should not take FOUR DAYS with the terminal essentially living on my screen, with my browser having a dozen tabs at any given time for troubleshooting, for someone who has done all this shit before (minus the modem) many times in the past. It’s done, I’m setup, but there isn’t a soul alive who would switch their generic Dell machine running windows, spend several hours a day for several days, just to get their base system running. And the second they see “open the terminal”, which is still very much a necessity, they’ll be running to the hills.
I have a friend asking me questions about Linux since I’ve been harping on this the last few days, and I’m like… it’s not the easy path everyone says it is. I don’t want to push them away, but fuck they use many of the same programs that aren’t one-click installs, and I haven’t even touched gaming, multiple sound cards, gpu drivers; they use their machine for gaming, and mine is on W10 for a reason. It would be a nightmare guiding them through the minefield I just emerged from. Not to mention games that aren’t handled by steam/proton and don’t have guides, old games like Midtown Madness/2, Midnight Club 2, Insane/2…
I always viewed the think pad line as more of a business line of products. I know it isn’t owned by IBM anymore, but considering how much involvement they had with Redhat, you might have better luck trying a fedora based distro. I’m running fedora Fedora 40 beta plasma and it was basically install and start working.
At the time (a couple of years ago), I tried a Dell… Precision? laptop, but it had a different cell modem in it (I was just starting my interest in cellular computers) and my provider AT&T locked it to an utter shit plan where I could pay like $45 for 15gb of data with overage fees per month, fuuuuuck that. I was searching for one that would be bound to their ‘tablet’ plans, as they got unlimited data for $20 (this is a business account, not consumer). AT&T offered the TP X13 Gen 2 Intel from them, that was guaranteed tied to the unlimited plan, with 0% financing, so I jumped. It is my first TP, but an ex has an older TP and had mostly positive things to say about it. And the modem (and antenna?) gets blazing fast speeds, like 400-500Mb/s. But that’s why I have the TP, it’s a “business” line for my (families) business.
I tried Fedora last year but again couldn’t get the X55 modem to work, which was frustrating. Information about it in the X13 is scarce since it wasn’t offered with Linux officially afaik, and you either got it early and Ubu or something ‘just worked’ with it out of the box, or you had to compile the driver from source for some reason (I don’t remember but they yanked the driver from newer releases I think). I guess at some point it was re-added but again nobody talks about this machine and it’s WWAN card so I got super lucky to find that one Debian 13 info page.
While I’ve played with Fedora briefly when I was distros hopping to see what worked last year (and before that), and the ex had it on his TP, I don’t actually know what the difference is vs Debian-based systems, since I try to stick with that as it’s what I started on and know/am comfortable with. All I know is its based (?) on RHEL. Care to give me a tl;dr major differences?
(long, super recent story/rant)
I just switched to Kubuntu for my ThinkPad (not my first choice but hardware incompatabilities) over the last few days, and it still very much is a terminal-based system. It took me ~4 days to set everything up, and nearly every step aside from “change things in the settings UI” was “in a terminal, type…”
I dipped my toes into Linux… 19 years ago? As someone who likes windows up until 10, and heard all of the ‘it’s so amazing’ gospel from Linux users, two decades later I’m like: “it’s still not ready”
Shit, I wanted to install Debian 12(.5) with KDE on this TP. It has a snapdragon X55, that I need working, and previous attempts at getting it working (year+ ago) failed. I read docs, did more research, I was ready. Made a live USB, install it in the live environment, restart, and… it hangs during boot. Research, ‘use the option presented at the boot menu’. Okay. “no network” errors, that’s fine, it’s not a net installer. Done, restart. Hangs. Research. “use rufus, it solved my problem”. Rinse, repeat, hang. Isn’t Debian supposed to be super reliable? And Kubuntu booted fine, like what the hell?
Then cue the 4 days of setup. This machine is a very light use box, mostly to be a hotspot. Browser, email, password manager. Btrfs for snapshots (WHY IS THERE NO SNAPSHOT UI IN ANY DISTRO I TRIED?!). I’m far from a novice, been trying to switch for two decades. This will be easy.
deep breath
WHY IS GRUB NOT TAKING MY UPDATED SETTINGS (it’s a known bug in Ubuntu since 20.04?!)? WHY CAN’T I GET HOWDY TO INSTALL? WHY AM I GETTING APT ERRORS ON A FRESH INSTALL? WHY IS BITWARDEN FAILING TO SYNC? WHAT IS THE NEW-NEW-NEW METHOD OF SETTING UP NEXTDNS? WHY CAN’T I RESIZE A PARTITION (/) LIVE? WHY DOESN’T MY HOTSPOT WORK WHEN I USE WPA3 (still broken, actually, and WPA2 isn’t an acceptable solution imo)? WHY DON’T I GET ANY ERROR MESSAGES WHEN THIS HAPPENS (a recurring theme)? WHY DO I HAVE TO SIFT THROUGH 3 DIFFERENT LOGS? WHY IS SEVERAL HUGELY-POPULAR PROGRAMS NOT IN THE DEFAULT REPO (omfg - Librewolf, Telegram, Element, Signal, Discord, Bitwarden…)? WHY DO THESE ALL TAKE DIFFERENT STEPS TO INSTALL ON MY SYSTEM WHAT THE FUCK WE HAVE A SYSTEM FOR THIS SCREAMS
E: WHY DOES KDE CONNECT JUST DECIDE THAT IT’S NOT GOING TO CONNECT TODAY UNTIL I TROUBLESHOOT FOR 3 HOURS, CHANGE NOTHING, THEN WORK?
And then, the 5G modem. Why in the shit doesn’t the fcc unlock tool just fucking detect, and unlock, automatically. Why. WHY. This is simple, the installer is already detecting hardware. It’s right there. This could be easy. Instead I had to dig through pages of solutions that didn’t work, until I landed on a page for my laptop (but seemingly a different architecture?) for Debian 13 (unstable) talking about needing to edit the installer with commands (omfg what) or the screen will just show nothing on boot, that you need to change wifi and bt stuff or they don’t work, etc etc… But in this heap of “I should just revert”, there was one line, the line I needed, to run this stupid fucking fcc unlock tool - and how to find the hardware address. Enter both, nothing (a ‘success’ message would be nice…). No further instructions in the doc. Luckily, I am persistent and went into the networkmanager anyway, tell it to connect to mobile broadband. Fill in my apn. Save. It works.
There’s a ton of stuff I glossed over, but it should not take FOUR DAYS with the terminal essentially living on my screen, with my browser having a dozen tabs at any given time for troubleshooting, for someone who has done all this shit before (minus the modem) many times in the past. It’s done, I’m setup, but there isn’t a soul alive who would switch their generic Dell machine running windows, spend several hours a day for several days, just to get their base system running. And the second they see “open the terminal”, which is still very much a necessity, they’ll be running to the hills.
I have a friend asking me questions about Linux since I’ve been harping on this the last few days, and I’m like… it’s not the easy path everyone says it is. I don’t want to push them away, but fuck they use many of the same programs that aren’t one-click installs, and I haven’t even touched gaming, multiple sound cards, gpu drivers; they use their machine for gaming, and mine is on W10 for a reason. It would be a nightmare guiding them through the minefield I just emerged from. Not to mention games that aren’t handled by steam/proton and don’t have guides, old games like Midtown Madness/2, Midnight Club 2, Insane/2…
It’s still not ready, not anywhere near close.
I always viewed the think pad line as more of a business line of products. I know it isn’t owned by IBM anymore, but considering how much involvement they had with Redhat, you might have better luck trying a fedora based distro. I’m running fedora Fedora 40 beta plasma and it was basically install and start working.
At the time (a couple of years ago), I tried a Dell… Precision? laptop, but it had a different cell modem in it (I was just starting my interest in cellular computers) and my provider AT&T locked it to an utter shit plan where I could pay like $45 for 15gb of data with overage fees per month, fuuuuuck that. I was searching for one that would be bound to their ‘tablet’ plans, as they got unlimited data for $20 (this is a business account, not consumer). AT&T offered the TP X13 Gen 2 Intel from them, that was guaranteed tied to the unlimited plan, with 0% financing, so I jumped. It is my first TP, but an ex has an older TP and had mostly positive things to say about it. And the modem (and antenna?) gets blazing fast speeds, like 400-500Mb/s. But that’s why I have the TP, it’s a “business” line for my (families) business.
I tried Fedora last year but again couldn’t get the X55 modem to work, which was frustrating. Information about it in the X13 is scarce since it wasn’t offered with Linux officially afaik, and you either got it early and Ubu or something ‘just worked’ with it out of the box, or you had to compile the driver from source for some reason (I don’t remember but they yanked the driver from newer releases I think). I guess at some point it was re-added but again nobody talks about this machine and it’s WWAN card so I got super lucky to find that one Debian 13 info page.
While I’ve played with Fedora briefly when I was distros hopping to see what worked last year (and before that), and the ex had it on his TP, I don’t actually know what the difference is vs Debian-based systems, since I try to stick with that as it’s what I started on and know/am comfortable with. All I know is its based (?) on RHEL. Care to give me a tl;dr major differences?