Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen3 Review – with Linux

To be fair, several of my work laptops had a similar sentence in their user handbook, but two monitors were possible if you connected the wires before booting the laptop.

Really strange limitation, as it never scaled with bandwidth - so 4k 90+Hz was doable, but 2x 1080p60hz wasn't.

Well, the 13” M1 MacBook Pro is basically the Air with a fan and more ports?

Display link as far as I can tell is a weak video card on a usb connector. Does anyone else make something like that?

I used one with a white plastic MacBook to get 2 displays. I have a new on for my Linux notebook. It works well, but there is a little latency. For writing code/ web browsing it’s fine for me.

Have you tried it on m1? I'm running a 4k at 60hz and 3440x1440 at 75hz and they are fine - I don't think I notice any latency issues at all

Regarding the edit, that would make sense. I have the same laptop and first tried to run Ubuntu LTS, had some problems with the thermals, even though it was definitely usable.

Tried Arch (with the 5.17 kernel, from Ubuntu LTS's 5.4 kernel) and the thermals were more or less identical to Windows, including the fan behavior.

It's a really nice little machine! :D

> maybe the most that I do is recompiling ffmpeg a few times a day, so it might just be a result of my usage patterns?

Maybe. If you compile in short bursts it's probably not going to affect you as much. With 4K screens and compiling a tiny bit of Rust, it starts being noticeable rather quick.

I did notice that newer kernel versions do behave a bit better, but still require a bit of help to keep consistent performance plugged in.

> RAM (I think only 8 GiB, actually) or CPU (I don't even remember which Intel CPU it had

Sounds like you had one of the cheaper T14's, it's likely you didn't run into any power limits due to that. 1080p screen as well, I presume?

Kubuntu 20.04 and its kernel version certainly throttle power on the higher-end T14's I've seen. If that's lifted then they throttle thermally, unless you manually force both cooling and power limits higher. Windows handles it all tad better, but the battery life is nothing to be amazed of.

To each their own. I'd have spec'ed that MacBook Pro out to 16GB though. I don't do Windows and I have on-prem cloud VMs (config'd for 32GB) for Linux. I don't need a Linux desktop (shudder!) either. I'm sure your THinkBook is great, but I prefer the Apple ecosystem and the "shit just works" of my Mac (although I'm still on an i9).

Macbook Air has never been marketed/sold as a 'Pro' device. There is the Macbook Pro line for that.

That's absolutely true. I'd say it's a marketing failure on Apple's part.

2K is only a few more pixels than 1920 x 1080 ?

I find the sweet spot minimum for my 27" desktop monitors to be 1440P. Anything that and above looks great.

Is this how I do that?

    $ sudo lsusb -s 004 --verbose

    Bus 001 Device 004: ID 06cb:00bd Synaptics, Inc. Prometheus MIS Touch Fingerprint Reader
    Device Descriptor:
    bLength                18
    bDescriptorType         1
    bcdUSB               2.00
    bDeviceClass          255 Vendor Specific Class
    bDeviceSubClass        16 
    bDeviceProtocol       255 
    bMaxPacketSize0         8
    idVendor           0x06cb Synaptics, Inc.
    idProduct          0x00bd Prometheus MIS Touch Fingerprint Reader
    bcdDevice            0.00
    iManufacturer           0 
    iProduct                0 
    iSerial                 1 [redacted]
    bNumConfigurations      1
    Configuration Descriptor:
        bLength                 9
        bDescriptorType         2
        wTotalLength       0x0027
        bNumInterfaces          1
        bConfigurationValue     1
        iConfiguration          0 
        bmAttributes         0xa0
        (Bus Powered)
        Remote Wakeup
        MaxPower              100mA
        Interface Descriptor:
        bLength                 9
        bDescriptorType         4
        bInterfaceNumber        0
        bAlternateSetting       0
        bNumEndpoints           3
        bInterfaceClass       255 Vendor Specific Class
        bInterfaceSubClass      0 
        bInterfaceProtocol      0 
        iInterface              0 
        Endpoint Descriptor:
            bLength                 7
            bDescriptorType         5
            bEndpointAddress     0x01  EP 1 OUT
            bmAttributes            2
            Transfer Type            Bulk
            Synch Type               None
            Usage Type               Data
            wMaxPacketSize     0x0040  1x 64 bytes
            bInterval               0
        Endpoint Descriptor:
            bLength                 7
            bDescriptorType         5
            bEndpointAddress     0x81  EP 1 IN
            bmAttributes            2
            Transfer Type            Bulk
            Synch Type               None
            Usage Type               Data
            wMaxPacketSize     0x0040  1x 64 bytes
            bInterval               0
        Endpoint Descriptor:
            bLength                 7
            bDescriptorType         5
            bEndpointAddress     0x83  EP 3 IN
            bmAttributes            3
            Transfer Type            Interrupt
            Synch Type               None
            Usage Type               Data
            wMaxPacketSize     0x0008  1x 8 bytes
            bInterval               4
    Device Status:     0x0000
    (Bus Powered)

No elaborate script is needed these days, the kernel's runtime power management suspends the card automatically as long as /sys/bus/pci/devices/…/power/control is "auto" and the device isn't being used (the nvidia/nouveau module is unloaded).

Documentation for the nvidia module claims [0] runtime pm is supported even when the module _is_ loaded for GPUs since Turing, but I haven't been able to test that (mine is older than that).

[0] https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/435.17/READ...

It's measured from the battery when unplugged: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/power_now

I hate non-dedicated GPUs with a vengeance. As a gamer, they never are up to par anyway, and never were. Even way back, Windows struggled balancing both. So you had to switch one of them off. I get that they are useful for non-GPU heavy use cases, in a gaming machine I can perfectly live with dGPUs. As a result, I never tried the Intel GPU under Ubuntu.

I have never experienced UI lag with Intel graphics on Linux (only ever on Nvidia, actually), so it's probably fixable. What DM are you running, and what are your PRIME settings?

On modern Linux systems the way to do it is using PRIME render offload.

That way, the Intel (or AMD in my case) integrated GPU will be used normally, with the Nvidia GPU fully powered down (you need a new enough card for this). Then, when you need it, you can use a command or environment variable or graphical launcher to signal to use the dGPU for offloading.

The GPU will then power on and render to a virtual display, and the framebuffer will be copied to the framebuffer of the relevant application on-the-fly.

Once no more applications are using the NVidia GPU, it will power down.

This way, there is no need to use a KVM, or do PCI passthrough, or anything of the sort, it mostly "just works".

If the (very small) overhead of passing through the iGPU is too much and your laptop supports it, you can also using MUX graphics and restart the DM with a config that will allow the laptop to rewire the screen into the dGPU, but I have never found this necessary or helpful.

You just need to write 1 to /sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate/no_turbo , like in

sudo sh -c 'printf 1 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate/no_turbo'

Writing 0 re-enables turbo. Note it is not the same as the power-saving mode in Gnome settings under the Power section. This is more similar to Low-power mode in MacOS which also prevents Turbo boost.

EDIT: I was wrong to call it power-saving mode in the grandparent comment. It should be called no-turbo mode there.

in case you did not find out by now

  echo performance |tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/policy?/scaling_governor

The easy way in Fedora is using `tuned-adm`.

```

$ tuned-adm active ...

$ tuned-adm list ...

$ tuned-adm recommend ...

$ tuned-adm profile powersave

```

Lenovo still offers up to 5 years, next business-day onsite service for the Thinkpad line that is somewhat reasable. Unfortunately, the battery warranty is an additional line item. Usually the 3 year NBD onsite option with battery is about $250 for a T14 or X13.

If I remember correctly, people regularly shelled out $5,000 plus for those Thinkpads. They had some insane “Rolls-Royce” type of support for business executives.

They also still use 4 RAM slots and an MXM slot for the graphics card on their ZBook workstations. Sadly the CPU is soldered and availability of MXM cards seems to be extremely limited nowadays.

my TI 86 lasts for days on a single set of AA batteries, but you don't find me comparing it to my dell workstation, now do I?

I have a laptop not because I want to use my computer on my lap or while unplugged, but because I want to be able to carry my computer between different workplaces.

As an industrial controls engineer, I'm constantly bouncing from my desk to my rolling cart in the shop, to putting it in my toolbag and driving to a local customer's site, to putting it in my carryon and flying to a remote customer's site, to my home office. At each location, I have power available. At some locations, I have external monitors and a keyboard/mouse, so I could easily plug in a Mac Mini or luggable mATX desktop, at others the laptop is often perched on some convenient stack of pallets and peripherals like monitor stands would be highly inconvenient. A 10x15x1.5" slab with a power brick (and a spare power brick can be left at frequently used locations) is just a really nice form factor to carry around, it's superior to separate parts like even a small Mac Mini, SFF, or mATX desktop, an external monitor that probably needs a box of some sort to keep it from being damaged, and a keyboard and mouse.

I use too much Windows-only proprietary software to make the iMac sensible, but I like the idea of the power and legibility of a large display, desktop-grade CPUs, and the larger thermal envelope available by ditching the battery and requiring wall power. Does anyone make an all-in-one or a carrying case for all-in-ones (with probably a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse) that would make jumping between different work locations make sense?

I'm aware that's sort of what a gaming laptop is, and it's pretty similar to the Lenovo Thinkpad, Dell Precision, and HP Elitebooks that I've used in the past...Especially after a couple years of 24/7 charger connections while baking the battery with a Quadro GPU running Solidworks, you barely have enough battery capacity to carry the laptop from one desk to another. Unfortunately, all those workstation laptops make concessions to try to pretend they're a Macbook Air where you can do...something? apparently some people do some kind of work with the laptop running on a battery and balanced on their knees. It's just a foreign concept to me. I'd rather they were 2" thick with a 120V socket, no battery, and 400W of CPU+GPU.

A battery is nice as an integrated UPS, to be able to move the machine between rooms, put it into a bag for hours and resume from suspend in a different place without having to restart every single application, same thing over a night.

About Macs, in my case I never liked their GUI since the very first Mac (the top bar, the menu, etc) and that's an instantaneous show stopper.

> If you never use your battery, why own a laptop at all? Why not buy a Mac mini or an iMac?

Sometimes I need to move, for example while travelling, otherwise I would use a desktop computer.

> This mindset is similar to what people with wired headphones think of Airpods et al. It's not an apparent benefit when you're in the bubble of thinking it's normal to have a wire going across your torso all day and hearing the thuds and bumps propagate through the wire to your ears. But when you buy a pair of wireless buds and have them for a week - you don't go back. You've discovered freedom.

What is abnormal is that in 2022 people think it is acceptable to be forced to use wireless headphones and have to constantly have to think and worry about keeping them charged, esp when they are used in a context where you quite possibly have them plugged in your ear all day.

Wireless headphones have their place (primarily in outdoor active settings in audio only contexts for small periods of time). But if you are sitting in front of your computer all day, there are these magical devices called wired headphones with infinite "battery life" and world class sound quality that you don't have to worry about being out of charge in the middle of an important meeting. Unlike wireless ones they also guarantee audio always being insync with video if you are watching a video regardless of the type of device/machine/operating system you are using them on, something I have never been able to get consistently working to my satisfaction with bluetooth headphones.

I don't think this is true for a large majority of us. Use cases and therefore priorities differ, its not that we just haven't "seen the light".

My laptop lasts a good 6-7 hours doing normal tasks, but I hardly ever use more than an hour or two at most as that is as much time as I usually spend in meetings. Anything above that is wasted on me as I prefer my dual monitor and keyboard setup too much and subsequently can keep it connected pretty much 24/7.

It's much similar in the case of wired headphones. I bought a wireless headset many years ago. As the battery has deteriorated a bit since then I feel that I too often had to stop listening to music during work hours because they needed to charge. If I forgot to charge them when not at work, they would have to charge during work hours when I would much rather use them. I decided that this annoyance was greater than having a cable that I didn't notice was there. The sound is better too so yay

As an audio guy I tried, but I don't like the sound. My Sennheiser HD-25 cans are perfect for the road. The cable and the cups are propperly decoupled from the headpart, the cable comes as a plug and play replacement should it fail after 3 years of rough (including sports) use.

I have had one pair of these headphones for 16 years now. I wonder how airpods would compare in terms of pure surviveability.

> Likewise, with battery, you don't think it's an issue now because you know your laptop's limitations and therefore rarely unplug it.

No I rarely unplug it because I need the screen real estate and the decent keyboard experience that I get at a workstation.

There is maybe 30% of my work where I can afford to work on a small screen and just work on it from the garden or a cafe.

Company issued laptops have become the norm but other than the occasional travelling scenarios most people still need workstations to get things done.

>> wired headphones think of Airpods et al.

Funny, people accept limited (I don't use Bluetooth headsets, but I assume battery life isn't an issue in real life) battery life for fancy headsets but complain about it with laptops. I'm the opposite, I embrace the limited battery life of my laptop (running purely on the nVidia GPU and sporting a i9, on Linux, the most I get out of it are 6 hours, less when playing games), but use wired headphones. Not judging neither side, just a funny when you think about it.

Both wireless headphones and laptops have downsides that you pay for the convenience of portability/ease of use. Sometimes it's worth it, sometimes it's not.

I use laptop only when I don't have any other option (traveling, meetings) and there is no way in hell that I'm going to work on a unplugged laptop for more that few hours simply because I don't like the ergonomics, performance and lack of "monitor space". This means that "battery life" after certain treshold (few hours) is useless for me and not something I would consider while buying one.

I understand that different people have different workflows and battery life is crucial for some of them, but it's not something everybody needs.

I actually have wireless keyboard, mouse and earphones, both for work and for sport.

But like other commenter says I need nevertheless an space for a 27" monitor, keyboard/mouse and a comfortable office chair. I don't think I have a "mindset", I'm all about improving my day to day, I spend an insane amount of hours in front of my computer. I have been told that my next work computer is going to be a MacBook Pro so I will get a taste of the Apple experience.

While I do share the general idea and I do enjoy the battery life of my M1, I can't relate about earbuds, at least not those I tried. Until then, I'm happy to keep my DT-770 wired.

> when the device is 5 years old and the battery has significantly degraded

When the battery has significantly degraded, I usually buy a new one. Changing the battery in a Thinkpad is not very hard.

If you scroll down on the link above you can see some graphs that show the 1280P is significantly faster than the M1 and the battery lives are very similar 11 hours vs 13 hours.

AMD are also doing a good job. The 7000s look very good. Crazy that this is still on a larger process node than Apple.

i3 runs fine on macOS

I mean, there is still a performance compromise; Docker on Mac sucks. Being forced to use APFS is incredibly slow for local Docker development.

I don’t intend to use it away from a socket so I dont want to conpromise 1% of the performance when plugged in by getting a lower power CPU that has better perf only when not plugged in. What CPU do you have that doesn’t throttle? It’s not an Intel H, I’m guessing an Intel U version, M1, or Ryzen then.

It's not that the OP would like that, it's just how it is with Intel+Nvidia "desktop replacements". Those setups do not scale too well between workloads.

It does seem fairly usable already. I'd say it's going to be viable as a primary workstation sooner than later, but things like polished GPU drivers will take more time.

There are other ARM machines as well, that run Linux more easily, but those aren't as high-performance yet.

If you don't care about gestures as they've always been fine in my experience. I can't speak for gestures because the only one I use is right click (two finger tap). But for pointing the cursor and pulling the trigger the touchpad/trackpoint works fine I use both constantly since sometimes the trackpoint is easier to reach or the touchpad is easier to reach. I also use both sets of buttons as well as sometimes it's easier to have your left hand at home position and your right hand trackpaddin' but you use your thumb on space to left click.

Besides the lack of OLED display, the limited RAM on AMD laptops is another showstopper then. I want a minimum of 64GB ECC, which I can get on a Thinkpad with an Intel Xeon CPU.

That's another thing I don't understand, these configurators are not available in my country (Czech Republic) - neither for Lenovo nor Dell.

Fortunately I was able to find a local Lenovo partner, who has some internal access. But I don't understand why they don't have it public for whole EU.

I also distinctly remember the unnerving feeling of getting a tingling sensation on my wrists when having a macboook pro charging connecting to mains.

I have only used them when clients specifically request it, but otherwise connect them to a workstation of my choice.

Out of curiosity, do you have any sources with actual evidence that carbon fiber is prone to catastrophic failure in bike frames/components, particularly compared to aluminum? From my (rather limited) research, there seems to be plenty of speculation and anecdotes online about the fragility of CF, but not much actual evidence of rates of catastrophic failure. My impression (not based on expertise or much evidence) is that properly designed CF is much stronger for a given weight than most metals, but can fail at relatively low loads if stressed in a way it wasn't designed for. As it applies to biking, I guess this would tend to mean that CF bikes are more likely to be structurally damaged because of a crash/fall, but not necessarily more likely to fail and cause a crash/fall. This of course supports your point that CF is not a good choice for someone who falls often.

Aluminum bikes are just as prone to failure, and in fact are less likely to be left in a repairable state after an accident. A dent or a crack in the frame ofter renders it useless.

True of carbon as well, but they can be repaired in some cases; aluminum frames almost always need to be scrapped.

Yes, honestly, a good aluminium frame is preferable to carbon for 90% of people. The small tradeoff in weight and vibration/stiffness characteristics is really not worth the loss in structural integrity, money, and peace of mind.

My username may give this away, but after tens of thousands of miles ridden on a variety of frames, I've settled on chromoly steel as the most versatile material. In fact I just picked up another steel frame bike this past weekend with a rack for panniers and a fork that can fit gravel tires.

Regardless I find it very strange to compare a laptop with a bicycle. You would pick the materials when constructing either one for very different reasons.

Specialized Diverge does have fender/rack mounts (although you need to replace the stock seat post clamp with another one for the top rear rack mounts, but Spec does sell one). It's not exactly a utility bike, but for touring around civilized Europe it's a very good bike. :-)

I'm still using my N9, great little phone...

alluminium doesn't grow on trees either.

plastic can be (almost) infinitely recycled for industrial use, it's food use that has limited recyclability.

also: Macs are very hard to upgrade (sometimes it's impossible to) and become e-trash in a couple of years, while these "plastic" laptops can last a decade before being discarded as junk.

Producing Aluminum requires huge amounts of energy, which might not come from renewable sources. Always look the at complete manufacturing chain.

> The casual dismissal of TrackPoints in the grandparent comment shows that the author has never tried one.

They're a great and innovative "backup" pointing device when one doesn't have access to a mouse or touchpad. They really don't compare to either of those more expressive and efficient options, though.

> The casual dismissal of TrackPoints in the grandparent comment shows that the author has never tried one.

I've tried to use track points. A dozen or so times. Recently I got a new thinkpad from work and gave it another go, same result. I just don't like it.

Granted, the trackpad on my thinkpad is also garbage. I prefer my external trackball mouse.

Trackpoint fanatics don't seem to understand what works for them doesn't necessarily work for everyone. I find myself rolling my eyes a lot in threads like this.

I’ve used them quite a bit. They were standard issue at a certain place named after a hat. It is NOT a fantastic feature to have your mouse move when you type which I found happened constantly when using a ThinkPad. 1) the eraser mouse “track point” was novel in 1994, not anymore. It’s in the way.

Likewise with the physical mouse buttons on the trackpad. It’s 2022. We have touch screens with gestures and stuff. Why do I still have to use a physical button? Tap to click you say? Turning that on means being even in near-field proximity to the trackpad means it’s a click, whether you wanted it to or not.

I don't know - I have a long history of ThinkPads (and adjacent devices, including some oddities like the WorkPad z50) and I cannot imagine wanting to go back to a TrackPoint after experiencing a high-quality touchpad.

Correct. I would lump ‘erratic trackpad clicking’ to its list of hostile user behaviors. The hardware inside the laptop on the board is nice. It’s the peripherals and body that make me feel like I’m working for IBM in 1996. Small changes in the design won’t make up for an outdated design.

Also, outside of SDD or RAM, what else are you upgrading? Does it even need to have that capability considering how often you do? Would you rather have better parts that won’t fail so easily in a slimmer, sleeker, design than one that sacrifices weight and size to allow you to maybe have the choice?

I like right to repair. I like being able to upgrade something. The frequency of which I upgrade my ram and sdd is about as frequently as I’ll need a new motherboard anyway as my board is outdated 4x cycles.

> I run Windows dual boot, since I need (native) Windows for certain work related tasks.

If your firmware has a "boot from" hotkey (usually F12), then you use that as your dual-boot menu.

>But this is a $3000 professional laptop, which is supposed to have good Linux support. //

That's a big fail by Lenovo then, so why didn't you return it? When the support guys logged in to your computer to fix it, what did they do -- just go "yeah, or product is crap" and usher you away?

Yeah for the most part it's a "Linux on laptops works if you <list of steps to configure things>...". At least that has been my experience. Although I have not run Linux on a laptop in years so maybe it's time to revisit that.

> I run Windows dual boot, since I need (native) Windows for certain work related tasks.

Windows also supports EFI boot.

>> Don't use Grub or any bootloader if you can avoid it. I haven't used Grub in 10 years. Load Linux directly as an EFI executable via the EFISTUB approach.

> I run Windows dual boot, since I need (native) Windows for certain work related tasks.

The windows/efi boot menu can handle dual boot.

But, assuming you want/need secure boot and bitlocker - I'm not sure if there is an easy way to avoid having to type in recovery key on kernel updates :/

Perhaps efi > direct windows and efi > grub > Linux might work? Probably still needs recovery key for bitlocker after grub update? Maybe this is solved now - I don't dual boot any machines w bitlocker right now.

>But frankly, I don't want to care about all this "oh, but you just have to do [insanely_technical_thing]"

>It should just work.

Then you should buy a laptop that ships with Linux and has official support from the vendor. Like the Dell XPS Developer edition, or anything from System76.

> By not using Grub you lose the ability to fallback on a safe kernel

That is factually wrong: if you create other EFI entries with different kernel payloads, then enroll them in your UEFI bios, you can select them at boot time in a menu.

This is how I test cmdline options (same kernel packaged in different .EFI)

If you forgot to do that before a problem, but still have the old payloads around, you can even use the UEFI to add EFI payloads by selecting their files from your EFI partition.

I keep a USB key around with the Arch Linux ISO to boot an OS, mount my filesystem, and fix whatever is busted. I never needed to do this yet.

This got me looking around at how one would load a luks or dm-crypt encrypted drive from efi without grub. I didn't find anything solid but I've used initram shims for stuff like that before so that might be an approach but at that point you might as well use grub which has some nice features built-in.

I guess I'm really curious what there is to gain by bypassing grub if anything?

I mean, that's not entirely true. You can chroot into your box and change your kernel if something goes horrifically wrong, the situation isn't as unsalvageable as you paint it out to be.

I use EFTSTUB with Arch Linux and I agree about it taking up more of your time. However, for me, this was all the very start to first set it up. Since then, it’s been smooth sailing.

I also use multiple kernels and I have had issues with kernel updates, and no issues with kernel parameters. However, there is friction with creating separate entries and so I created a very simple shell script to save my commands.

I’ve had no issues dual booting with Windows using BitLocker. I do not use secure boot (yet).

If you’re willing to spend an hour to set it up, I’d go for it. However, that’s an hour of your life you can save with Grub.

> The parameters are encoded in UEFI NVRAM.

You can embed the parameters in the EFISTUB, this is explained in the arch wiki.

I use that to test different parameters with the same kernel packaged in different EFI payload, which I can select from the F12 boot menu if I don't want to use the commands to specify "use this payload only for the next boot"

It's completely seamless after initial setup on Arch Linux. No scripts, copying, or anything. It just works for years. I almost forgot it exists.

I highly recommend that option, even if you use an Ubuntu based distribution: in 2022, there's no reason to still use grub on a UEFI system.

Ubuntu for me just works. I use it on an X1 Gen 5. Also used on XPS13.

I was unable to make the official dock work with my Lenovo (Fedora), but a usb-c dongle has been working without issues.

I have a Zephyrus G15 with 5800u/RTX3080/40GB/3TB and with the 5.15 kernel it works flawlessly on Linux Mint. I use it more often than MBP these days. The only drawback is no DisplayPort for VR.