New Hardware Fun
The other day I finally replaced my trusty Thinkpad T480s I bought 6½ years ago. Overall, I was still pretty happy with it and even gave it a little refresh early last year (RAM upgrade, bigger SSD, new keyboard) but the CPU was really starting to show its age when compiling. I’m almost as picky as Nate when it comes to laptops but the P14s Gen 5 AMD (what a mouthful) checked more boxes than most laptops I looked at in recent years.
The device shipped with Windows 11 and whenever I touch a Windows machine I’m baffled that people put up with this. I connected it to Wifi (beginner’s mistake apparently) since I wanted to install all firmware updates and salvage a couple of things from it before formatting the SSD (ICC profiles, Dolby audio presets, etc). The first run wizard asked me for my choice of locale, then went looking for updates. Once done, the system rebooted. After that it asked me to give the computer a name. Guess what? Another reboot, and more updates. And then the dreaded compulsory Microsoft account I had no intention of creating. You can open a terminal by pressing Shift+F10 but the old bypassnro trick just led to a reboot and it asking the same questions again. Just when I was about to give up, Bhushan showed me another trick how to create a local account. Indeed, after yet another reboot and clicking away like 10 individual nag screens about privacy and cloud stuff, I was able to log into the system.
This is the sort of usability nightmare and command line tinkering bullshit that people were mocking Linux users for back in the days! Compare that to my KDE neon “unstable” installation where I plugged in a USB stick (Secure Boot of course rejected “3rd party keys” by default), booted into the live system, had the entire drive formatted, and within 10 minutes or so ended up with a working sexy KDE Plasma setup. I’m still sometimes amazed how beautiful our default setup looks nowadays with the floating panel, frosted glass, and all. I don’t like dark mode but since that laptop has an OLED screen I opted for “Breeze Twilight” which combines light applications with a dark panel and wallpaper.
As with any new device, there’s a few surprises waiting for you. Like most recent laptops it has a stupid Copilot (“AI”) key. Unfortunately, rather than inventing a new key code, it emulates an actual key combination of Meta+Shift+Touchpad Off (F23 I heard, yes, there can be more than just F12). This makes it difficult to just remap the key to something useful (like a right Meta key). However, at least you should be able to use it as a global shortcut, right? Unfortunately, you weren’t able to assign it from GUI. I now fixed the Copilot key by allowing Shift be used in a shortcut in conjunction with “Touchpad Off”. It’s a kludge but at least you can now make it bring up KRunner or something.
Speaking of proprietary keys, it also has a “Phone Link” function key. It is recognized as such starting from Linux kernel 6.14 but there’s no support in Xkb or Qt yet. I just sent a pull request to libxkbcommon to add it and once that lands, I’ll look into adding it to Qt. How cool would it be if under Plasma the Phone Link button would instead open KDE Connect?!
The suspend-to-idle stuff is both a great opportunity and a little scary. Modern laptops don’t do “proper” S3 suspend anymore but only S2 which works more like on a smartphone where it can wake up anytime and fast. Right now even plugging in the charger or touching the touchpad causes the machine to wake up. Luckily, if KWin detects the lid is shut and no monitor is connected, it sleeps again after a short time to prevent a hot backpack situation. Work is ongoing to make better use of this capability, to detect what caused the system to wake up. For example, when plugging in the charger, we might want to wake up, play a short animation and the “plugged in” sound and go back to sleep.
I can still return the device within the 14 day period if something major crops up but I already fell in love with its 120 Hz OLED 16:10 display (I luckily don’t seem to be sensitive to the 240 Hz PWM it uses), so I don’t think I’ll be returning it :-)