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Switched from Windows 10 to Debian 11 on Lenovo ThinkBook 15 Gen2 ITL. Plus, thoughts on Ubuntu and Fedora.

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GNU
Linux
Red Hat
Microsoft
Debian
Ubuntu

I finally got off Windows again.

It seems like every time I buy a new laptop, Windows is all that really works right on it for a while, and then I find a place to hop off.

Well, Debian 11 is that place for my Lenovo Thinkbook 15 ITL Gen2 (really rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?). This laptop is a monster, and Lenovo got a lot of hardware into it cheaply, but they do cut corners in a lot of scary places.

Like that BIOS update that killed Windows 10 a few months ago.

While Lenovo says this laptop has Ubuntu “Certification”, they don’t support it. In fact, they apparently tell people on Lenovo Forums looking for help to “reinstall Windows”. Hard pass.

I managed to figure out why Ubuntu can apparently see the NVME SSD on this laptop and most other Linux distributions (including Debian 11) can’t.

It turns out that Lenovo is still putting Intel’s “VMD” on laptops. I looked for what in the hell this actually is, and Intel goes on and on about how it’s a “feature” to hide the hardware from the OS which would seem to indicate that it is mostly useful on servers, so when I evaluated Debian and came to the conclusion that everything worked okay, I did a few last steps, including installing one more BIOS update from within Windows. Hoping that it would clean up the mess of warnings that are in seemingly everyone’s system logs if they boot Linux, and which spew a nice bunch of crap about failing to reserve ACPI devices and bogus ACPI AML tables. Alas, it did not.

FWIW, according to at least one Ubuntu developer, they’re an eyesore, but apparently harmless.

Turning off VMD (server article, but after using the NOVO button to get into the BIOS, same deal) managed to make the system log complaints about having access denied go away, which is nice since many people complained that they couldn’t actually boot their computer into Linux until disabling this, even though the installer ran okay.

I also disabled Secure Boot, which has never secured any Linux computer. In fact, about all it ever has done for us is put Microsoft at the “root of trust” and I’d rather trust a hungry bear with a steak in my back pocket than Microsoft.

Oh, and if anyone from the FSF is reading this, feel free to tell Stallman that they can give a Free Software Award to me next time. I haven’t written any Free Software programs, sure, but I also haven’t done anything to sabotage your movement in ways you might never recover from, like Microsoft employee Miguel de Icaza and uEFI “Secure Boot” troll and overall pervert Matthew Garrett have. While you were pinning a medal on Garrett, you also had a page blasting this Security Theater as “Restricted Boots”.

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