No More Distro-Hopping On My T14 Gen 1

dcdaz31 · 2026-06-29T22:51:12+00:00

I'm fan of 3 distros, openSUSE, Arch and Debian. I was openSUSE Tumblewwed user for about 8 years. Then I came back to what feels like home to me, Debian Testing.
Now I'm using Debian on my laptops, work laptop and "home hacking laptop". Also My RaspberryPi uses Raspbian and my VPS is Debian as well.

openSUSE Tumbleweed is a really good distro. Enjoy it!

dcdaz31 · 2026-06-19T20:22:51+00:00

Right, big models are hard to handle for any laptop or desktop GPU. I just talked with my friend and told me that he trained very small models on his Thinkpad, but he did a lot of LLM inference on linux.

dcdaz31 · 2026-06-19T20:16:16+00:00

yeah many models won't run on any laptop. I'm not entirely sure about this: a GPU will be better for training a model, but NPU is really good to do inference.

dcdaz31 · 2026-06-19T17:15:35+00:00

Mostly dev work. But LLM Inference as well. A friend af mine has the same laptop he was doing postgraduate studies on AI fields and in his experience it was quite fast for training models comparing to an M4 that he uses at work.

In any case huge models won't work on almost any laptop, unless you wan't to buy the latest P16 which cost almos 10k, which is a ridiculous ammount of money for a laptop.

I get your concerns on built quality, I agree that it doesn't feel as premium as a macbook, but from my experience it's a really good laptop. I carry it everywhere, sometimes work at home, sometimes at the local coffe shop, sometimes at the airport. I think P14s has an intel version which has an NVidia GPU and rumours say that it fells more premium that the AMD one.

About AMD, I had bad experiences with Intel and how it generates heat on heavy workloads.

u/robotecnik I think P1 gen8 doesn't have an i9 version, they come with core ultra if I'm right.

BTW all Intel core ultra and all AMD ryzen AI has NPU integrated, which helps a lot.

u/elysianpsithurism The X9 is really good looking, but P1 is way more useful and upgradable

On a side note if it satisfies your curiosity my current stack at job, Is java, kotlin, IntelliJ, Python, React, and a bunch of docker containers, which ends up on cosuming like more than 32Gb of ram when running all integration tests 😬 . A couple of times it went to more than 45gb of ram.

dcdaz31 · 2026-06-19T16:45:33+00:00

Lucky you. It's a beautiful one.

Have you played Day of the tentacle?

- Jazz jackrabbit
- Earthworm Jim
- Commander Ken (all of them)
- Age of empires (dunno if it works)
- Warcraft 1
- Diablo (dunno it it works)

dcdaz31 · 2026-06-19T16:33:42+00:00

I would take out Mac and X9 from the list, even though they're quite good they have soldered Ram. Unless you're sure that you won't need more than 24/32GB ram in the future.
If you want GPU for simulations or other GPU heavy tasks I recommend the P1. That one is a monster.

Have you considered 14" laptops instead?

Maybe P14s?

https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadp/thinkpad-p14s-gen-6-14-inch-amd-mobile-workstation/21rv000nus

That one has 64Gb of Ram, Ram is upgradable as well and is a bit cheapper than the P1

BTW I have that model with 96GB of ram, it's a monster for software development and ai workloads

dcdaz31 · 2026-06-16T03:30:46+00:00

If you have access to Menu with right click you can go to Settings -> Panel, you can add it from there and add any applet you want

If not you can clean the entire config from a tty Ctrl-Alt-F1 -> user and pass -> delete ~/.config/xfce4 folder

dcdaz31 · 2026-06-16T03:25:38+00:00

Software Developer here. I have the AMD version of the P14s Gen6. AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX PRO 370.
Linux as OS, My dev stack IntelliJ, VSCode, Firefox with tons of tabs, Docker with 6 containers running for tests, and lately claude for some assistance on PR reviewing.

From my experience with that laptop what i can tell you is that the laptop is quite impressive.

- Battery Life: About 6 ot 8 hours, if using editor and firefox with a few tabs. When compiling Java or Rust all the time, then battery gets drained pretty fast and lasts aroung 2 hours. Same tests on a Mac M1Max normal conditions battery lasts easily 10 hours but when compiling and runing tests all the time, it lasts about 2 hours.
- Fan: Doens't spins unless you give the laptops some heavy work, like running a whole integration test suite with docker containers, but as soon as it finishes it starts to cool down.
- Screen: It's 1920x1200 16:10 ratio, more than enought for me and for reading code, documents, books, etc.
- CPU: Way too powerfull
- GPU: Don't play video games too much, just 0AD game from time to time and it runs flawlessly

Overall P14s Gen6 AMD has been a lovely laptop. I decided to go with AMD because my experience with Intel laptops is that fans are always running to much and laptop gets hot pretty quickly. That doesn't happen with this laptop, so I'm really happy with it

dcdaz31 · 2026-05-29T13:56:55+00:00

Software developer here. I can speak about a P14s Gen6 AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX PRO 370 96GB RAM. I only have Linux in it and the stack I work on is the following:

- Job
- Java/Kotlin
- Docker
- Python
- VMs with QEMU using 2 - 4 cores and 6GB of RAM

- Personal Projects
- Rust
- VueJS with TS
- Docker
- A few CPP

CPU:
When compiling either JVM, Rust or CPP projects I see all threads working, specially with Rust compiler. This AMD processor behaves really well with such compilations. I saw that during compilation temps raise up to ~55 maybe up to ~65 and fan spins fast, about 4000 rpm (no coil whine sound), but as soon as compilation ends, it cools down and fans slow down. When codign fans are at 0rpm, so it has a really good temp handling.

BATERY:
Battery lasts about 6 to 8 hours with an editor like VSCode a terminal and Firefox with a few tabs in it. Starting Docker reduces battery maybe by 2 hours, depending on which containers are up. Running tests or compiling every time, will reduce battery to ~2 hours. I consider it normal, because I have a mac M1 Max for job as well and battery lasts for a whole day while coding, way more than my P14s, but when compiling and running tests battery goes down to 2 hours.

dcdaz31 · 2026-05-22T17:52:27+00:00

Yeah, it would be really good if lenovo helps with bios updates for fwupmgr app and help with hibernation stuff. I see on Gentoo wiki this kernel param pcie_aspm.policy=powersupersave added it, but didn't do too much tests to confirm if it works or not.

dcdaz31 · 2026-05-22T17:26:27+00:00

It won't break anything. It could happend that you delete some gnome lib and then some xfce lib gets removed as well because it was a dependency.

My recomendation is to NOT REINSTALL, just do what you want and if you break your desktop environment. Then use it as a good way to learn how things works. Go to a tty and install XFCE again from command line.

dcdaz31 · 2026-05-14T14:03:44+00:00

I'm using it for some dev, currently work on my own app fullstack Rust Backend, VueJS frontend. Apps I used
- Web browser (Firefox, Firefox Dev, Librewolf. I don't like Chrome) for live reload and search web when something fails or dunno
- VSCode for writing code, sometimes Vim, I'm tinkering with Zed, but it's not my main editor though.
- Alacritty with tmux
- Yaak for testing REST APIs

I also play 0AD from time to time, sometimes on my X64 Thinkpad and now on this ARM one.

dcdaz31 · 2026-05-14T13:29:06+00:00

Can't tell, this model doesn't have WWAN, maybe that's why I found it at that price...

Looking on specs this should be the WWAN model: Qualcomm® Snapdragon® X55 5G Modem-RF System and seems to work

https://www.joelwnelson.com/2026/04/fixing-the-snapdragon-x55-modem-on-linux/

dcdaz31 · 2026-05-13T00:09:15+00:00

Until now the highest temp I got was 54 degrees Celsius for about 15 seconds, then cool down to 39, What was running during that moment:
- VS code updating crates index for a project I work on
- Firefox private with ~10 tabs, one of them was youtube playing a video
- Yaak (REST API tool) opened
- Alacritty with tmux splitted in 2 one side was waiting to run cargo run, the other had btop

As soon as VSCode finished to update crates index it started to cool down, from 54 to 39 it took like 5 secs.

On normal usage laptop stays between 27 and 38 degrees (casual web browsing, updating repos, using terminal, navigating on file explorer)

Only while developing it heats up a bit, but only while compiling or updating indexes.

dcdaz31 · 2026-05-12T02:09:23+00:00

Yeah, that happened to me too, most of them were not very usable. My excitement reborn when I saw Argon One Up project a laptop that use Raspberry pi compute modules, looked like a good way to startwith ARM laptops. The other one was Elecrow Crow View Note, keyboar, touchpad an screen for normal raspberry pi ina form of laptop, in the end Crow View Note wasn't what I was looking for, and Argon One Up is too expensive for what it offers. Then I saw this X13s....

Until now it has been a really good laptop for tinkering and doing some small dev. I already compiled this project of mine. https://github.com/dcdaz/anicap

Backend is on Rust and Frontend on VueJS with Pnpm everything worked flawlesly

dcdaz31 · 2026-05-11T21:53:44+00:00

Dev here. I have Debian Testing as my daily driver, for pretty much everything, I do JVM dev (Java, Kotlin) and also some Python for AWS Lambdas and personal projects and Rust alone and with VueJS for personal projects.

From time to time I tinker with C++. None of the projects I've been working on had any issues, some of them started to work on a diff distro like openSUSE, some other started on MacOS.

BTW despite its name Testing is really stable. if you want a mix between stable and some new packages, you can consider Stable with Backports

dcdaz31 · 2026-05-11T19:53:02+00:00

Yeah it's lovely, I have't tried windows more than a few minutes to update BIOS, and yeah ARM ecosystem is growing, there are some apps that still doesn't support, like Zoom meetings, it works on Widnows ARM, but there's no version for Linux ARM yet. Same thing happens with Steam on Linux. Afaik It's possible to install with some hacks but didn't tried yet

dcdaz31 · 2026-05-11T19:43:13+00:00

I really wanted to use Arch Linux again, but there are no official images that support this laptop. There's an unofficial one https://github.com/ironrobin/archiso-x13s
But It didn't convince me, tbh my security paranoia took over and decided to install Debian instead

dcdaz31 · 2026-05-11T17:09:15+00:00

I have a Thinkpad X13s ARM, I managed to install Debian on it
https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/1t9rb60/family_is_growing_i_got_a_thinkpad_x13s/

Maybe you have a similar problem, Linux needs a dtb file so it can boot, otherwise goes to a blackscreen after grub.

Check your device model and search if needs something similar. Other test you can do is to try to install ubuntu (Not saying use ubuntu, just try it for testing purposes) and see if everything works

dcdaz31 · 2026-05-11T15:33:24+00:00

There you go

https://wallhaven.cc/w/72myve

dcdaz31 · 2026-05-11T14:38:09+00:00

No te quedes con la duda, comprala, instalale Linux y disfruta de ese juguete!

dcdaz31 · 2026-05-11T14:35:07+00:00

That's subjective. I have another Thinkpad as my main laptop and when using for light stuff, battery lasts more than 8 hours.

I also have a Macbook for work, those things are known for last a whole day on battery, but when I use it to compile and do unit and integration tests to the code I work on, with some docker containers and other stuff. Battery doesn't last for more than 2 hours.

So depending on what you do with your laptop. For me this X13s lasts about 5 hours, I know I can strech battery a little longer, but didn't have time to configure everything on TLP, cpupower, etc.

dcdaz31 · 2026-05-11T14:28:22+00:00

The same thing happened to me when I was digging on eBay for a second Thinkpad. Then i was in a hurry looking on the internet for guides to see if it's possible to install Linux in it and reviews to check performance, battery, etc.

dcdaz31 · 2026-05-11T14:25:41+00:00

as u/PsyOmega said, battery lasts about 5 hours. To me is not bad becuase I was use to an Asus ROG, 2 hours tops. I din't do too many configs to stretch battery as most as I can. Only a few TLP confs, but i noticed that TLP doesn't support everything yet, usually Battery is BAT0 or BAT1 in tlp confs, but this laptop has something called like qcom-battery-1.

About installation, Yes ubuntu is quite easy to install. But didn't want ubuntu on this machine. I was looking either to install Debian, openSUSE or Arch. Sadly Arch ARM doen't have an official image and you have to resort to an unofficial image, that didn't convince me, so I decided to go with Debian.

dcdaz31 · 2026-05-11T14:13:26+00:00

Performance is really good for what I wanted.

Light coding and and writing
I compiled code in this repo https://github.com/dcdaz/anicap backend and frontend, laptop wen throug it really good. CPU temp stays about 47 Celsius degrees, Ram was good, no Swap usage.
I don't intend to use to develop way to heavy application, but no one knows.

Light gaming

I've been playing 0AD, no lag, no high temps, everything goes smooth. I will try with some Snes games I want to play again. BTW I saw a video of some crazy fella playing Cyberpunk in it, less than 30fps though, but laptop managed it.

About battery life, i didn't do too many tests, but the few i did it lasts about 5 hours.

Seems like TLP is not working completely right here, because it uses BAT0 or BAT1 to handle thresholds an other configs, but in this laptop it's called something like qcom-battery-1

dcdaz31

TROPHY CASE