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1+ Year Running Arch Linux On a Lenovo Yoga 2 Chronicled
New submitter KeithCu writes with a lengthy explanation of the joys (and just a handful of glitches) he's had in running Arch Linux on his ultraportable, a Lenovo Yoga 2. Other than the hardware-specific issues, I've been amazed by how well Arch Linux works, given that it doesn't have release cycles, or a big team with a lot of money supporting and marketing it. I've heard only 30 developers maintain the core Arch packages, with most of them having a full-time job doing something else! At the same time, it shouldn't be a total surprise things work so well, because free software doesn't just fall off a turnip truck.
Not many reviews feature pictures of a laptop charred from building LibreOffice.
Tried to read the story, site already appears slashdotted.
I'm stuck using a Thinkpad Yoga 12.5" at work, would rather run Linux but the damn thing's tablet-specific stuff seems like it'd be a huge pain in the butt.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
welcome!
Was he running his blog on the laptop?
I can't read the story - it is already Slashdotted.
But Arch is notorious for breakage. Lots of it.
I tried Arch myself on my own laptop for about a year. There were at least a dozen times where running what should have been a simple system update rendered things unusable. Sometimes it was just a few simple programs that ceased to function. Sometimes it was X itself failing to launch, leaving me at a command prompt. All of it took a fair amount of fiddling to fix, and eventually I got tired of it.
I switched over to Manjaro. The same laptop has been running that for at least two years now and hasn't had a single instance of breakage.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:yQY0nURcMJ0J:keithcu.com/wordpress/%3Fp%3D3641&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1
Working LInk
Can't read the artilce. Slashdot isn't a real news site because it doesn't do any actual reporting, just milks other people's work/reporting.
Stuff that matters
I ran Arch for a long time on multiple laptops and an HTPC. I run Manjaro now because it's just easier to install and functionally similar.
Not many reviews feature pictures of a laptop charred from building LibreOffice.
Running Gentoo on less powerfull Yoga 11e without any issues (apart non-working-until-next-kernel touchscreen) here.
IBM and by proxy Lenovo are heavy contributitors to the Linux Kernel. Of course their hardware is going to work. Just as HP server hardware functions flawlessly (HP desktop not so much)
Other than the hardware-specific issues
So basically: other than the fact that it can't connect to wifi, has no ethernet, 3d acceleration, and keeps my fans don't cool correctly which resulted in leg burns and a melted case, it's perfect.
Yeah, yeah, we know. Windows and Mac are terrible and Linux is so much more "stable".
Scanning for networks failed No networks found
the de-facto wireless GUI on Linux...was broken for my machine because it thought my wireless card was disabled
Meanwhile, my mouse is the most frustrating issue
Resume has been flakey...I never closed my screen because I didn’t trust it would come back. Sometimes, it would come back, but Gnome wouldn’t let me login!
For a while, the laptop speakers never worked after a reboot until I plugged something into the headphone jack, and then removed it
One time I was building LibreOffice while it was on a blanket and it overheated and charred the bottom. When doing CPU-intensive work, I now place this laptop on a metal plate
There are 4K videos on Youtube, but they are extremely jittery and suck all the CPU as the GPU is not being used
It took hours to render these 3200×1800 Arch wallpapers
[The mouse] use[d] to jump violently all over the screen while typing, but now it just hovers in small circles
In spite of my problems, I’m very glad I don’t need to mess with the Windows or Mac world.
Unfortunately, such advanced battery features are not yet enabled in Linux
OK, so let's see. Other than the network card, mouse, 2D graphics, sound, CPU, 3D graphics, battery and the fact that normal usage melted it, it works awesome. I think I'll stick with Windows 10 TP on my laptop, where I've only had minor network issues requiring a reboot to get it back sometimes.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
For me, the fact that an update was allowed to break things made Arch a no-go. I'm not adverse to tinkering on my own schedule, but my machine should die just from running an update.
On a new Fedora install, I used BTRFS. I would snapshot whenever I was going to run an update, just in case. One time a Fedora update broke something and i was able to rollback in about a minute. It was fantastic.
I realised this meant that Arch was now an option, and I haven't looked back. I have exactly what I want installed, exactly as the developers intended it. It's rock-solid stable, fast, and gets good battery life.
The documentation is truly amazing. It's now the first place I go even when I'm working with other distros at work.
The act of installing one feature at a time means that it's much easier to pinpoint what is causing a problem, and the manual configuration means that you tend to understand the applications better when problems arise.
I really can't recommend it enough, provided you use BTRFS (or XFS I guess). Having rollback abilities is an absolute game-changer for linux desktops.
He seems knowledgeable on a lot of the Linux stuff but he doesn't seem to understand that his Lenovo Yoga is not a thinkpad. He mentions a few things that he misses from having previously used a thinkpad (the better keyboard and the better pointing device being two such things) and doesn't seem to realize that he is using a laptop that is not designed to compete with the thinkpads. There are convertible thinkpad tablets out there for that purpose.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
and I don't have any complaints. I wanted to up my skill level and have done so dramatically. I know what services are running on my machine and why. Also, I know how to perform routine networking tasks without ifconfig! Sure there were challenges at first, but after the initial learning curve I feel much more in tune with my OS than when I ran Debian or CentOS. Servers at work still get Red Hat because that's what we're allowed to use. However, when I get to spec out a special project (which is the focus of my job) I usually choose Arch because I want a very specific set of services running and don't want anything to interfere. Use what works for you. This works for me.
When is the new slack coming out? The last release was in 2013! And don't say, 'when it's ready', the world came and left already.
Thanks for sharing that experience. It has been quite a while since I experemented running a Linux setup. Your article inspirede to spend the next weekend getting Linux district up and running.
I concur. Arch is an easy way to learn linux from a services and utilities point of view. I am somewhat skeptical still about the value of LFS (from a services point of view). Too much time is spent in the build cycle. You will understand how to compile things, but you don't get enough "trigger-time" on the important day-to-day services that most people expect to run. I ran Arch on a laptop and on a workstation while managing about 200 windows servers. Get remote desktop client installed, samba, and you are good to go! (all automation happened on the automation server)
who is KeithCu? why do we care what his experience with arch has been on his lenovo? any basic googling will show the distro isnt the most stable. probably explains why the arch wiki are so visited. i dont understand the point of the article. arch is a 10+ yr old distro. hows this any different then a "hey heres john doe's experience with gentoo the last two years!" almost slashvertisement
Unless you have deep philosophical reasons to never ever run Microsoft software, for almost any cutting-edge hardware youmay be better off just running VMWare (Workstation or Player) on Windows, then running your Linux within the VM. You may lose convenient access to some features, but you'll also get the advantage of better hardware compatibility and with most usage you probably won't much notice the performance hit.
fencepost
just a little off
Archlinux is a pretty good example for "Keep It Small and Simple" (KISS). Plain text-files for configuration, a well-working package-manager without any magic and only the absolutely required patches. My desktop at work is running with Archlinux since years and my private laptop (ThinkPad X22O) also.
You have to be experienced with UNIX or GNU/Linux and will have only little maintenance duties and always an stable state-of-the-art system.
Honestly, I'm a long standing user of Gentoo and compiling the kernel on my self. So "experienced" mains clearly not "can install Windows", it means experienced with UNIX. On the other side, using Windows and keeping it up-to-date is a nightmare for me because it just enforce a bad usage-pattern and I'm not really longer experienced with Windows.
"Unless you have deep philosophical reasons to never ever run Microsoft software, for almost any cutting-edge hardware youmay be better off just running VMWare (Workstation or Player) on Windows, then running your Linux within the VM."
Well, for the last five years, I've never found the need to buy cutting edge hardware for my desktop and laptop computing needs. My desktop runs fine with an all Intel setup (a NUC mini PC with no discrete video cards) with a CPU that was two generations behind the bleeding edge. Ditto for my laptop. Not a gamer of the FPS variety, so I've got all the speed I need with my "obsolete" hardware. So a Debian Linux install works just as fine as any commericial OS full of desktop bling. However, I do have a fairly "modern" tablet by a certain Korean company, whose bloatware infested Android variant I promptly replaced with a more open custom ROM.
Arch linux uses systemd, fuck it.