I recently - as in two days ago - bought a ThinkPad X1 off of eBay, and decided to try Fedora 43 Cosmic Spin out on it. I want to sell my MacBookPro M1 as I rarely use it. I find that I’m using Linux more and more these days. I have my iPhone and iPad Pro for everything Apple, so the MBP is relatively superfluous in the grand scheme of things. I still have my work ‘spare’ laptop which runs OpenSuse Tumbleweed (TW), but it has a truly terrible keyboard and screen. This Dell has now been superseded by the 16Gb/512Gb/2.8k OLED screen. Yea, welcome to #FirstWorldProblems - lols.

Now, what made me think about trying Fedora out on my spiffy ThinkPad is not perhaps down to the grand thoughts that you may have envisioned me thinking! I actually wanted to continue with OpenSuse Tumbleweed, but for some reason the .iso download was taking an absolute age from OpenSuse; so I thought well whilst that’s downloading I’ll give Fedora a try. My last interaction with fedora - on the aforementioned Dell - was a whole world of pain. I spoke to my friend Zachary, and he also confirmed Fedora 43 was running really well on his X1.

So guess what, I went ahead an installed it - like the loon that I am! :P It recognised my 2.8K OLED screen straight from the initial installer; it recognised my inbuilt fingerprint reader, and well, everything actually. LUKS nvme drive encoding was a breeze. Like literally everything is working almost flawlessly, perhaps the easiest Linux set-up I’ve ever done. Even when it came to OpenSuse TW install which I thought was good, I still had issues with it recognising my fingerprint reader.

So after using it for like the last 48 hours, if you have a ThinkPad I can recommend Fedora. There’s a few things that I currently miss on Fedora and they are:

  1. More regular updates between point releases. I find myself trying to update Fedora twice a day, and there’s there’s simply nothing to update! I think I’ve been spoilt with coming from OpenSuse TW and Arch Linux for too long. It’s not a complaint, it’s more I’m missing my dopamine ‘hit’ with updated software.

  2. BTRFS snapshots. I miss these and I’ve installed a program called ‘BTRFS Assistant’ which should help me get them set-up quite easily and painlessly. Having such a safety net is something that I miss, and whilst I’m not using my OpenSuse TW - it’s something that I would like to continue having on my laptop.

  3. systemd-boot. Fedora 43 installed GRUB2 by default. Whilst certainly not a major thing, I decided a while ago that I wanted to use as much systemd functionality as possible (please don’t hate me! lols). I would have loved to see an option on the installer to use systemd-boot rather than GRUB2. It’s simply a cleaner install and easier to manage in my opinion.

I’ll write another blog post later on about what I installed, and why.