It’s probably been 15 years since I’ve used Linux and Mint seems to be the recommended distro for people who aren’t all that familiar with Linux like me, but I didn’t know if there was anything I should know with this ThinkPad model that anyone is familiar with. My searching around shows people saying everything from it was painless to install to they had tons of issues and I have no idea how common either one is.
So any advice would be appreciated. Thanks!
Does it have dual batteries? My t470s does a hard shutdown instead of switching battery source when the first battery is empty sometimes. It’s an old bug and I think the consensus is that no one is really sure why.
Yes, it does have two batteries. That kind of sucks. But I don’t need all-day battery life, so hopefully that won’t be a huge issue.
I can’t speak for the T460, but I have a T480 with dual batteries and battery swapping works just fine. With a bit of tinkering I was even able to get the fingerprint sensor to work as well
Much like my searching, it seems like it’s all over the map in terms of experiences, although in general, it seems like the issues people have encountered are minor.
Hopefully you won’t get bitten by this bug. It seems like a combination of Lenovo firmware, upower, and the DE.
I hope not, but if it is an issue, it doesn’t sound like it will be a huge one most of the time at least.
Is your internal battery dead? I’ve never seen such problems with dual battery Thinkpads.
No, both work, it’s the switching over that often does a hard shutdown.
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/upower/upower/-/issues/62
I’m using the latest Lenovo firmware and have the same issue in any Linux version I’ve tried. Bad luck I guess, but I’m out of ideas.
Fwiw I never had a problem hotswapping batteries out