We’ve been teasing this for a while, but today it’s finally true—Fedora Workstation is now available preinstalled on the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 8, ThinkPad P53, and ThinkPad P1 Gen 2 laptops. The ThinkPad X1 Carbon is available today for direct consumer purchase from Lenovo’s online store. The Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen 2 and ThinkPad P53 will be available next week via the “Contact Us” icon on Lenovo.com. What’s more, the successor models are in the works for pre-load and online ordering as well!
Lenovo has been a great partner in bringing this to market. Like the Fedora community, they are operating on an “upstream first” model. That’s part of why the only thing you’ll see on the laptop that doesn’t come from an official Fedora repository is a set of PDFs providing documentation and legal notices. Lenovo engineers have been contributing to the Linux kernel, including a patch to enable the “lap mode” sensor, which is already accepted. They have also worked with their vendors to improve Linux support in devices like the fingerprint scanner.
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Of course, you already know that open source is about more than just the technology; the community is what makes it great. Lenovo is a member of Fedora and other communities. In addition to participating in the usual Fedora places (like the devel mailing list), they also were a gold-level sponsor of our Nest With Fedora conference. And they have a dedicated Fedora section on their community forum. Mark Pearson, Senior Linux Developer said “doing open source the right way is important to us” at his Nest With Fedora Q&A session.
This will be a global program, but it will take some time to roll out country-by-country. If it doesn’t appear on the website in your country, call the local sales number for your country to place a phone order. I’m excited to have Lenovo offer Fedora Workstation as a supported choice on their laptops. This is a great opportunity to grow our community.
