Finally, I managed to get rid of Windows on my old Thinkpad Tablet 10 2nd gen. I use this tablet mainly as a notepad to take handwritten notes, for reading scientific papers and sometimes as my ultra mobile netbook (keyboard cover). It is of great help to record Khan academy like lecture videos. I was never happy using Windows on it, but Lenovo (and Intel?) fucked up a lot with the hardware layout and driver compatibility of this tablet. A major downside were uncontrollable Windows 10 updates that rendered the tablet almost useless because it became so slow during this summer (Yes, I tried to speed it up). Using Arch or Gentoo Linux or any Unix (BSD) was not feasible because I didn’t had the time to reverse engineer a lot. The major downside with many Linux distributions (incl. Ubuntu) was that the battery indicator did not work. That is a major downside on mobile devices However, I got rid of Windows and replaced it with Fedora 29 30. Ubuntu 18.10 still doesn’t work even closely out of the box Fedora 29 does. If you have more time, then I would like to recommend you this article series by Nicole on how to get Debian working on it. You could also compile Gentoo for it.

Article is updated to Fedora 30

What works:

  • Battery indicator and power management works with Gnome and KDE - only minor problems with suspending it to RAM
  • Wifi works with manually adding brcmfmac4356-pcie.txt from https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/third_party/linux-firmware/+/master/brcm/ We have to modprobe brcmfmac on every boot because for some reason systemd doesn’t do the job it should… BSD init scripts ftw!
  • Bluetooth seems to work
  • Suspend etc works flawlessly
  • USB, SD card slot etc. (incl. using a microSD as an encrypted storage device)
  • Volume/Sound control
  • Stylus pen works with GNOME and KDE (nothing else tested). However, it doesn’t work with the GNOME virtual keyboard. We have to use touchscreen input for that.

and what doesn’t:

  • cameras do no work out of the box. I haven’t tried to make them work because I prefer to use a high quality webcam for all video calls anyhow
  • audio seems to work didn’t trace the problem so far
  • it seems like touchpad and pen input freezes once the keyboard is disconnected - if I know that I’m using it for taking notes etc., then I have to remove the keyboard before Wayland starts

What is different now?

  • the system is fast
  • I can program on it (Julia, Python, C++, Fortran, Rust - you name it)
  • I can work without facing delays anymore
  • Full SSD encryption works (Windows 10 business!! edition didn’t support it and I ran into some problems with VeraCrypt.)
  • Xournal runs more stable than on Windows 10