I gave in to my impulse to get back to ThinkPad + Arch Linux. Thanks to the numerous installs that I have done over the years, getting Arch up and running was as easy as running the Ubuntu installer for me1.
Notable changes:
GNOME and KDE only ship with Wayland. Previously, there was still an X session available to choose at login. wl-clipboard now replaces xclip, which I had gotten used to using — time to update my scripts. Fingerprint reader works! Something I had gotten used to on my Mac was using Touch ID to unlock it. Now I’m finally able to use it on Arch by installing python-validity, open-fprintd, and fprintd-clients. There is a small problem with running sudo commands when adding it to the PAM config. There isn’t a way to switch between fingerprint and password authentication. I have to wait for the fingerprint attempt to fail before it shows the keyboard password prompt — not ideal! Power tools I configured the power tools to help ensure that my laptop’s fans don’t start spinning at the first sign of load. The laptop remains silent for the most part, and the fans only spin when required. I was able to set up NVIDIA drivers to ensure plug-and-play capability with my monitor. In X, I had to jump through hoops and run specific xrandr scripts to get my external monitors working. Suspend/sleep doesn’t work as well as it does on macOS. A full charge on the laptop currently gets me about 2 hours of use. Even while idle, the laptop continues to drain the battery at an undesirable rate. I am tempted to see if replacing the battery would give me a respectable battery life[^2]. [^2]: If I decide to make the ThinkPad my primary laptop.
Considering it’s a 10-year-old ThinkPad, everything feels incredibly snappy and performs really well.
I still consulted the ArchWiki.↩︎