T480s and Manjaro Cinnamon report

My old System 76 system did not end up working well with Manjaro, in the end the issues forced me to change distros. But I have found a very nice T480s Lenovo on Amazon. Specs were nice: i7-8550U, 24gb RAM, 512 NVME drive, 14" screen all for $550. So I got it as my distro testing computer. I have played around with several, none of which really…satisified if you understand what I mean. Some had technical issues, such as losing the WiFi connection upon reboot, or other glitches which made the experience unsatisfactory.

So I decided to come back to Manjaro. I loaded the latest Cinnamon version, and it boots fast, seems really stable. I have updated everything to the latest to include Libreoffice 7.4. Icons are sharp, I have decided to remain for now on the 5.15 kernel since it seems very nice and stable. It is nice and light and I can see it joining my stable of “road warrior” laptops that I take with me to the coffee shops (I need something to do since I have just retired). The only question I currently have is I have enabled TLP to help save battery life since it came with an 80% battery (new one on order). Does TLP remain active or do I have to re-enable each time I restart?

Look and feel: Great. It has a nice clean look, and it appears “modern” rather than the 1990’s early 2000’s look of so many Linux distros. Good selection of software, and the update process is pretty fast. I cannot see flatpak support at all in the update manager, so I do not know if it is there. I have enabled the AUR which is how I loaded Chrome, my preferred browser.

The T480s handled Manjaro really well, I have had none of the issues I have had on other distros, and so it looks like this laptop will stay as a “manjaro machine”. I am having none of the issues I had with the System 76 laptop due to their coreboot which seems really picky about distros and kernels. All in all a very nice inexpensive purchase that is working well so far.

It depends on how you enabled it.

sudo systemctl enable --now tlp.service

… will start it and enable it on every boot.

sudo systemctl start tlp.service

… will start it right away but will not automatically enable it at boot time.

For more information, see… :arrow_down:

man systemctl
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Which model out of curiosity? I’m currently using a Gazelle (gaze17-3060-b) and have owned a Serval WS (serw12).

It is indeed. I’m currently working with support to resolve the issue on my Gazelle. The Serval had proprietary BIOS.

See Flatpak - Manjaro

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Thank you, that was the command I thought I needed but could not recall it.

The one I had was the Darp 6 the first generation Darter Pro with Coreboot (gen 1). Thanks, I will look to see if they might have updated their Coreboot firmware, but I doubt it. Right now it sits in a drawer and is seldom used. I am not going to play around with it any longer, it is running LMDE 5 and doing fine. The T480s is magnificent with Manjaro.

Thank you I installed Flatpaks and then immediately installed the latest Libreoffice. I have also set up TLP as described above. So far Manjaro Cinnamon is working really well on this older laptop which still manages to feel somewhat fresh. My two favorites are the System 76 Lemur Pro (battery life king), and the HP Dev One. If Manjaro long term works out well, I might install it on those two laptops as well.

Right now I am impressed with the attractive looks of everything, and how it just works so cleaning on this laptop. I have not had a Lenovo laptop before this, and I did a lot of research on Lenovo models. This one was close to the X1 Carbon, both in size and weight, with both having carbon fiber in the chassis, but it had loads of ports which is very important to me. It also includes an ethernet port which is important. Both ethernet and wifi work well in Manjaro on this laptop.

I find, for me, and my use cases, the 14" laptops work the best in terms of portability and ease of use. I take my laptops out with me to various coffee shops (so the wife will not beat me :smiley: ) since if I spend too much time at the house, I get on her nerves. I will continue to field test this laptop and occasionally post how things are going. The 5.15 kernel seems to just be utterly stable and so I doubt I will change for a more up to date kernel.

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