This weekend the X1 Carbon with Fedora Workstation went live in North America on Lenovos webstore. This is a big milestone for us and for Lenovo as its the first time Fedora ships pre-installed on a laptop from a major vendor and its the first time the world’s largest laptop maker ships premium laptops with Linux directly to consumers. Currently only the X1 Carbon is available, but more models is on the way and more geographies will get added too soon.
It seems Lenovo is taking its embrace of Linux quite seriously, with proper integration with things like Linux Vendor Firmware Service and Fwupd. The blog post goes into a number of other recent improvements the Fedora project is working on, too.
I’ve been running Fedora 32 on my Gen 7 for few months. It works superbly well. Great to see Lenovo continue to commit into Linux and LVFS
The hell with Fedora, I want a supported preloaded CentOS on my mobile hardware. I’m a stability minded kind of guy. It would be easier and cost effective for Lenovo to support.
Understood, but I think that would require someone to backport new drivers and such to CentOS as they updated the hardware. It might be more expensive over the long run. Also, isn’t LTR version of Cent kind of dying away? I had heard some conflicting information about that. I guess we’ll find out when 8 reaches end of life.
Red Hat backports drivers and security fixes into their kernels. A kernel may report as 3.10, but it’s not a vanilla 3.10 kernel.
Then CentOS has the Pus repo which delivers enhanced kernels. https://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories/CentOSPlus
The bigger problem for running CentOS as a desktop, at least in the past, is the graphics and GUI components don’t get updated. This is why I run Fedora as my desktop OS. People expect to run Fedora as a desktop OS, and as such, the graphics stack and GUI components gets updates.
No one knows, or someone knows but isn’t telling anyone else. CentOS is supposed to become a rolling version of RHEL, like OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, but only the sales team has committed to this as far as I know.
“Also, isn’t LTR version of Cent kind of dying away? I had heard some conflicting information about that. I guess we’ll find out when 8 reaches end of life.”
If that was true, why not just kill off CentOS in favor of Fedora?
Many businesses in the Financial industry use CentOS, especally in the hedgefund startup space, as they want RHEL’s stability and predictability, but not at their insane licensing schemes.
As a side note, The fact that Redhat was a publicly traded company, that they purchased the CentOS project before the IBM takeover, explains a lot.
Several reasons.
A long time ago, Fedora was supposed to fill the void left by Red Hat Linux when Red Hat made the decision to go to subscriptions. Fedora would focus on stability and bug fixes, but the community had other ideas. The community decided they would rather focus on features, and Red Hat rolled with it.
This left a diconnect between RHEL and Fedora which has gotten wider as the years have gone on. Red Hat needs a public proving ground to shake out bugs and what not. Fedora does this to a certain respect, but not to the extent which Red Hat would like since the Fedora community is focused on things like desktops and laptops. Things which RHEL customers don’t really care about.
CentOS, as originally conceived, was a downstream version of RHEL. This was great for people who needed stability but didn’t want to pay subscription fees to Red Hat. This is an important detail, and we’ll come back to it in a second.
The current diagram looks like this: [Fedora] –> [RHEL] –> [CentOS]
Fast forward to a few years ago. Fedora is a fantastic desktop distro which sort of feeds RHEL. CentOS is the community version of RHEL, but everyone outside of stodgy, stability first companies who don’t want to pay Red Hat subscription fees is ignoring CentOS in favor of Ubuntu.
Ubuntu is the distro de jure of emerging technologies, for whatever reason, and they are claiming to be the distro the cloud is built on. They weren’t wrong. Most cloud tech had repos for Ubuntu, and everything else later, maybe.
Red Hat needed a FOSS distro they could give away. Something they could push as a stable playground for new tech, but they also didn’t want to give RHEL away for free. Maybe also something that could act as an incubator with a direct correlation to RHEL to shake out bugs and what not. The decision was made to bring CentOS in house.
At this point Red Hat has Fedora, CentOS, and RHEL. Fedora is the upstream, and CentOS becomes a peer of RHEL instead of a downstream of RHEL.
The relationship diagram is updated: [Fedora] ——–> [RHEL/CentOS]
Red Hat still has the problem of Fedora and RHEL only being loosely connected.
CentOS has the mission of being the playground to get people to build new tech on the Red Hat platform. To do this people need newer libs, more current software, and stability.
To satisfy these requirements, CentOS was repositioned to be the upstream of RHEL, with the release of RHEL 8. It’s still in transition, but that’s what’s supposed to happen. CentOS gets a clearer mission then just being a free version of RHEL, the community gets a distro with newer libs to build new tech on, and Red Hat gets a distro which focuses on stability and bug fixes which directly relates to RHEL.
The current diagram: [Fedora] –> [CentOS Stream] –> [RHEL/CentOS]
The future diagram(?): [Fedora] –> [CentOS] –> [RHEL]
Thanks for the clarification. That clears a lot of things up.
Dell will sell RHEL licenses for their Precision laptops. Is that close enough?
Aside from that, no one is going to do that. CentOS/RHEL is pretty miserable as a laptop or desktop OS. I’m saying this as someone who used to run CentOS as a desktop OS and gave up in favor of Fedora which focuses on being a really good desktop/workstation distro.
It absolutely would not. Deploying RHEL/CentOS at the end of its lifecycle can be pretty rough. There is lots of custom compilations and third-party repos.
Basically, just run Fedora. It’s a lot less work.
I have the 5ht gen and I always had a ThinkPad for over a decade or maybe more, but until today they have not fixed the cooling problem on Linux (thermald is not a solution), and there is still not driver for fingerprint reader. I like the fwupd commitment, but they need to do more than this. Supporting Fedora is more important for me since Fedora has more mainlined patches.
I’d love to see Fedora gain traction, just to see all those .deb zealots get worked up about something as insignificant as a format war between what is essentially a glorified .zip file with a dependency list attached (and some scripts).
BTW Fedora is my most disliked distro on a personal level, because it’s from a major company (RedHat), so you might think you are getting an OS from a reputable vendor, but it’s actually just like any other distro, relying on “whatever happens to be available” for driver support. If RedHat is making so much money, couldn’t they just pay people to reverse-engineer the Nvidia Optimus driver so Fedora didn’t have to suffer through the embarrassment of not having support for it? Most Linuxeros underestimate the reputational damage this caused to Desktop Linux. We are talking about the standard for laptops with Nvidia GPUs since 2014. The only laptops I know that doesn’t use it are my two 3D Vision laptops, because the Nvidia GPU had to be connected directly to the 120Hz screen for 3D to work. Anything else relied on Optimus, with no wire coming out of the discrete GPU and going to the screen.