Lenovo has announced that all of its ThinkStation desktop PCs and ThinkPad P series laptops will be available to buy with Ubuntu preloaded starting summer 2020.
Lenovo is already well represented within the Linux hardware community having ‘certified’ a swathe of its devices for various different distros over the years.
The company also recently began to sell laptops preloaded with Fedora, and make more of its firmware updates available through the vendor-neutral Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS).
Now it’s spreading its love for Linux further.
Lenovo say ALL of its ThinkStation and ThinkPad P Series laptops will be available to buy with Ubuntu LTS pre-loaded and not just a few specific configurations stashed away on a hard-to-find store page somewhere.
And while Ubuntu isn’t the only OS option its adding (the same devices can be bought with Windows 10 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux pre-installed) it’s still a major win for Ubuntu and the wider Linux community.
But It gets better. In a further boon the company says it will “…upstream device drivers directly to the Linux kernel, to help maintain stability and compatibility throughout the life of the workstation.”.
Of course, it’s easy to buy a ThinkPad running Windows and install Ubuntu manually (and this news doesn’t change that). But hereon-out buyers can be certain that all hardware works with Ubuntu out-of-the-box — no driver hunts or config edits necessary!
“With the preloaded OEM version of Ubuntu LTS, Lenovo provides a highly stable and more secure version of the widely used Ubuntu distribution,” Lenovo say.
“Ubuntu LTS benefits from an extended five-year support cycle, providing increased user confidence and system stability across their deployment. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, performs certification and regression testing on these systems on an ongoing basis to ensure that it remains as stable as possible for end-users.”
As noted in our Ubuntu 20.10 article, Ubuntu developers are working on ways to improve the capabilities of and the experience when using OEM kernels. Some of that work will be back-ported to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS which, from the sound of this news, will likely benefit Lenovo’s (new) Linux customers.
Lenovo’s ThinkPad line is pretty revered among developers, a relationship this news will likely deepen — does it make you more likely to consider buying one?