Lenovo ThinkPad T480s

16 was not enough for me, but 32 seems to be fine. Running 10+ qubes. See also: Is 4GB of RAM enought for running Qubes OS?.

Reading documentation is really essential for a good experience with Qubes. Also, ask here if you have any problems (create a new topic).

@fsflover,

Thanks a lot! This gave me some insight. As far as I can foresee for me it will not be more than 5+ Qubes maximum. I may presume 24GB of RAM should be enough.

Thanks for the links you did provide. I do always read documentation before I start to install a new OS and will continue to read according to your recommendation.

I ordered a T480s i5 8350U with 8GB soldered on the Board and a soDIMM of 32GB. That should ad up to 40GB RAM.

But today instead of the T480s a T490s with 8GB RAM soldered on the motherboard was delivered. This I will sent the T490s back because on a T490s I can´t upgrade the RAM there is no slot (very bad idea of Lenovo). T480s is a nice system but useless as a QUBES OS system.

So for now I will proceed on the T460s with 24GB RAM, and re-install QUBES OS tomorrow. The I7 6600U is still a nice CPU altough only 2 core.
The T480s will follow when it will be delivered.

I was looking around for instructions to replace the XFCE desktop for a KDE any tips & tricks?

Don´t want to hijack this thread so if this is to much of topic please move my question to the right thread.

Thanks

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It’s not 24GB but 40GB as I have myself 40GB of ram memory

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How? I took the info from the platform spec.

Are you sure you got a T480s? How many slots do you have and what’s in it?

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It’s definitely 40GB - if you have 8GB soldered you can add a 32GB module.

The manufacturer wont update their specs as RAM improves and becomes
cheaper.
Also, sometimes they will only report results which were tested with the
original installed OS.
It’s therefore common for the “real” maximum to be far in excess of the
manufacturer’s report.

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Thank you @quququbebebe and @unman, I’ve made the respective edits.

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I found that T480s has suspend, USB and brightness issues. Are you sure it belongs to the list?

@fsflover wrote:

I found that T480s has suspend, USB and brightness issues. Are you sure it belongs to the list?
From the report:

can’t suspend the system, it will crash when waking up. The solution I found, was to disable the 2nd usb controller on sys-usb (3.0 xHCI Controler)

I don’t see a USB issue here other then with suspend. So if the 2nd USB controller is enabled suspend is not working, if it’s disabled suspend works.

Consider the brightness value from 0 to 11, with 0 as a black screen and 11 the maximum brightness. I can’t access brightness 1 naturally. I must go all the way up to 11, then go down to 1. An other consequence of this issue, is the popup showing the current brightness having some visual issues.

That’s exactly the kind of minor issue that doesn’t stop productive use of the computer. That’s why the criteria list and not a general “everything works, no problems”.

So, yes … in my opinion that computer belongs on the list.

@Sven

As also @quququbebe & @unman did post, 40GB RAM in Thinkpad T480s is not a problem at all.

The Lenovo PSREF are outdated and we have found this to be the case with other ThinkPads before (Like the T450s the last one with DDR3 RAM).

I bought a ThinkPad T480s with Intel i5 8350U CPU. At first a crappy T490s was delivered, crappy because RAM isn’t upgradable in a T490s. Now finally the correct T480s was delivered and I installed the 32GB RAM module & QUBES OS 4.1.0-RC3.

Installation of QUBES OS was easy. It took <20 minutes. That’s a huge improvement of >40 minutes compared the ThinkPad T460s that sports 20GB RAM.

I have chosen the i5 8350 CPU (4 cores 8 lanes) on the ThinPad T480s platform very consciously. The heat development under load in the i7 8550U and the i7 8650U on Linux is on the high side. This i5 8350U CPU also scores better in various benchmarks than the two 8th generation i7 CPU’s I mentioned before do (the i7 8650U I know of my ThinkPad X1). This is despite the lower 6GB CPU cache compared to the 8GB CPU cache in the i7 CPUs

Installation of Qubes OS was simple and done in >20 minutes. That is a huge improvement of >40 minutes compared to the installation time needed on ThinkPad T460s. On that T460s i7 6600U (2 cores 4 lanes) with 20GB RAM installation of QUBES OS took me more than an hour.

As written earlier here I am new to Qubes OS and need to study this OS and learn. The hardware platform of the ThinkPad T480s seems very suitable, partly due to the RAM upgrade.

I posted this just FYI.

Hope it’s useful information to the forum members.

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Thank you @Amadeus65. Could confirm that suspend does (not) work on your machine? Could you also share an HCL report?

Qubes-HCL-LENOVO-20L70028US-20211220-175053.yml (805 Bytes)
This is my submission for the HCL report

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Thank you @HPOA909 for your HCL report, which is now online.

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ThanQ

Also, I have a GitHub username for that submission is HPOA909 (HowardPlayzOA) · GitHub, by using @HPOA909 in the submission for this yaml file. Thanks.

This sounds to me like you want me to change the reporter name from @HPOA909 to @HPOA909 in the HCL – right? The link under the reporter name goes back to this thread and in the forum you are called @HPOA909. That might be confusing. Do you want to change your forum user name to @HPOA909 too?

yes

@deeplow please change the user name, I’ll fix up the HCL entry (done).

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Done!

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ThanQ