I bought a brand new Lenovo P14s Gen 5 laptop and tried to get it working with Qubes. It sort of works as a standalone laptop. WiFi didn’t work, but that could probably be remedied with some effort. Unplugging USB devices makes it crash … maybe that is not a dealbreaker for some. The big problem for me was the Thunderbolt dock.
Running Qubes with the Thunderbolt dock connected would, in short order (once even when entering the disk encryption password) print a message “disabling IRQ 118” (or 119 don’t remember for sure). After that happened, all input of any kind to the laptop is disabled, including the built-in keyboard and trackpoint which otherwise was working.
For me the dock is a dealbreaker since most of the time I would be using the laptop at my desk. I’ve already initiated a return but thought I would get an HCL while I have the laptop here.
In order to get Qubes to install I used kernel-latest, and I added module_blacklist=ucsi_acpi to the Linux kernel command line when installing.
I tried various other snippets I found in the forums (e.g. acpi=off, ioapic_ack=new) to try to get it working better with the dock with no success. I would not recommend this laptop unless you never want to plug it in to Thunderbolt and you never want to unplug a USB device. I think there are few people who could live with these constraints.
It’s too bad because this is the first ThinkPad I’ve ever bought and it’s a great laptop, but I bought it strictly to run Qubes and it can’t do that for me.
The laptop was boxed up waiting to be dropped off at UPS but I decided to give it one more try. I had been installing with a USB Qube. I decided to install again, this time without a USB Qube.
It works better. It actually does see a monitor plugged into the Thunderbolt dock. At this time I only tested with one such monitor. I could activate the monitor in display settings and it worked. Also, it didn’t block input forever.
However, although it worked better, it still did not work well. It would not block input forever, but it would still block it. I would have a few seconds of being able to use the mouse or trackpoint, then they would lock up for several seconds. This was a cycle that would repeat ad infinitum. The keyboard was worse. If I had a key pressed down when it “froze”, the key would repeat the whole time it was frozen and only stop the next time it became responsive to input again.
I tried plugging in the Thunderbolt dock only after logging in to Qubes instead of having it plugged in while the machine starts and it actually works a lot better. When I plug it in after I’m logged in to Qubes, it takes a couple of seconds and then all three of my desktop monitors worked, and so did my external mouse and keyboard. I had to plug ethernet directly in to the laptop’s own ethernet port, and that did work.
I did still experience one crash though a few seconds after plugging in the dock so I’m not sure it’s perfectly stable.
EDIT: Apologies, I actually have another model of Lenovo P14s Gen 5?
I have a 21MFS0TW18
Not sure if what I wrote is relevant
Hello !
The price on this laptop was so low for the spec that I just couldn’t not buy it.
Wi-Fi
I can confirm the issue with the Wi-Fi card.
Currently, my “fix” is to use a cheap USB Wi-Fi adapter.
Apparently it’s possible to replace the WWAN/GSM module with a Wi-Fi card at least on the Gen 4:
I looked really hard at the driver issue and from what I understand, this is a QubesOS specific issue with this driver; so we’re a long way from it being resolved. Someone even tried to compile a custom version of the kernel module to add some logging.
It would be nice if we could hire a Linux guru to debug it… let’s pool 5k$ and get a gray-bearded Linux master to fix our Wi-Fi
USB
USB has not been a problem for me, at least with the Wi-Fi dongle, but I’m yet to try docking or using my SSD.
Suspend
I loose a lot of battery while suspending, so it looks like suspending just doesn’t work well? It happens both when I close the lid and when I run systemctl suspend
Overall
If you can get it for super cheap like me, I’d say it’s an okay choice.
I’m not daily driving it yet, but will report later on + get a proper “HCL” report.
Looks like your model is an Asian region variant, but the technical specifications appear to be the same. If you can provide an HCL report and/or Support Files, we can compare and contrast the hardware differences, if any.
At the moment this model not supported by fedora.
Try to use Fedora 43 template for sys-net, install atheros-firmware for needed driver and hope for soon resolution by fedora dev.
kernel: |
6.12.54-1
You should install Qubes with kernel-latest option.
