Lenovo ThinkPad T430 / Nitrokey NitroPad T430

User Support HCL Reports
12

I was extremely lucky and got a “new” (aka unused) T430 that spend the last 10 years in original packaging at an IT warehouse. After upgrading it to make it identical to the one I already have, I installed R4.1 on both of them.

HCL reports:

This machine is the best and it certainly works flawlessly without any workarounds or troubleshooting with R4.1. This being said I have a couple of notes I want to share:

  1. If you use Coreboot/Heads make sure you upgraded to the current version Heads-v0.2.0-1150 or the install won’t work.

  2. dom0 needs zenity installed for things like qvm-move-to-vm to work. Also in case you want to use Whiskermenu one now has to install xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin which was included by default previously.

  3. Most of the Qubes OS UI in dom0 is now Qt5 based and doesn’t by default adhere to the selected theme, which is especially annoying when using a dark theme. Luckily this can easily be remedied by installing qt5-qtstyleplugins and exporting QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=gtk2 (e.g. in /etc/environment).

  4. I get a very noticeable performance bump when using Btrfs as opposed to whatever is the default. I don’t have the technical understanding to explain this but I have done repeated A-B-A experiments on two identical computers and at least with my exact hardware (see above HCLs) the difference is very noticeable. This was the case with R4.0.4 and subjectively is even bigger with R4.1 (e.g. due to the current world situation I have a qube permanently streaming CNN in a window on my screen… this was not fluid and somewhat bumpy in the default install but runs smooth as butter now with Btrfs – I know that doesn’t make sense on the face of it, but it is what I see; also general qube startup times are several seconds shorter) … so I continue to strongly recommend this for this machine.

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