secureboot needs to be disabled in order to boot the installer. I haven’t turned it on since, no idea if it works with qubes.
the installer (also the installed OS) boots, but linux then immediately panics with an error related to ucsi_acpi, and reboots. I don’t know how to make it not reboot on panic, and couldn’t find anything in the qubes documentation. So no idea how to capture the error or even read it, but at the bottom it said something about ucsi_acpi.
so I tried module_blacklist=ucsi_acpi on the grub cmdline for vmlinuz (to blacklist the faulty driver).
this works for both the installer and the booted OS, but it’s a shitty solution because the laptop relies on a USB-C charger for power, and not loading the acpi driver for UCSI devices seems to fuck something else up, so the result is that unplugging the power will panic dom0, and restart.
this happens very often here in germany because our power grid is unstable, so a half second power interruption results in a panicked OS. don’t buy this laptop if you don’t want to carry around a battery pack.
ethernet works out of the box
MT7925 wifi card works, but debian-12-xfce template has firmware-misc-nonfree from 2023 which doesn’t have the driver for MT7925. pinning debian-testing (ie 2025+ versions) pulled in the missing mediatek driver.
speakers work. have not tested headphone plug.
brightness adjustments of the LCD work out of the box)))
To be fair, I paid only US$1800 (+tax) for mine. We may reasonably hope Xen will have a fix for the thunderbolt problem, someday. I am going to try an M.2 type-B to mini-PCI adapter and a mini-PCI wifi module, for internal wifi support. I traded off a fair bit to get a 4k OLED and AMD CPUs, eyes open.
Created an account to share my findings of this laptop here, but overall it seems that the big complaints relating to ucsi_acpi have been resolved (for post-installation OS running kernel-latest only).
For the install of Qubes (R4.2.4), the ucsi_acpi problem applied, so I also had to use the module_blacklist=ucsi_acpi entry to get the installer to properly launch.
Installed using kernel-latest option in the installer. Install went fine, if a little bit buggy with some screen tearing and refresh issues (minor annoyances only).
Booted into the fresh Qubes install (with Debian, Fedora and Whonix default templates installed). All the essentials seemed to be working just fine at this point, except for wifi (sys-net based on default debian-12-xfce template), but swapping sys-net to use the default fedora template fixed that.
Ran all the updates for dom0 and templates to get to the latest kernel (6.15.10 at this time), and after rebooting the basics all seemed to work great including wifi now working on sys-net using the updated debian-12-xfce template.
I have not needed to use the module_blacklist kernel entry beyond for the initial installer.
So far it seems a pretty great Qubes workstation.
I expect all the installer annoyance will be fully resolved by the time the Qubes R4.3 installer is officially out.
TIP: Would recommend everyone to go into BIOS and Permanently Disable the Absolute Persistence rootkit that ships standard with this machine. There are quite a few BIOS options that are worth reviewing, and I did fiddle quite a bit with mine, so YMMV with the above results if you are only using completely stock BIOS settings.
Update: using the latest kernel provided by kernel-latest (6.17.9) breaks boot (display stuck at boot before loading of LUKS decryption screen; keyboard is responsive but entering decryption password does not work whereas Ctrl + Alt + Del to reboot system does work).
For now, recommend for those using this laptop to stick to kernel 6.15.10 which presented no issues for me.
