Oh that’s good then. I think they stopped using whitelists a while ago, so if it is slotted you can probably replace it with anything. Maybe they reversed course on soldered modules then, or perhaps it only applied to some models. I looked into specs of the T16 at some point, and that one had soldered wifi module.

A lot of the modern thinkpads have the wifi module soldered to the motherboard nowadays unfortunately. Sad that they would use these crappy realtek cards in the first place as well.

Yeah the thought is that as long as my patch applies without error, I would get the latest kernel automatically built and can just update my laptop normally with pacman. And since I have a server anyways I might as well use it to compile the kernel at night. I’m also thinking of doing the same with some aur packages as well.

I use a custom kernel on my laptop. I just modified the PKGBUILD of the official arch kernel package, and added my patch as a file. Then I could build a proper package with makepkg. I’m planning on setting up my server to automatically build the patched kernel and serve it in a private arch repository, so I don’t have to compile the kernel on my laptop regularly. I’m waiting on forgejo (git forge I host on my server) version 9 to be released first, as it should support arch package hosting by then.

Thanks. I had a blast reading my old comments :p

For old not very demanding games by todays standard, yes. As long as you get something new enough to have proper support for Vulkan API (such that DXVK would work). As others have mentioned, AMD have better iGPUs than intel, so definitely look out for that.

I wished tiling windows would work like snapping of floating windows, but more powerful. For example instead of snapping only to the edge of the screen, I would for example hold alt while dragging a window and would get a preview of where the window would snap to depending on where I’m hovering. And that it would resize the other windows accordingly.

Having to remember or customize a billion keyboard shortcuts for switching between windows and rearranging the grid, makes tiling window managers DOA for me. I don’t have the time/energy to set it up or practice the shortcuts.

I don’t know specifically about the T470, but if you have an nvidia GPU, you might have issues depending on how the display outputs are connected to the GPUs. I had a T420s at some point with an nvidia GPU, and it was a PITA to get the display output to work on linux. I had to permanently enable the nvidia GPU for that to work (cutting battery life in half), because the display output was connected only to the nvidia GPU. I swore to never buy an nvidia product ever again after that experience.

I’m only saying this because I’ve seen a few videos about windows users switching to linux mint lately. Having to update the kernel for the computer to work is a common occurrance. IMO the newest available one should be the default one. We should strive towards giving new users the best possible first impression of linux.

They really need to update Mint though. Sure it is good… on old computers. Anything made the last couple of years will have issues due to an ancient kernel and mesa. We should stop calling it stable/lts and unstable, because users will always pick the one called stable, even if the ‘unstable’ one is the one that would in most cases work the best for desktop linux. Or at least we should separate the kernel and mesa away from the rest of the ‘stable’ packages, and include recent versions of that by default, to not scare away people with driver issues.