Re: FW: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux
Hey Mark
On 2020/06/03 20:24, Mark Pearson wrote:
>>> 1. Support
>>>
>>> I'm not sure what you did in the case with Fedora, but my guess is you
>>> have some agreement with how to handle support calls for Fedora on the
>>> system. Debian isn't backed by any one company, and in the immediate
>>> future our usual community support channels might be as good as it gets.
>>> I suppose if users know this, understand this, and know what they're
>>> getting, then this becomes less of an issue.
>>>
> So - I'm kinda nervous about the support side to see what happens as we
> enable websales. Up until now it's just been corporate customers and
> best effort support on our Lenovo Linux forums.
> We will provide support for HW related aspects of the platforms and
> genuinely we're waiting to see how bad or good it's going to be.
> For OS stuff that isn't HW related (e.g. the calendar app crashes) then
> we'll point more at the community. My hope is that Linux users are more
> technically aware and will be reasonable....We will see what happens but
> it is a bit of an unknown.
> I'm spending a fair chunk of time at the moment following up with the
> Lenovo support team getting them familiar with the basics of Linux.
Yeah I had flashbacks to the netbook era where lots of people bought
Linux netbooks and were confused that it didn't run Linux (and the
famous story of the young woman who accidentally bought a Dell machine
with Ubuntu which caused her to drop out of college -
https://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/woman-claims-ubuntu-kept-her-from-online-classes.html)
At least a lot has changed and an increasing number of the general
public are becoming aware that there's something else than "Mac and
Windows". If it was my webshop I'd probably make a final pop-up if they
choose Linux with a table that says, "You chose a Linux system, here's
the difference between Linux and Windows" with a "yes, continue", "No,
take me back". Not to discourage anyone from getting a Linux system on
it, but as I mentioned in my talk I'd be concerned that just a few RMAs
might discourage an OEM from further shipping a distro.
Sorry, I'm just thinking out loudly above, I hope it all works out ok!
>>> 3. Rescue partition
>>>
>>> Laptop manufacturers usually don't ship with physical media anymore.
>>> Instead, the laptops have a rescue partition on them for
>>> re-installing/resetting the machine.
>>>
>>> As far as I know both installers we currently use in Debian are fine
>>> from installing from a rescue partition, we just need a nice way to set
>>> that up when initially performing an oem style setup from our
>>> installation media. (again, not a huge technical problem, but probably a
>>> bit more work than #2).
>
> Actually I have an ongoing exercise to improve the recovery side of
> things with a meeting later this afternoon.
>
> For Fedora given what we are providing is just Fedora + some docs then
> the recovery solution is currently "go install Fedora using their USB
> installer and the docs are on the support site if you really want them".
> It's not the best but it's what we have.
Ah, good to know that this isn't as essential as I thought.
> We raise bugs the normal way with Fedora. They weren't public before the
> announcement but we're moving to doing things in a more standard public
> way. We have the advantage that a bug on Fedora is usually something
> RHEL wants so it's easy to get attention and that would be something
> Debian would need to consider. We did get input for their bug triaging
> but ultimately it was for the community to decide what was a blocker or
> not and I didn't win every battle. There was an audio over HDMI nouveau
> driver issue that got fixed after F32 was released - users will get that
> just as part of their regular update and that's OK.
Ah I've typed several paragraphs several times and deleted it, drivers
are a big issue, I guess we can take that topic further off of -project :)
> In my mind the best long term solution for Debian is if Lenovo are
> contributing fixes ourselves - after all we usually know what the fixes
> are. We're not technically at the stage where that is doable though -
> but it's what I'm aiming for and I'm the trial guinea-pig.
Fantastic! Yes feel free to reach out to me any time if you need some
help. I can give some guidance with Debian procedures or can help you
with sponsoring fixes, patches and package uploads, but what I can't do
is pressure someone in a team to prioritise an issue or force them to
accept a patch that they don't want, but I think in general, people will
be supportive in getting issues solved to get Debian on an OEM laptop
(and fixing these issues in Debian helps for all our existing ThinkPad
users too).
> For me the first step would be an understanding that if we propose a
> patch then we're doing it for a good reason and it doesn't sit there for
> a couple of months.
I did another talk over the last weekend in our first ever online
MiniDebConf where I talked about our patch backlog, we definitely want
to get better at this.
> I don't think we're at the stage where you can trust us to merge things
> in without review but longer term I'd hope to be a more trusted
> community member who can be relied on to deliver quality items. How we
> get from here to there is in my mind the challenge - for that we need
> support and I appreciate peoples time is limited and very precious :)
Nice! If you're interested, it would be great for you to join us a full
fledged project member too. That takes a lot of work, but in the
meantime we also have a status called Debian Maintainer where you're
allowed to upload some packages without any supervision before you're a
full Debian Developer.
>>> I think we generally care about the hardware that we have, and that our
>>> employers typically buy and deploy. I think "other people's hardware
>>> problems" will always be less exciting than your own. Usually when more
>>> of the latest hardware starts hitting us personally we tend to care
>>> more. I think part of this is just natural.
>
> Agreed. I'm afraid from a Lenovo preload shipping point of view it has
> to be the latest HW though and that's a challenge.
> If it's any consolation, whilst I have access to a lot of devices I also
> have to fight for some HW access. I don't have an X1C8 yet (my colleague
> does....I'm not bitter ;)) Getting HW where it needs to be is one of the
> big challenges I face generally.
I understand. From a preload point of view, I suppose it's possible to
start off with a subset of laptops that might work well? Or is there a
strong preference from Lenovo to support a wide range from the start (I
noticed that that's what Fedora did, so just wanted to check).
<snip>
>>> full retail price for their laptops considering how much work they put
>>> in making Debian (and often other Linux systems) run better on it. I've
>>> been considering reaching out to both Lenovo and Dell (and other
>>> manufacturers that are popular or important within the project) to see
>>> if we can get much better pricing for our members, whether they're just
>>> closer to cost or even a little subsidized. Maybe you could shed some
>>> light on this topic too :)
>
> I've kicked off a discussion on this internally. I did actually look
> into this when I joined the team last year but I know more the right
> people to talk to now and Linux is getting a lot more attention
> internally. I'll see what I can do - I think it's a very reasonable
> suggestion.
Fantastic, thanks!
-Jonathan
--
⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ Jonathan Carter (highvoltage) <jcc>
⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ https://wiki.debian.org/highvoltage
⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋ https://debian.org | https://jonathancarter.org
⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀ Debian, the universal operating system.
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