Linux on ThinkPad X13s Gen 1

ThinkPad X13s Gen 1 running Debian 11, Regolith-Desktop w/ Dracula look and neofetch

This is to document my ordeal #EmbraceTheSuck journey and work-in-progress of daily driving a Lenovo ThinkPad X13s Gen 1.

Windows 11

  • Install BIOS Updates (via Windows App Lenovo Commercial Vantage)
  • Install Windows 11 Updates, incl. Windows 11, version 22H2
  • Activated Windows Feature Hyper-V, installed WSL2 and distros Debian and Ubuntu.
  • Installed Visual Studio Code along w/ some other native-arm Windows Apps, just to see…

Linux

The state of Linux on the X13s is still pretty much WIP (work-in-progress), but NO it has not stopped a few month ago.

The community is eagerly awaiting the latest kernel works to arrive in distros.

Debian—WIP

I installed Debian by following along the instructions for flashing and installing Debian (Installer for Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 laptops) compiled by Linaro (link posted by Lenovo's Mark Pearson on Lenovo Community Forum Post "Re:Does anybody know if there is work being done to integrate X13s (ARM-processor) with linux?").

Notes:

  • I created the bootable USB driver on Linux via the awesome balenaEtcher application.
  • I shrinked the Windows drive on my 1TB disk by 768000 MB, resulting in 750 GB of "Unallocated" space.
  • I would have preferred to install Debian with full-disk encryption and a custom sized swapfile, but this has to wait for another day 🤷‍♂️
  • Modifying the boot order: FS15:\> bcfg boot add modf 0 EFI/debian/DtbLoader.efi "Debian"
  • After "updating" to Debian testing I had to re-enable os-prober to create a custom GRUB menu entry for Windows as documented here
  • Uninstalled regolith-desktop (until arm64 repositories for Regolith are available) and re-installed GNOME via tasksel.

A loose collection of links to public web resources about various attempts of making Linux on X13s a thing:

Fedora

Results of Matthew Miller's poll What do you think about Fedora Workstation on an ARM-based Lenovo laptop?

Fedora developers are aiming for it being supportable/usable in time for Fedora 38, at some point before that, some consumable images will be released for testing.

src refs: fedoraproject.org/wiki. Fedora Linux ARM mailing list

Kernel and other necessary bits for Fedora on the Lenovo x13s.

You can download Fedora for ARM prerelease builds—as of writing of Fedora 38—from here. Alternatively the ongoing development builds from here.

Arch

Ubuntu

Installer for Lenovo X13s

BSDs