Fedora 32 on a Lenovo T14 AMD Ryzen model

Posted on Fri 28 August 2020 in Fedora

The T14 with AMD processor arrived and it is time for a short write up.

Specs

The machine I work with is powered by an AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 4750U with Radeon Graphics. It comes with 8 Cores and 16 threads from 1.7 GHz - 4.1 GHz. Aside to that processor there come 16GB of RAM and 512GB NVMe SSD storage. This makes that little laptop a decent machine.

What do I expect to work?

As I am using my laptops and environments on a daily bases I have some requirements that are important to me:

  1. Suspend and resume
  2. Docking station support
  3. Good performance
  4. Long battery life

Why Fedora Linux?

It comes with a recent kernel that has support for the Ryzen 4000 series and I have used it in the past as my main system on other T-Series laptops. Since I do have some work to do on podman based deployments and Openshift integrated environments, this will be the daily driver for that work. Beside Fedora, FreeBSD would have been my second choice. We do some FreeBSD based development, but that work-flow is now realized on a virtual server environment and does not need to have a FreeBSD based workstation.

Setup Fedora 32

After playing around with latest Fedora on a Live-USB, I installed Fedora Linux with KDE spin. KDE fits my requirements better that Gnome and it gives me more options to customize it to the work-flow I use on all machines.

Before you install Linux!

After installing I spend quite some time to fix a problem with suspend and resume. Long story short, if you plan to install Linux the Lenovo T14, go into the BIOS/UEFI settings and change the ACPI mode to Linux. This will make suspend and resume work if you have chosen a recent kernel.

Basic Installation

I choose to use a USB-Stick with the KDE spin and installed it using mostly the default. The only changes I made:

  1. Use xfs as file systems
  2. Enable encryption for all possible partitions

Everything worked as designed. Kudos to the Fedora team, you guys do a great job with that installer.

After the base installation I updated all installed packages and installed the tools I need to work with

sudo dnf update -y && reboot

Then I enabled the the non-free repositories to have better codec support for non-free audio and video codec, since Fedora does not ship them included in the distribution.

sudo dnf install https://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm

sudo dnf install https://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm

sudo dnf install gstreamer1-plugins-{bad-*,good-*,base} gstreamer1-plugin-openh264 gstreamer1-libav --exclude=gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free-devel

sudo dnf install
https://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm

sudo dnf group upgrade --with-optional Multimedia

Installed the Mirosoft rpm repository to pull Visual Studio Code later:

sudo rpm --import https://packages.microsoft.com/keys/microsoft.asc sudo sh -c 'echo -e "[code]nname=Visual Studio Codenbaseurl=https://packages.microsoft.com/yumrepos/vscodenenabled=1ngpgcheck=1ngpgkey=https://packages.microsoft.com/keys/microsoft.asc" > /etc/yum.repos.d/vscode.repo'

Here the list of basic tools I use on all desktop machines

  1. tmux
  2. vim
  3. htop
  4. git
  5. keepassxc
  6. zsh
  7. mosh
  8. vlc
  9. kate
  10. evolution with evoltion-ews for Exchange support
  11. code (Visual Studio Code)

sudo dnf install tmux vim htop git keepassxc zsh mosh vlc kate evolution evolution-ews code

With that additional packages installed I configure my personal work-flow.

Conclusion

All my requirements do work with the T14. Suspend and resume works. The docking works.(I use the USB-C Pro Dock, at home and at work) Hardware performance is very good.

Fedora 32 makes a great job on that machine. As rumors become more concrete, Fedora and Lenovo even plan to ship some models with Fedora preinstalled. We will see if the T14 with AMD will be one of those models.

Fedora Lenovo Thinkpad