Linux on lenovo ideapad yoga
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Last week I got a new laptop and I want to share my experience of getting Linux on it.
As mentioned in the title, the laptop is a Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 with an AMD Ryzen 5800U, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD and a 13,3″ screen with a resolution of 2560×1600. The exact model-number is 13ACN5. I am using Arch btw. 😉
1. Booting: Works without any problems. There are some ACPI errors shown during boot but this doesn’t seem to prevent this system from booting.
2. Installation: No problems at all.
3. Input devices: Both keyboard and trackpad work.
4. Screen: The built-in display works as well as brightness control for it via the dedicated keys on the keyboard. External displays work via a USB-C to HDMI cable or a USB-C to HDMI adapter. The Yoga doesn’t have a HDMI output, just USB-C.
5. Wifi/Bluetooth: Both WiFi and Bluetooth work out of the box.
6. Sound: Works. I noticed that the speakers sound a bit thinner than under Windows but I guess this can be tweaked easily.
7. Webcam: The quality of the webcam is bad but it’s the same under Windows. Maybe I’m just spoiled because I normally use a proper video camera + a HDMI-capture card as webcam. 😀 Anyways: The webcam works well enough. It also supports Windows Hello Facial Recognition and I can confirm that it works with Howdy after enabling the IR-sensor with this: https://github.com/EmixamPP/linux-enable-ir-emitter
8. Battery/Energy consumption: I just got this device last thursday so I don’t own it long enough to say much about it’s battery life. Also I hardly used Windows on this laptop so I can’t compare the battery runtime under Linux with Windows. All I can say for now is that the runtime seems to be fine.
The Yoga Slim 7 has 3 different power profiles: Intelligent Cooling, Extreme Performance and Battery Saving. These profiles can be switched in the UEFI. I’m running the Battery Saving profile which makes the laptop basically silent when using it for «normal» use like browsing the web.
9. Suspend/Hibernation: Standby/Suspend/S3 doesn’t work out of the box, this is a known problem for many newer laptops. «dmesg | grep ACPI | grep supports» shows that S3 is not supported. I read somewhere that there will be improved support in kernel 5.14 so I guess I have to wait and see. UPDATE: Hibernation/Suspend to disk works as expected.
10. Sensors: lm_sensors has some problems finding sensors for the hardware. For example it can’t monitor the CPU-temps etc. I’m sure this will change with future kernel updates. Since the laptop seems to work fine and stays very cool I don’t care that much about the missing sensors.
Overall I’m really impressed with this laptop. Almost everything works out of the box or with little effort and the things that don’t work don’t matter much for me. Aside from the very good Linux support this is a fun device. It’s small, lightweight, powerful and has a good build quality. My only real point of criticism is the limited I/O. You get 3x USB-C and a headphone-jack. That’s it. I even had to buy a USB-C thumb drive to install Linux. But yeah, I guess that’s just the way it is.
I hope this little review helps one or the other. Feel free to ask me any questions. 🙂
Linux on Lenovo Ideapad 730s/YOGA S730
This review is to share my experience installing Linux on this laptop, if you want to know more about this laptop you can go to this notebookcheck site or this review on YouTube .
I am dualbooting Ubuntu 20.04 and the laptop runs extremely fine. No major issues and even I can get better performance and better battery life compared to Win10, the caveat is that the fingerprint won’t work, a shame though because it is quite fast (faster than my mobile phone). Note that I have not tested the full performance of the 2 thunderbolt 3 ports (by using e-GPU, for example). But from what I’ve seen there aren’t many TB3 issues in kernel 5.4.
Installation is pretty straightforward as with any other modern laptops, make sure you have updated the BIOS, then switch boot order in BIOS and disable secureboot (you can still run Ubuntu while keeping this on, but this helps with the wireless card issue).
Known Issues (Fixed)
- Overheating while plugged-in (laptop very hot to touch, felt like a hot coffee mug, ngl) but not while on battery. BIOS update works but not wonders, most likely the slim design is what messes with the cooling system. Solution: undervolt the CPU or use TLP and set CPU settings to balance_power . This results to temperature reaching no more than 57°C under moderate load and under 80°C under heavy load.
- Also, Lenovo’s Intelligent Cooling is known to generate more heat by reducing fan speed in order to keep the laptop silent. You can set the cooling system through BIOS if you don’t have Windows installed, otherwise use Lenovo Vantage.
- Wireless-AC 9260 have problems (it is found on 730s using the Realtek card, but not on the Intel one), the WiFi strength somehow drops occassionaly. Disabling secureboot is mandatory to make the card work properly. Source
- Low sound issue, thankfully it’s repairable unlike some of my older HP models with B&O, look up this blog post to fix it, make sure to read the comments as there are some changes to the file locations in Ubuntu 20.04.
Known Issues (No Fixes)
- Fingerprint will not work on any distros , the fingerprint device is from Shenzhen Goodix and it seems like they are not going to make it available for linux, I have not found any attempts to reverse-engineer it like the validity drivers (this device is also used in some Dell Inspiron and Thinkpad models, and they won’t work either).
Other important links
Other 730s on Linux reviews
Important notes
- Before installation, update BIOS first to the latest version.
- Battery life is average, I can get 6 — 7 hours of regular use (audio streaming, docs, jupyter notebook, sometimes YouTube). You might want to undervolt the CPU or get a USB-C laptop powerbank to gain more battery life.
- The laptop works almost out-of-the-box with Ubuntu 20.04 (Kernel 5.4), it may not work properly with older releases, as there are improvements to Thunderbolt support in Ubuntu 20.04.
- There is an Ideapad Battery Conservation feature to limit charging to 55% — 60% is available on Gnome Extensions . Edit: thanks to u/for_better_world, without gnome, change /sys/bus/platform/drivers/ideapad_acpi/VPC2004:00/conservation_mode from 0 to 1