The early Lenovo period W series were (imho) very good as well, still have my W500 series which is built like a tank. Survived years of college, years of lugging it around to customers and data centres and having somebody spill a full cup of coffee over it (yes, the drain holes do work!). It only required replacing of the monitor cable once, which was a pretty easy thing to do. Unfortunately the CCFL backlight has lost quite some luminance by now, but guess after 16 years that is to be expected. Can’t get myself to part from it though, so many memories attached to it.

Or SuSE Linux, the non-slackware or jurix version was bleeding edge at the time.

And that’s just the quick summary, first time I just restored a backup. But as my system immediately failed again after updating I started digging and came across some obscure posts of Lenovo users (ok, maybe Lenovo isn’t that great with implementing Secure Boot after all 😋) having the same issue and devised that rescue plan. Quite the nightmare indeed, but at the other hand it also taught me some new skills. After going through the same routine on each update of that package I ended up excluding it from updates in DNF.

Don’t now if the issue was ever resolved, I’ve since stepped away from Fedora as I’ve just had too many of these weird issues with it on each new release. Creating bug reports and the accompanying warm feeling of helping to improve the Linux ecosystem is nice, but in the end I just need to get work done.

This has nothing to do with Lenovo perse, this is the average experience for every laptop I’ve owned which had Secure Boot turned on.

You know what is fun? Having your Dell basically bricking because Fedora starts shipping a new version of shim-x64 which completely fails the UEFI handover to bootloader. Leaving you unable to boot at all, so no chance of reaching rescue mode. Then more fun times of booting a live environment from a usb stick after going through the same hoops you went through, finding out how to decrypt your BTRFS partitions, manually mounting and chrooting them so you can finally downgrade the offending package.

Linux and Secure Boot just isn’t a great combination if you ask me.

when was the last time you heard any such news for PC

A few seconds ago, when I read that the new Linux kernel contains TCP related performance improvements!

Meanwhile Wayland absolutely hates my year old AMD laptop. It hangs itself on a regular basis, some applications go completely unresponsive every so often to the point they need to be kill -9’ed. Rock solid when running X11, completely unreliable in Wayland. It’s a shame, I want to like Wayland as I think there is no future for X11, but as it stands currently I simply cannot use it yet for my day to day business.

check for an alternative install method, like Flatpak,

If anyone wants to go the Flatpak route, think about enabling Flatpak in the Manjaro package manager. That way you’ll keep a centralised overview of installed software and the package manager will handle any updates.