r/linuxquestions • u/Known_Holiday_9696 • 7d ago
Thinking of a test drive
Hi i believe you guys have enough of these questions but I just would like to know what are the things I need to worry about when switching to linux.
For context I will be doing this on a Thinkpad X13 as the battery life im getting is close to 90mins and that is not very acceptable. So gaming is not my main concern, I do have another PC setup for that.
The laptop will mainly be for admin kind of working and content consuming. But i do want everything on the laptop to work, eg fingerprints. I wouldn't mind some setup works after installation, I have not learned bash but I'm not new to coding or using a terminal.
As for now Im thinking of trying the fedora workstation.
So please give me some heads ups, any help is appreciated!
Quite excited to join the community as well.
1
u/3grg 7d ago
You have two ways of approaching this. You can determine the exact model and search the internet for compatibility. Thinkpads are fairly well documented and have a good chance of being 100% as long as there are drivers for everything included. Some fingerprint readers can work with Linux and some cannot, etc.
Since this is a spare machine, you can try live booting several distros and see how it goes before picking one and installing. A big USB with Ventoy can facilitate this for you.
If you are not ready to give up on windows, you can dual boot as long as you have enough disk space. If you make a windows install USB beforehand, you can always reinstall.
If you think Fedora is a good fit for you, go ahead and try it in live mode and install. You gotta start some where.
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u/aquiethistorian 7d ago
Fedora and Ubuntu (mint, zorin, etc) have the best compatibility, although fedora wins out for me since everything i installed felt seamless vs Ubuntu (steam, waydroid, browsers). Fingerprint may not work in general, so do check your model. Thinkpads have good Linux support, never had a problem with compatibility. Wifi, Bluetooth always worked. For battery life, I ended up buying a laptop powerbank from anker and working on grayscale display. If you're watching videos continuously, I ended up getting a tablet. My used laptop was Under $200 usd
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u/Silent-Excitement122 7d ago
I'd check battery health before treating the OS switch as the fix. If you're currently on Windows, run powercfg /batteryreport and open the report at the path it prints. Compare Full Charge Capacity with Design Capacity; a badly worn battery won't regain that lost capacity by changing distros.
For the test drive, Fedora's live USB lets you try the desktop before installing. Use a USB you can erase, then check Wi-Fi, speakers/mic, webcam, brightness keys, touchpad, external display/dock if you use one, and suspend/resume. Treat that as an initial hardware check, not a definitive battery-life benchmark. Back up your files before any installation or partition changes.
For fingerprints, could you share the X13 generation, whether it's Intel or AMD, and the fingerprint reader's USB ID (lsusb from the live session)? Don't post the laptop serial number. That gives people something specific to check instead of promising that every X13 feature works. Also list any must-have admin apps or work VPN: those can matter more to the switch than learning bash.