Lenovo in the Linux Desktop Community

When Linux was young, a major part of the Linux experience was installing it yourself—an occasion for many tales of struggle and triumph. As the importance of Linux became known, hardware companies started offering GNU/Linux preinstalled. Eventually, major vendors such as Lenovo, Dell, and Huawei sold GNU/Linux on desktop and laptop systems. This article focuses on the strategy at Lenovo, and how they interact with the Linux community.

A Growing Interest in Linux

Mark Pearson, a senior software engineer who leads the Linux desktop team at Lenovo, says that Lenovo’s historic ThinkPad series and many of their other systems have always been Linux-friendly, even before the company started offering a preinstalled Ubuntu Linux distribution about a decade ago.

Pearson is seeing a definite increase in interest about Linux on the desktop. Still, most of the customers requesting Linux are enterprises and software developers. Of course, Lenovo also offers support for Linux on servers.

In 2019, Lenovo decided to greatly increase their support for Linux. They listed Ubuntu as an option on many more systems—adding more than 40 platforms a year, Pearson says—and in response to consumer demand, started offering Fedora preinstalled as well. They have obtained Ubuntu certification, which guarantees such benefits as checking that all their hardware works with Ubuntu and that they issue regular updates. They also work closely with the Fedora team and Red Hat to get certified and to support Fedora, as well as Red Hat Enterprise Linux on some enterprise-level systems.

Relationship with the Linux Community

Senior software engineer Mark Pearson leads the Linux desktop team at Lenovo

As a hardware vendor, Lenovo is superbly positioned to benefit both the Linux community and the other vendors it works with. Most peripheral manufacturers have a solidly Windows-based clientele and would suffer a lot of headaches getting a Linux driver accepted into the Linux core, given the complicated requirements and the fussy ways of working among core developers. Lenovo knows the process and can shepherd an open source driver into the Linux core repository.

Lenovo itself, according to Pearson, submits a number of changes to the kernel.​ Pearson says that most of their contributions are in the drivers/platform/x86 layer, such as thinkpad_acpi, the standard Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) driver for ThinkPads. Anything that’s in a Linux kernel on a system sold by Lenovo, according to Pearson, is in the core. Lenovo also works closely with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service project.

Finally, they are tied into the community for support. They offer their own Linux forum and participate in other popular forums. This, I know, is a contrast with some other companies. I bought an Ubuntu-installed laptop from one vendor and found that the system wouldn’t boot after a routine update. The customer service at that vendor curtly directed me to public Ubuntu forums, who knew nothing about the vendor’s problem.

A Win-Win Relationship

Lenovo demonstrates how computer manufacturers can improve their own sales—opening up whole new markets—while making Linux and open source work better. The open source developers, the hardware vendors, and ultimately the users are empowered by these collaborations.