[kwlug-disc] ThinkPad P15 -- crap?

[Chris Irwin]

On Sat, Jun 26, 2021 at 01:30:34AM -0400, Ron Singh wrote:
>It is just you and also, it is not just you:-)

>From what I understand, key travel is 1.8mm which is decent these days, not
>as good as the older classic T420/T520/X220 keyboard with around 2.2mm
>travel. My tech guy uses a P15 and he has a T450 in his bugout bag, he did
>not have anything negative to say about the P15's keyboard.

I haven't had any complaints about the *keyboard* on my T14 (coming from 
a T460 before it, although I preferred the pre-chicklet layout)

However, the trackpoint is significantly worse currently. The built-in 
trackpoint is choppy, and there's nothing I've been able to poke yet to 
get it smooth. It seems to be a polling rate thing, and it works fine in 
Windows. Other pointers work fine (including trackpoints on external 
keyboards).

That is one of my two let-downs of the new machine (soldered RAM being 
the other one. In a thinkpad!)

>The trackpad though, yeah, Lenovo's trackpad is just crap regardless of
>vintage and OS choice. Our people turn that thing off in the BIOS and
>pretend it is not there and just use the trackpoint.

The T14 trackpad is the least-worst I've used in a thinkpad so far, but 
that's not saying a lot. I think some of the X1 series use glass-top 
pads, which might actually be decent. I tried leaving it enabled for a 
bit to take advantage of GNOME 40's gestures, but keep brushing it with 
my palm and moving the cursor, so I've disabled it again.

I've had a number of thinkpads over the years and always disabled the 
trackpad in BIOS. Oddly, on the T14 Gen1 (AMD), that doesn't actually 
work for Linux. My best guess is it now only sets a flag that the 
windows driver picks up on, but linux still happily uses the device. It 
is easily disabled in GNOME settings, though.

-- 
Chris Irwin

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