The Lenovo ThinkPad T490 is a great laptop, but it comes with some discrete GPU challenges.

My new T490 with a 10th generation Intel CPU and a discrete NVIDIA MX250 has arrived! Installing Linux creates some interesting challenges.

My new ThinkPad arrived this week and it is working well! The Fedora 25 installation was easy and all of the hardware was recognized immediately. However, there was a downside. The display looked washed out and had a strange tint. It seemed to be more pale than the previous ThinkPad. The default ICC profile in GNOME didn’t help much. There’s a helpful review over at NotebookCheck that has a link to an ICC profile generated from a 4th generation ThinkPad X1 Carbon.

My upgrade to Fedora 22 on the ThinkPad X1 Carbon was fairly uneventful and the hiccups were minor. One of the more annoying items that I’ve been struggling with for quite some time is how to boot up with the wireless LAN and Bluetooth disabled by default. Restoring wireless and Bluetooth state between reboots is normally handled quite well in Fedora. In Fedora 21, NetworkManager saved my settings between reboots. For example, if I shut down with wifi off and Bluetooth on, the laptop would boot up later with wifi off and Bluetooth on.

The X1 Carbon’s touchpad has been my nemesis in Linux for quite some time because of its high sensitivity. I’d often find the cursor jumping over a few pixels each time I tried to tap to click. This was aggravating at first, but then I found myself closing windows when I wanted them minimized or confirming something in a dialog that I didn’t want to confirm. Last December, I wrote a post about some fixes.