I recently purchased a Lenovo X1 Carbon, Generation 2 to run Fedora Linux (F20). I returned to a Lenovo Ultrabook in December 2012 and loved it, but the 256GB disk was a limit, and I was looking longingly at the high-DPI (hidpi) screens of the new X1 Carbon Generation 2.
Pros:
- great laptop: great weight, great 512GiB SSD disk
- beautiful screen: 140dpi
- Good Linux support (as of July 2014, but not as of June 2014)
Cons:
- The keyboard is odd. Innovation is good, but I really like a control key to the left of A, and they have “end”. I like tilde to the left of “1”, and they have ESC. I can remap it in X, but that’s work and gets lost on suspend/resume. (Also, you need linux-3.15 to get support for the soft keys.)
- Lack of physical buttons on the mouse is a shame.
- Linux support is just getting solid as of July 2014. See above about the soft keys.
- Gnome 3.10 support for high-DPI displays is mixed (as of July 2014). Gnome mostly works, but the shell freaks out every now and then. Emacs is confused about width.
- Use with an external monitor that is not high-DPI is tricky. I found fonts that balance things, but it requires…tolerance.
Other things that have matured since Dec. 2012: USB 3.0 Ethernet runs at 1Gb/s (not the 100Mb/s limit of USB 2.0 Ethernet adpators). (Although this computer comes with an odd port that is dedicated for Ethernet.)
More experience
After a couple of weeks, some more experience:
I can’t get X11 keyboard mapping to work reliably, so moving the control key is still tricky. (1) it resets every suspend-resume. (2) When I remap I get very odd behavior, with ctrl-W repeating infinitely (a horrible outcome in emacs, or evince).
The softkeys aren’t horrible, mostly because I don’t use function keys very often.
HIDPI mostly works–but see evince bug #723431 for an important fix (work around: run evince as “GDK_SCALE=1 evince”).
I’m purchasing a hidpi external monitor to match resolutions more closely than my (otherwise lovely 30” 80dpi Dell). The ASUS PB287Q is “only” $600 and should match DPIs.
Overall: I’d buy this again to run Linux, but it will definitely be smoother in a few months when GNOME 3.12 is in Fedora 21.
FreeBSD
I don’t know about the status of FreeBSD on this hardware as of July 2014.