Hello there - so I wanted a new convertible laptop/tablet with a bit of grunt and looked around at a few options, namely the Thinkpad X1 Yoga, Lenovo Yoga 900, etc. I was looking for something that would have a decent amount of battery life, support linux natively and run VM's with no issues.
After hunting around for reviews, I finally settled on a VAIO Z Flip, thanks to Alex Yepez for shipping it over to me as the decent spec models (16GB, 512GB SSD, 3.3Ghz Skylake i7) are only available in an old colony. It's a good balance of specification, build quality (carbon fibre and aluminium body) and price - BUT... There are not many posts about it's linux support and pretty bleeding-edge hardware, so it was a bit of a gamble.
I can report that, after trying a few different distros, I've settled on Ubuntu as the most supportive of the hardware - everything I've tested so far seems to be good - with a few caveats;
Anyway - I thought I'd put this out there for anybody considering a convertible, wanting to run linux and considering this model of laptop. I'll probably add a few updates to this if I find anything else useful to share.
UPDATE: It seems that the newer kernels in the devel repos break certain nice things like suspend, the brightness hotkeys and the touchscreen, better to stay in the main repos and deal with the fact that the graphics isn't recognised fully until libdrm gets updated.
ANOTHER UPDATE: After wrestling with Ubuntu for a bit I've figured out there are a few 'quirks' that need ironing out. The touchscreen shits itself every now and again so needs a cronjob to fix, add a soft keyboard, screen flip toggle soft button, etc. Added a few simple scripts to correct the bugs and so far, looking good. Will image the build and keep testing. Battery life looks good enough but will start power tuning soon and see if it can be improved. Update to follow...
After hunting around for reviews, I finally settled on a VAIO Z Flip, thanks to Alex Yepez for shipping it over to me as the decent spec models (16GB, 512GB SSD, 3.3Ghz Skylake i7) are only available in an old colony. It's a good balance of specification, build quality (carbon fibre and aluminium body) and price - BUT... There are not many posts about it's linux support and pretty bleeding-edge hardware, so it was a bit of a gamble.
I can report that, after trying a few different distros, I've settled on Ubuntu as the most supportive of the hardware - everything I've tested so far seems to be good - with a few caveats;
- Secure boot - before you can install, you'll need to start up the default Windows 10 Pro build and go into control panel to set it to boot into the UEFI and from there disable secure boot and allow the system to boot from USB - after that it's just F3 while booting to get to your UEFI boot menu and choose USB/etc.
- Restore/Recovery partitions - The disk came partitioned into four partitions, one for the OS and three for various recovery tasks... They can go. I did take a bit-level backup using the ever-reliable clonezilla to an SMB share on my desktop before zapping the initial build also, just in case.
- Your first boot after installing will fail. It did for me, every time. Just drop into another tty (CTRL&ALT&F1) and do a full apt-get update & dist-upgrade to bring the system up the date and reboot.
- The Intel WiFi firmware isn't to be found on every installer disk - be prepared with a USB nic (I prefer the apple ones, the asix kenel module is pretty ubiquitous and very stable in my experience) to do the initial setup.
- For the Intel Iris 550, there's a bug in the libdrm package found on most distros, the fix is now available and has been built into version 2.46.8 which can be added either using one of the various third-party PPA's or by enabling the pre-release/development packages and updating - the Iris graphics should be fully supported after that.
- Window manager choice - tricky one this because I've never liked the Ubuntu Unity interface but after trying out a handful of WM's - gnome, cinnamon, etc. - Unity wins for touchscreen use, hands down. Clearly the default pink/purple theme has to go but that's easy enough. If you want good touchscreen support for in tablet mode - learn to like Unity...
Anyway - I thought I'd put this out there for anybody considering a convertible, wanting to run linux and considering this model of laptop. I'll probably add a few updates to this if I find anything else useful to share.
UPDATE: It seems that the newer kernels in the devel repos break certain nice things like suspend, the brightness hotkeys and the touchscreen, better to stay in the main repos and deal with the fact that the graphics isn't recognised fully until libdrm gets updated.
ANOTHER UPDATE: After wrestling with Ubuntu for a bit I've figured out there are a few 'quirks' that need ironing out. The touchscreen shits itself every now and again so needs a cronjob to fix, add a soft keyboard, screen flip toggle soft button, etc. Added a few simple scripts to correct the bugs and so far, looking good. Will image the build and keep testing. Battery life looks good enough but will start power tuning soon and see if it can be improved. Update to follow...
