Ubuntu 18.04 + Lenovo X1 Carbon (6G)

Disclaimer: I’m not responsible for any damages or injury, including but not limited to special or consequential damages, that result from your use of this set of instructions.

Everything in General Just Worked Out-of-the-Box

In my previous open letter to Apple, I mentioned that the Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon running Ubuntu was a wonderful candidate for a Macbook replacement. So while I am waiting for the late summer hardware event, I decided to do some hands on exploration to prove my theory with some solid day-to-day usage testing on a 6th gen X1 Carbon myself.

The installation went off without a hitch and everything except for the fingerprint reader just worked right out of the box. To my surprise, even the touch screen worked. The only thing that I didn’t check was the SD/Sim slot which I read somewhere that it also doesn’t work out-of-the-box. No big deal for me though as I don’t like using fingerprint readers and have no need for sim/nano SD support. I then connected the HDMI port to my external display and that worked wonderfully as well.

Battery Life

Battery life was left little to be desired out-of-box as expected but nothing that can’t be tuned to an acceptable level of performance by doing the following:

1. Disable “Secure Boot” in BIOS
2. Run the below command in the terminal:

sudo apt-get install tlp tlp-rdw acpi-call-dkms tp-smapi-dkms acpi-call-dkms

Without any further tweaks, I already feel a boost in battery life. It works out to about 10 hours of battery life based on my usage patterns. However, for those of you who are “worried papas” or care for very specific battery use parameters for your devices, you can take a look at the “Battery charging threshold” section of this article which goes further into tweaking what’s under the hood. FWIW, I didn’t have any of the touchpad, trackpoint, t̶e̶m̶p̶e̶r̶a̶t̶u̶r̶e̶,̶ ̶o̶r̶ ̶C̶P̶U̶ ̶i̶s̶s̶u̶e̶s̶ it mentions so I didn’t bother with any of the tweaks the author suggested on that end.

Edit (July 4th, 2018):

I did however find that the low latency kernel seems to perform better so I switched to it and the deep sleep…