Dell & Lenovo now sponsoring the Linux Vendor Firmware Service

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https://www.phoronix.com/news/Dell-Lenovo-Sponsoring-LVFS

Original Reddit discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1t5d1ym/dell_lenovo_now_sponsoring_the_linux_vendor/

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Holy moly, $100k a year each. I hope this more than covers LVFS’ costs and give them enough headroom to keep improving it.

For these companies it must be pocket change, but that can be a lot of money if the LVFS is efficient enough.

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Dell and Lenovo both sell Chromebooks, which technically run a variant of Linux. Those laptops are especially popular in schools.

It’s smart investment on their part and broadens their options longer term.

All in all a net positive on all fronts.

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They also sell laptops and desktops, mostly workstation-class, with Linux preinstalled. I’ve always had great results with fwupd on Lenovo laptops, great to see them sponsoring something useful.

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My Thinkpad from 2017 keep getting firmware updates through lvfs for like 7 or 8 years. I was pretty impressed actually.

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Plus dell sells a decent amount of servers, the majority of which likely are Linux provisioned. Not sure about Lenovo’s server market share though

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as large hardware vendors, i’m pretty sure they were to getting to the point where they would lose features or even access to the service if they didn’t start paying-in.

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This is a good very good thing! Let’s hope that Dell & Lenovo will also cover their more Consumer oriented devices (Lenovo Yoga, Lenovo Ideapad or Dell Non-Pro or XPS models) instead of just their Business oriented Models (like Dell Latitudes and Thinkpads/Thinkstation)

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Yeah, I’d love to see my idea book not require windows to update firmware.

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Let’s push for it to happen!! Collectively we make it happen! Also, for more companies to jump on board. Imagine Samsung jumping on board to make a Linux phone!

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Broadly speaking what are they key differences between the consumer oriented devices and business oriented ones? Better battery life on the latter?

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Generally build quality and repairability. Any IT department will favour devices that can have common failure points (battery, SSD, screen) replaced with a single screwdriver, and with that comes the need for stronger chassis and modular designs because you can’t rely on glueing everything in. Also, with the exception of Apple fanbois, IT techs are quick to condemn manufacturers who let pro grade kit standards slip, which could mean a few years of lost sales.

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pro grade kit standards

Which are you referring to? Build quality and repairability? IME, enterprise laptops are well built, but generally have horrible quality displays in terms of both resolution and color gauntlet support.

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Can I update bios on my laptop with this? On the website, Lenovo only offers an exe file for Windows - can’t even install it manually in BIOS like I’d normally do on a desktop PC.

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Yes, https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Fwupd

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Hmm, I need to spend more time with fwupd.
I assume it’s possible to extract the firmware payload from the exe and apply it with fwupd?

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With certain devices, yes, it’s possible. My Microsoft surface pro 6 can update its various firmwares from the blobs extracted from the official exe.

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Lenovo and Dell laptops are the best for Linux for some time already. Thinkpads get the spotlight but the Latitudes are no hassle too.

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Lenovo and Dell laptops are the best for Linux for some time already. Thinkpads get the spotlight but the Latitudes are no hassle too.

A costco HP I grabbed in a pinch has been rocking linux without any issues from day one.

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Good for you. In my anedocte, Pavillions were a removed to install Linux.

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I have an HP Envy from several years ago and the BIOS is super locked down so I can’t enable secure boot on it. With my previous HP laptop, I had a ton of trouble getting the WiFi to work

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That’s really odd. I have a pavilion of similar age and I enabled secureboot without issue. Old HP and wifi is pain and suffering.

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Maybe there’s a way, but I looked all over the settings and internet and even had an AI agent do a search for how to enroll my keys and couldn’t figure it out

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Also how old is this envy? Exact guide I followed. I built mine from source as I run Debian on that laptop.

I have an HP pavilion x360 from 2017. https://youtube.com/watch?v=FhJYj57qQCI

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I even have a Latitude running with the Linux-libre kernel 👍

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Looking for the day that Lenovo will make Thinkbook firmware updates available via fwupd like it does for Thinkpad.

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How to get firmware updates without fwupd?

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I keep Windows just for the BIOS firmware updates. Next laptop won’t going to be a Thinkbook and probably not a Lenovo because of this grip.

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Any recommendations? I am in the market for a new laptop as well.

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Dell and Framework. Thinkpads are also super reliable, don’t hesitate because of my rant. There aren’t that many options already. You can check the HSI level (the security of the device) in here: https://fwupd.org/lvfs/hsireports/devices

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Sadly, Framework doesn’t ship to my country yet.

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So why this company and not coreboot?

NovaCustom uses Dasharo, developed by 3mdeb. Isn’t that better?

https://github.com/Dasharo/coreboot

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This is talking about fwupdt firmware and patches, not uefi/bios replacement.

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Isn’t uefi bios firmware? What’s the difference?

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Those are considered firmware, yes. And these can vary in their installation as being updated via the firmware interface itself or some other update mechanism.

Some firmwares like on certain IBM thinkpads, my surface pro 6 and others can be updated directly via a Linux command called fwupd, but the firmwares must live in specifics public repositories.

This news means we’ll all have a much better time using fwupd to update these on dell and lenovo machines, but the firmwares themselves will remain proprietary blobs.

Coreboot replaces the bios/firmware altogether, and it’s not an easy task to get new ones, unfortunately.

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Ah, thanks. So this is just an open source tool for closed source crap.

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the alternative is manually (and somewhat regularly during your hardware’s support period) searching a manufacturer’s web site for a bios update, hoping that your bios has a built-in flasher or there being at least a boot disk or ‘dos’ flasher you can slap on a usb to do it… lvfs is a good thing.

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Oh, surely it is a good thing.

But I think we can demand lenovo to just source hardware with libre firmware. That’s a better thing.

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