Lenovo-Fedora world domination plan

Project Discussion
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Hello @mpearson! Based on this objective for Strategy 2028, there is huge support within the project to get Fedora pre-installed on more computers. Thanks for what you’ve done for Fedora in Lenovo so far!

I’m reaching out on behalf of the Marketing Team to see how we can support this initiative better. Personally, my assumption was that Fedora couldn’t really do a lot of marketing for this because Fedora is not supposed to be a product and all that. After seeing that people are really for this, it’s emboldened me to be more direct in the potential marketing we can do.

I also want to get ideas from the broader community on what we can do and what we’re ok with doing. Because we’re getting into a commercial space, I figure that we want Fedora marketing to come across as being excited about pre-installed Fedora and not as shilling for whichever manufacturers are willing to provide Fedora out of the box. Our tone should respect the desires of the manufacturers AND our community.

To start us off, are there specific things that we can or should be doing? Is there anything that’s like “if you could do x/y/z that would be great”? Then we can dive into ideas for things that we could do but haven’t tried yet.

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A passing thought, but it would be cool to do an interview about how Fedora preloaded on Lenovo came to be. I think there is a story there and a lot of people would be interested to know how it happened. The interview could be with Mark or someone else at Lenovo, and it could go on the Fedora Magazine.

The scoop would be a behind-the-scenes view at how it went from concept to an experiment to real. It might also serve as inspiration for other OEMs about how Lenovo brought Linux preloads to some of their lineups.

The caveat here is that I’m pushing an idea without the ability to drive it. :sweat_smile: However, we have done community interviews like this before, a long while back with Community Ops. If it helps, I could fish up some examples.

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Hi Joseph,

Thanks for tagging me with this. I have to think about some answers a bit but so the following is a bit off the cuff and let me know if I miss anything

Would :heartbeat: to support any marketing with Fedora. In Lenovo, the Linux team does not have any sales or marketing skills or experience and it’s something that to be honest we’re missing. We’ve been very much focused on resolving the technical issues and we do a poor job of selling the work we do (which in my opinion is kinda crazy). We are working on some things internally to better advocate for the Linux work we do but it’s slow moving and realistically Lenovo sales are still learning about what Linux is and are marketing folk have no idea :smiley:

I don’t really know what you could or should be doing - honestly open to suggestions here too. I think anything that encourages Lenovo web teams and product teams to see there is demand for Linux is good (and I’m guessing that likely applies to other OEMs too). At the moment I’d love to get more platforms online and expand the Linux program (I get so many requests for Ideapad and Legion) but I don’t have the resources to do so and the sales numbers are not enough (yet).

Justin - for covering the concept to reality path, if you want to cover that (it could be interesting) please do involve Matthew. I joined the PC team just as the Fedora preload concept was really kicking off so I don’t know the very early days of how it went. It was definitely a challenging project but I’m glad it succeeded. I’m not sure if it would inspire or terrify other OEMS though! One big thing I learnt is even if you solve the raw technical challenge of getting Linux running well there is a ton of other stuff that goes alongside that is hard to prepare for.

With regards to interviews or sharing details on the Linux program, etc - I’m always very happy to do that and I try and be as transparent as possible about our program (good and bad). I’ve done talks at Nest and Fedora release parties along those lines but as long as people aren’t bored of hearing about it I’ll happily do more - let me know what works. A small caveat that any ‘official’ media engagement (I know I got tagged on the Fedora podcast last week by Matthew) have to go through the Lenovo media team first for approval - but they’re usually good to work with.

Let me know what works for you guys and I’ll do my best to help out and if we can brainstorm ideas then I can try and pull in Lenovo marketing folk and see if anything either explodes or flies :slight_smile:

Mark

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Goal: We need to sell some laptops

Thanks for the additional insight into where things stand currently! Helps a lot to know what has been tried and where we’re at. Definitely want to make sure that one of our goals with our marketing efforts is to go for metrics that will show the value of preloaded Linux to internal Lenovo teams.

More specifically, I think our goal should be to drive sales to Lenovo Linux laptops. I don’t think anything will move the needle more. Whether we can do that, I hope we can, but I do think that’s the right target to shoot for.

Idea Zone

To that end, I do have a few ideas for things we can try. Some of these ideas are one-off initiatives we can do. Some are building blocks that can be used for future efforts. Some are more about having regular messaging and finding creative ways to keep that message out there about Lenovo Fedora laptops.

  • @jflory7’s idea of a Magazine article would be a great piece of long-form content to add color to what we’re trying to do here. If someone has bandwidth to pick this up, this is a great and relatively standalone task that would help this initiative.
  • Podcast episode about Lenovo Fedora partnership would also be good for similar reasons.
  • Getting clarification on how to get to the Fedora options on Lenovo’s website.
  • Developing a landing page for Fedora laptops that would include (or probably only be) Lenovo products so that we have an easier to digest website to send people to. That page can then redirect to the specific machines people are interested in.
  • Working on the specific value proposition for buying a Lenovo Fedora laptop that can be reflected in marketing, presentations, and other places we talk about our partnership.

Last one I’ll separate out because it’s a lot. Making Fedora on Lenovo a regular topic on our socials. I haven’t really documented this thought process anywhere, but I try to make sure there are regular topics or themes that are represented in the Mastodon account. Just like I regularly want to talking about Fedora innovation, features, community, supporting other open source projects, and so on, so do I want to regularly talk about how you can buy Fedora preinstalled Lenovo laptops. It’s an important step for desktop Linux that counts towards our efforts to promote FOSS more broadly.

To that end, I think this whole process will produce content that can be used to regularly talk about Fedora and Lenovo. Every article, podcast episode, or new development in supporting hardware is an ‘excuse’ to talk about this on our socials, and thus keep that idea in circulation.

Next Steps

First, I think the next best step is to get folks who want to be involved in this initiative into the Marketing Team Matrix channel. From there we’ll be able to move much faster on content and ideas.

Second, if anyone has ideas on things we can do or ways they (or their team) would like to contribute, please do so in this thread! Would be cool to accumulate ideas in one place so that as we get momentum going we have our next actions already identified.

Third, if you see any ideas that you would like to run with, please let us know! With many of these, like the article, podcast episode, and landing pages, those are projects that can run in parallel if we have people who want to pick up the parts they’re interested in. As I said, if you’re looking for a way to participate, consider picking up one of the ideas discussed and run with it. The Marketing Team will be happy to support you!

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It seems like a good way to avoid the fiasco that happened to Dell offering Ubuntu (clueless customers suing because Ubuntu didn’t run Microsoft Office™). Making the alternate OS support completely separate from Lenovo should prevent that.

I wish I could justify a new laptop so I could write about the best features. I had a used Thinkpad, and I loved the advanced battery management. I hear Lenovo continues that enlightened tradition.

An article about using that to extend battery life is one idea. I believe Fedora exposes BATTERY_CHARGE_MIN and MAX to Fedora via /sys/class. Keep it at 70/85 while on your desk. Set MAX to 100 a little before taking it on a road trip.

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I am bitter about Fedora on Lenovo products because something bad changed in Fedora 38 that now creates a series of strange bugs, crashing of the Gnome shell, and freezing of the BIOS framebuffer on my Lenovo ThinkStation P360 Ultra mini workstation. It’s very far from a usable or stable OS on my machine now. In comparison, Arch Linux and Ubuntu work totally fine running the same kernel versions. It doesnt make any sense. But I have given up hope for Fedora working on my enterprise Lenovo workstation.

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Can you send me details offline (mpearson-lenovo at squebb dot ca) and I can have a look (I don’t want to turn this posting into a system support thread :slight_smile: ).
I’ve been running F38 on a number of my machines and it’s been solid for me - we’ll have to see what has regressed; but any logs etc would be useful.

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Well @mpearson, IMO the PERFECT mobile workstarion for a Linux-based system is, indeed, the Lenovo Legion Slim 7 AMD Advantage… maybe the only thing missing is the full RAM upgradability (8GB are soldered and only the other slot is upgradable).

A great screen, an AMD GPU and a well balanced power/portability ratio.

An even more portable mobile workstation would be (if it was possible) an AMD Advantage edition of the Slim 7 ProX… I fell in love with the Intel/NVidia version, and the AMD/NVidia version doesn’t look bad at all, but an AMD Advantage would be PERFECT (If you’re willing to overerlook the soldered RAM and go directly to 32GB)

I know the idea is having more models with Fedora Out-of-the-box. But it might start with bringing more support (official guides, for example) to those who want to transition from one of those models with Windows to Fedora.

Of course, every use case is different, I’m a content creator first, gamer second and have no programming or technical background (except for my tech journalist side-job)… so having a discrete GPU tu run DaVinci Resolve is a must. Sadly enough, that’s the main thing missing in most big brand’s Linux-out-of-the-box laptops (and all Linux-based brands like System76, Tuxedo or Slimbook come with NVidia GPUs).

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Mark can correct me on this, but as I understand it, Legion and ThinkPad brands are not just different decoration on similar underlying hardware, and we don’t necessarily have much “pull” with the consumer-oriented brands like Legion (as opposed to business-oriented ThinkPad).

I’m not saying we shouldn’t ask — in fact, customers asking is how this happens — but some things are easier than others.

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Is it too early to reveal one of those things? :slightly_smiling_face:

To me, this is exactly what would make the story so juicy.

@magazine-editors, would there be interest and capacity among the editor teams to write an interview with Mark? Or would it be easier if someone came to you with an interview drafted for review? The answer to this question will determine where we could start with something like this.

+100 . I am in traveling home after Red Hat Summit this week. We had a Fedora & CentOS stand there, and I was surprised how many people came up to talk to us about the Fedora OEM preloads on Lenovo hardware. The #1 thing I heard from talking to people on the show floor about them was that they were hard to find. Some folks even thought Lenovo gave up on shipping Linux OEM preloads and asked us if we knew a vendor that did preload Fedora for enterprise workstation purposes. I told them that Lenovo still has them but you have to really look.

I should have the least influence over this because I haven’t been a regular attendee of the socials, but this feels like it could come off oddly to me. I think it is totally fine if the topic comes up organically, but making it a kind of agenda item or recurring topic for our socials might come off in a weird way to folks. Especially if someone attends the social is a newcomer and might not fully appreciate how excited we are about buying Fedora preloaded on our favorite hardware and how long it took for us to get here (compared to 20 years ago).

Basically, I want to be careful that it doesn’t look like we are shilling too hard in a space that is meant to be open and flow organically. I don’t think our marketing efforts are impacted by this, because that sort of output might be expected from marketing outputs. It might not be at a social hour.

But to reiterate, I don’t think anyone should feel like it is an off-limits topic if it comes up organically and as part of the flowing conversation.

This thought is not baked fully, and I also don’t know whether it is useful for @joseph or whether @mpearson could provide this. But I wonder if the Fedora Marketing Team could be connected to a member of the Lenovo media team to be an occasional “reviewer” of sorts for bigger efforts (e.g. a Fedora Magazine article).

My thinking behind this is that it would be useful to get the Lenovo angle on a Lenovo piece by a member of the Lenovo team. Right? That feedback might help us cover anything interesting or exciting that we want to include. I also hope that making the connection to the Lenovo media team would mean that we could share some social media love on our outreach posts for any marketing piece.

This could be a bad or difficult idea for a number of reasons, but I am putting it out there to test whether there is something that immediately jumps out as bad or difficult. :slightly_smiling_face:

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I’m not confident that I could compose good interview questions for this topic. It would probably be better if someone more knowledgeable about laptop hardware specs and their interplay with Fedora Linux could do the interview.

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Yeah - you beat me for replying :slight_smile:

The Legion (and Ideapad) platforms sadly aren’t in the Linux program - though I get a lot of questions about them and we’ve managed to sneak in a few fixes. We cover most Thinkpads, all ThinkStation, a bunch of ThinkCenter and all ThinkEdge.

I highly encourage asking for these platforms - but my recommendation is to do that via the websites or any customer surveys. Unfortunately everyone here knows I’m biased as I would like to put Linux on everything (which is probably a suitable statement on a thread about world domination!)

It’s a sad truth today that there are many pieces needed in the firmware to be compatible with Linux and getting product teams to make those changes is hard without a hammer (or business case). Until I started this job I hadn’t realised how much reliance there is on the BIOS/EC/whatever FW - and with an open-source fan’s hat on…that’s a bit depressing to be honest…but one battle at a time.

You also obviously need the HW vendors for the devices in the laptop to offer and support Linux drivers - there’s a lot of ‘trickle down’ effect from the Thinkpad project which is good, and in the longer term it will help; but there are enough differences that it’s not a gimme.

For an AMD + Nvidia combo - we do have the P16v that is Linux certified so maybe check that out? It’s not in the Fedora program and it’s not a platform that I’ve seen have a particularly big uptake with Linux users…I’m looking to expand the Fedora program but that platform wasn’t on my radar.

As far as guides on Windows to Linux transitions go - I’ve generally avoided doing that sort of documentation as there are many better guides out there then I could write :slight_smile:

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Yeah - I get frustrated by this, and it is on our side. Many reasons - some good, some bad, some just plain annoying. But the systems we do get up should be easier to find :frowning:

Making some noise to encourage web teams to fix this would be great.

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I am looking into what we have in terms of media contacts internally. It will be interesting and bear in mind that our media folk know nothing about Linux so sometimes it can be an awkward match up - but definitely up for giving it a go.

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It would have helped if the folks at the Lenovo booth had been in the know. As I said, it’s a big company and the folks there were demoing other kinds of hardware. But @mpearson maybe that’s something we can do better next year.

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I had no idea we had a Lenovo booth there - I assume it was the server team?
Agreed - maybe we can have one of the PC team there next year.

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Edge devices.

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Well, Flock is still around the corner. :grin:

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Sadly I can’t make it to flock this year as it clashes with our family holiday (which wasn’t movable because of my wife’s vacation days).
Seeing if someone else from the Lenovo team can attend; but getting travel approved in the current business climate is brutal :frowning:
Next year!

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lol, sorry, by socials I mean our social media. :slight_smile: As of now I’d like to post about our Lenovo laptops at least once a month, which I think is an ok goal to shoot for since we do about 20 posts a month on Mastodon. Won’t feel overblown.

Also, the goal would be to bring news or something cool. I want to mention Lenovo because we are doing something that shows this partnership is active, not simple announce it over and over again. Basically, content or development in this space serves as excuses for repeating the fact that the preloaded laptops exist. It’s creative repetition that is also valuable in its own right.

@mpearson I tried finding the currently available Fedora laptops but had no luck. Could you provide the link for where we can get these?

I went to the Lenovo site and selected Linux for the operating system I wanted. Five options came up. Of the five, four specified they were Ubuntu and only the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10 Intel (14") seem different. Even then it still didn’t list Fedora, it just didn’t say Ubuntu either.

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If one or all of these are the Fedora laptops, is there a way to request that ‘Fedora Linux’ be added somewhere in the description?

If we can get at least one link to a Fedora Lenovo laptop, that can be the first post I make about this program. I’d like to have a call to action that is the actual place to buy this.

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