FWIW, I am looking into running Linux on this machine as well and mainly ran into the issues mentioned on
this page.
So far I have tried Debian Bullseye and Linux Mint 20.2 and the experience is quite similar: the touchpad and wake-up from suspend don't work out-of-the-box / with default settings.
My findings go slightly beyond what is already mentioned on the website at the time of writing, so I am going to summarize them here:
Touchpad
It is correct that loading the
i2c-hid module is required. This does not always seem to be sufficient. With different kernels I had varying success.
I can confirm that it works with the current Debian kernel
linux-image-5.10 and Linux Mint kernel
linux-image-5.11.0-43-generic.
On older AND newer kernels on Mint, I have NOT managed to get it to work as loading of the
hid-multitouch module is not triggered, which seems to be the culprit. Manually loading this module does not help.
Wake-up from suspend
It seems there are two main issues here:
- Re-initialization of the graphics card.
- General ability of waking up the system.
The first issue manifests itself as flickering of the display after wake-up. This seems to be resolved by adding
i915.enable_psr=0 to the linux command line (i.e. in
/etc/default/grub).
BTW, if the machine is in this state, it is still possible to log in via ssh, so at least it is possible to save your work and reboot somewhat gracefully.
The second issue is more annoying: it is impossible to reactivate the laptop from sleep no matter what you do, except for long-pressing the power button and switching it off.
At least on my machine with BIOS version 2.27, it was not sufficient to change the BIOS power management settings to "normal" (as suggested in the link above).
Disabling the hardware power management completely seemed to have fixed the issue for me.
I have not looked yet into what that actually means (e.g. CPU/GPU not entering certain power saving states), but at least suspend and wake-up seem to be working now as expected.
I am hoping that at least the power management issues are resolved over time with updates to Intel drivers and firmware (it seems to affect other machines as well).
For the touchpad, it is a continuation of an issue that already existed for the U7410...so I am just hoping that it will work more reliably with future kernel updates even if the appropriate module has to be loaded manually.
As a conclusion: I have seen much better linux compatibility (Lenovo), but also much worse (older Fujitsu models).
I am probably in the same boat with a few of the previous posters that are supplied with this particular model by their university in south-western Germany.