There’s a story going round that Lenovo have signed an agreement with Microsoft that prevents installing free operating systems. This is sensationalist, untrue and distracts from a genuine problem.

With that solved, let’s get to the real root cause of the problems here:

The real problem here is that Intel do very little to ensure that free operating systems work well on their consumer hardware – we still have no information from Intel on how to configure systems to ensure good power management, we have no support for storage devices in “RAID” mode and we have no indication that this is going to get better in future. If Intel had provided that support, this issue would never have occurred. Rather than be angry at Lenovo, let’s put pressure on Intel to provide support for their hardware.

As someone who tried to move his retina MacBook Pro to Linux only a few weeks ago – I can attest to Intel’s absolutely terrible Linux drivers and power management. My retina MacBook Pro has an Intel Iris 6100 graphics chip, and the driver for it is so incredibly bad that even playing a simple video will cause the laptop to become so hot I was too scared to leave it running. Playing that same video in OS X or Windows doesn’t even spin up the fans, with the laptop entirely cool. Battery life in Linux measured in a 2-3 hours, whereas on OS X or Windows I easily get 8-10 hours.