Lenovo 14ACN6

I was looking for a successor to my trusty Dell Latitude E5570 which still is my main machine. It is a power house with its Intel Core i3 6100 CPU accompanied by 8 GB of RAM and a WD black HDD. For speed and capacity I have no reason to look for something else. But still I was looking around. The screen of Fluor is rather outdated. A 1366x768 TN (Twisted Nematic) display with a contrast ratio of 400 and a meager 200 nits of intensity made the pictures of my Nikon camera's look like waterpaintings after a thunderstorm.
I have another machine, an outdated Acer Aspire E15 (E5-521 series), also with a glossy, probably IPS, 1366x768, screen on which these same colours looked fabulous. On the Acer all pictures look so much better. So I decided to start looking around for a solution. I considered mounting an aftermarket new old stock 1920x1080 IPS screen in Fluor but that turned out to be too adventurous. So I decided to start looking around for a new computer.
After considering several models and a series of visits to a local computer shop (CoolBlue) I decided to buy a Lenovo Ideapad 5 Pro 14ACN6 82L700GLMH. A 14 inch machine with a Ryzen 7 processor, 16 GB of RAM, 512 GB of SSD and a 2880 x 1800 (16:10) 14" screen.

The Lenovo website is huge. Each model has 10-12 sub-models, each with his own code. It can be VERY problematic to find out the details for each version. But there is ONE website that contains all that is known: psref.lenovo.com Just enter the last 10 digits of the product code in the search bar (top center). In the case of the 'Lenovo Ideapad 5 Pro 14ACN6 82L700GLMH' machine, enter "82L700GLMH" in the search field. The website will dynamically fill in the other part of the name of this model, and you can find ALL details about this model. In most cases even the color gamut is published. That's a great advantage.

When the computer arrived the battery was flat. I first had to charge it over the USB-C port. That took an hour. Not bad. I inserted the USB drive, powered on and hit the F12 key during booting. There was just one option: the Windows bootmanager. Which meant I had to reboot, press F2 to enter the BIOS settings and remove Secure boot and the other usual things. Now I could see the USB drive. It was there twice:

as a USB drive
as a USB drive with EFI

The former did not boot. The latter did. Within seconds I had 12 penguins in the top of the screen. I was booting into Slackware 15. Great success. Suddenly the system switched to GUI mode and the 12 point font became virtually unreadable on the 2880 x 1800 screen. Too small. The inlog screen for Slackware also was virtually unreadable... Not very promising.

I managed to start an XFCE session and ended up with an empty screen with miniature panels and icons. The first thing to do was enter the settings manager and in 'Appearance' change the DPI setting to '200'. That made things a lot better readable. Change more options on the live-system. It all looked very promising. Then I loaded some more applets in the top panel (Panel 1), to discover that I did not have WLAN. No icon. No nothing.
So I used Fluor to search the web. This machine has a MediaTek WLAN system that is very Linux-hostile. I picked up a WLAN dongle and inserted it in the 2nd USB port (the live system was in port 1). Within seconds I was online. The computer functioned good. The operating system was OK. But the MediaTek WLAN system was the problem.

This was a €950 laptop. And it needed a €5 WLAN dongle to work. From my previous experiences with a Lenovo computer I remembered that there always is a workaround for these situations, yet there is no guarantuee that there would be success. It might well be that I would never get the MT chip to work reliably. And one of the two USB ports would be permanently occupied. CoolBlue offer a 30 day trial service. I will keep this in mind,

After I installed the WLAN dongle I could access the web and visit one of my photosites knipser.nl and started browsing a gallery with lots of high res pictures. The new screen of this new super laptop looked just as good as the Acer screen. That was a bit of a disappointment, to say the least. The lenovo screen is

2880 x 1800 pixels (16 : 10)
400 nits IPS grade
1000 contrast ratio
100% sRGB
Anti Glare (the Acer is glossy)
90 Hz

This screen is very bright. Sometimes too bright. Not sure if this machine is worth the 1000 euro price tag. Perhaps in Windows, but not in Linux.

The keyboard mechanics are super. Nice to the touch. Good shape, size and travel. But the letters were very hard to see. The light grey letters on the dark grey keycaps was no fun. Also, when the backlight was on, you must be watching the keyboard straight from above. When the computer is held at an angle, I looked under the caps, into the backlight, so you see nothing. Not a big success.

I sent the machine back. From a €950 machine I expect a working WLAN system and readable keyboard. Hey Lenovo, just install Intel gear. The screen also turned out to be too much resolution.