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I don't know what happened but sometime in the past week Something (a software update?) happened to our Debian 13 install and now whenever our laptop goes to sleep it does not wake up again, and this is just suffering

thank you to the person who suggested I do a kernel rollback, I should've tried that

I chose the old kernel 6.12.57 in the GRUB menu and now the laptop can go to sleep and resume as normal

/var/log/apt/history.log shows the 6.12.63 kernel was installed at "2026-01-16 04:38:59"

apparently kernel rollbacks are not a standard process, so here's what I did:

• sudo apt-mark hold linux-image-6.12.57+deb13-amd64:amd64 to prevent old kernel being removed later
• sudo grub-mkconfig to get a list of grub menu entries and submenus
• sudo vim /etc/default/grub, changing GRUB_DEFAULT="Advanced options for Debian GNU/Linux>Debian GNU/Linux, with Linux 6.12.57+deb13-amd64" (yes, you have to write out the full name of the submenu and the menu item, with > between them…)
• sudo update-grub to apply the changes to /etc/default/grub

ahhhh someone in the Debian support IRC channel helpfully pointed out that since this is a very new laptop, I should probably try the backported newer kernel version (sudo apt install linux-image-amd64/trixie-backports). now we're on 6.17.13 and it works much better!

not only does suspend work on this newer kernel version, but this laptop can finally “truly” go to sleep; when a ThinkPad is sleeping, the LED in the logo and on the power button is supposed to gently pulse. that wasn't happening before!

it's like the piranha plant in super mario 64 <3

@hikari If you are considering Linux, and you say you are worried about hardware support, everyone says "just throw it on an old ThinkPad! It'll work great!". The problem is that what no one tells you is that the "old" is load-bearing. If you want to run Linux it absolutely *must* be on an old ThinkPad. If you attempt to run it on a new ThinkPad, or *any* Lenovo product newer than 12 months at a minimum and 24 months preferably, you will be in fucking hell. I have experienced this myself twice.

@mcc I must say that until this suspend issue cropped up we were almost amazed that a brand new 2025 ThinkPad seemed to work flawlessly with stable Debian, but the fact this stable Debian release came out in 2025 is probably part of why

@mcc @hikari aw poop. I've been testing Linux on an old ThinkPad before committing a work machine to it and have been very impressed with how painless things went. So I appreciate the heads up!

@JennCutter @mcc @hikari if and when you decide to try Debian, I'll be at your service for working though any issues you run into. (My go-to for running Debian Stable on a (very) modern machine has been running a kernel from stable-backports.)

@mcc @hikari the trick is to be completely fine with the fact that the audio volume controls don't work and just resign to finally using the software volume controls offered by each website and embedded video for once

@mcc @hikari
TLDR: I agree with "24 months preferably".

The 3 thinkpads (E14, X1, X1) in my household are about 4-6 years old.

At the start various minor things didn't work (not as bad as "fucking hell"*)
E.g. the volume and brightness buttons and leds wouldn't work until one sleep/wake cycle after powerup.

Eventually these problems went away with a software upgrade.

* Hell was our last HP laptop, where kernel of the time would permanently corrupt any mounted disk, even if only reading.

@mcc @hikari optimally it's also one you got from work and they haven't asked you to return it for long enough they've probably lost it

@mcc @hikari Lenovo has some new models that they'll ship with Ubuntu -- though I suppose they might be tossing in drivers that aren't in the upstream distros. (Same for other manufacturers, of course.) https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/d/linux-laptops-desktops/

@mcc @hikari As always, the Arch Wiki is a useful resource to guess which ThinkPad you could get, and what to expect from it: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Laptop/Lenovo#T_series

BTW I own a good old T470 (2017), and everything works great, including things like firmware updates with fwupd, power management, etc.

@mcc @hikari I dunno, I have Linux on my two desktops and very infrequently have problems. one has h/w from 2025 and runs on Bazzite, while my main machine has Fedora on it and works just fine. Fedora and derivatives have been the most stable for me - I used to have to reinstall everything every 1.5-2 years when I used Arch-based stuff and Debian-based often wouldn't work.

maybe give Fedora a try, but the most important thing is to use software that makes sense for your use cases and needs. if you don't need/want Linux, don't use it. I want to be as far away as possible from Windows, and if my music software functioned well on Linux I wouldn't have a Windows partition!

@mcc @hikari I would guess half or more of this reason is the distro itself. last thinkpad I bought new I had linux running on it without issues but I ran opensuse tumbleweed a rolling distro that has a current kernel.