th the weblog uni un

A few weeks ago, I bought an Lenovo Ideapad Flex 5 14ARE05 for university use, basically a mid-range convertible with a Ryzen 5 CPU and due to the fact that Windows is just insufferable, I planned to set up some Linux distribution. Since I am more lazy than I maybe should be with those things, I chose Ubuntu, and most things worked out of the box. However, the few things that do not are pretty noteworthy so I’m just gonna list what I had to do to make it work fully.

For some reason Secure Boot was already turned off when I bought the device, maybe because it was used for showcase by the vendor? No clue, but I had to change the boot order though, so you might wanna keep that in mind. Also, consider inverting the Fn functionality, it tends to be pretty annoying to have to hold Fn everytime you need any F key.

Since it’s a convertible, the screen can be turned by almost 360 degrees, and at some point a kind of touchscreen mode should activate. GNOME seems to natively support this per se, however, the drivers for this specific accelerometer or whatever is used were not shipped. Installing yoga-usage-mode was sufficient though - although it recommends some more userspace software, it simply worked after loading the kernel module, since GNOME seemed to detect the input device.

There’s still a few issues: Sometimes it takes two rotations for the device to correctly return to laptop mode, with the cursor just not showing up and the touchpad not really working. At other times, the cursor is invisible, but that can usually be fixed by navigating it to the very left or whereever your dock is located. Also, pinch to zoom and a few other gestures don’t really work with the touchpad, but that’s probably a userspace issue, completely independent of the hardware.

The pen feature works fine too and didn’t require any additional setup, however, the button at the top of the pen isn’t recognized, not sure what one could do about that though, usually two buttons are sufficient anyways.

The laptop has a fingerprint sensor, but it was not recognized at all. Making it work took installing libfprint-tod-2, a special version of the fingerprint library thingy, after which it still worked rather inconsistently if at all, if I remember correctly. Installing synaTudor, yet another weird userspace quasi-driver, was another step to functionality, however, one had to disable the fprintd daemon for whatever reason, or otherwise the device would be constantly locked up and therefore not really work either. Nonetheless, it’s kinda inconsistent, especially when waking up - it takes a while for the message to unlock via fingerprint to show up, and even then it’s rare that it’s recognized at all. On the other hand, sometimes it works without any issues, so maybe it’s worth taking a closer look at what services are running exactly, but since it’s not exactly the most important feature, I’ll save that for the future.

yeah it works pretty well tbh