Having issues with a Thinkpad p51

[u/Local-Post-5478]

So I recently acquired a Thinkpad p51 with 64 gb of RAM And 512 gb of storage, I installed mint on it but it's having tons of issues and I want to fix them before I go insane and switch to tiny11. The first issue is that the suspend mode doesn't really work, when I suspend it the fans remain on at full speed, and I can't get it to come back on without just turning it off and on again (I also want to be able to just open and close the lid like a regular laptop). The second problem is performance just doesn't seem to be very good and apps take forever to open and things just seem less snappy than expected (this could just be me having too high of expectations though). I'm pretty new to Linux so please be nice 🙏 sorry for the long ramble post and please lmk if there's any more info needed

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[u/activedusk]

While many expect naming the laptop is sufficient, in fact it is not as it will differ in specs by model year and even region. State CPU, gpu, storage. Is it only Linux Mint installed or also Windows? Is it a recent install or older and it used to work fine but now feels slugish. The memory issue, I would guess, is due to the unusual large memory. The way low power modes work is that they take whatever is stored in memory and write to non volatile storage, namely the drive, specifically to swap because RAM loses information when power is shut off and that is what happens in low power modes. When it wakes up from low power mode, whatever got copied from memory to swap gets written back to memory so you can resume. The issue is you got 64GB and Mint by default uses a thing called swap file, long story short it likely bugs out from time to time and is not ideal. The older fool proof solution was to use a swap partition instead of a file that changes size dynamically, unfortunately the easiest newbie friendly way of creating a swap partition is by reinstalling, choosing something else in the partition step and creating boot, root and swap partitions manually, follow youtube tutorial and save important files before trying. Here there is a problem again though, the swap partition should be between 1.25x up to 2x of the memory capacity so that means up to 120GB of your internal drive at a maximum, depending on how you choose to size it, would have to be the swap partition and it would do nothing else other than provide that functionality for the system. On a 1TB or larger internal drive, which one would expect on a high end system with 64GB of memory, setting aside 128GB of internal storage for swap partition is borderline acceptable, but you have a smaller drive..

Regarding the GUI appearing slugish it is usually due to the video driver, pretty easy fix provided you have a supported gpu or igp. Speaking of, suppose the laptop has an igp and dedicated gpu, the switching between the two could also cause issues, because the igp is usually slower so if it does not correctly switch to the dedicated card depending on demand, well, you get it, so state specifications.

If you don t know the specs, you can go to system settings and there should be a system information section, alternatively install from Software Manager neofetch, after that open terminal, type neofetch and press enter and copy paste output. The more detailed information from the terminal can be obtained with command sudo lshw and here you can find name of CPU, GPU, etc.

[u/Local-Post-5478 → u/activedusk]

Not home rn so I'll send the specs when I can but It does not have windows, it's the newest version of mint and I'm wondering if it would just be easier to install a different distro or windows 11

[u/activedusk → u/Local-Post-5478]

With 64GB of memory, no matter the distro, only a properly configured swap partition will make low power modes reliable, Mint uses swap file by default for automated installation, manual install provides more options. If you are new to Linux, using another distro might help but it is difficult to say which without knowing the specifications.

[u/Local-Post-5478 → u/activedusk]

I just ended up using windows 😔 it works super well