About Debian GNU/Linux on Lenovo IdeaPad 1 15ALC7

Introduction

I've moved my installation of Debian GNU/Linux to this notebook recently and upgraded it to the currently stable Debian release with codename trixie.

No unresolved issues occured and I would like to summarize the compatibility details and my configuration experience - of course related to this laptop's hardware, my OS history and requirements.

Why I've chosen this laptop

The reason was simple: price versus performance. At least with regard to my search criteria. Nothing required from my side is missing.

Hardware specification and compatibility with Debian trixie

Quick specification

Processor

AMD Ryzen 5 5500U with Radeon Graphics
Base/Burst frequency: 2.1/4 GHz
6 cores, 12 threads
L1 / L2 / L3 cache: 192 KB / 3 MB / 8 MB
64-bit
Virtualization AMD-V

The processor is a 64-bit processor for the amd64 Debian port. I also installed the amd64-microcode package with AMD CPU firmware from the non-free-firmware section of the Debian archive.

This CPU contains 6 cores with hyper-threading enabled, the operating system thus displays 12 CPU units. Their frequency scaling based on CPU load can be customized by configuring the cpufreq subsystem - most simply by installing and configuring the cpufrequtils package and loading additional cpufreq kernel modules if needed.

Memory

16GB DDR4-3200
3200 MHz
8GB soldered + 8GB SO-DIMM
16GB max memory size

No additional configuration needs to be done on the 64-bit Debian amd64 architecture.

Hard disk

SAMSUNG MZAL8512HDLU-00BL2
512GB
NVMe 2.0

kernel driver module: nvme

No additional configuration was needed either. And the speed is impressive in comparison to standard SATA HDDs, i.e. non-SSD disks. My measurements gave me roughly 6-10 times better results depending on the exact measurement type (read / write, hdparm / dd without caching etc.). Simple write test through the filesystem without caching and with waiting until the data and metadata are physically written was really approximately 10 times faster.

Video adapter

AMD Radeon Graphics (Integrated)
VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Lucienne
Graphics Frequency 1800 Mhz

kernel driver module: amdgpu
Xorg driver module: amdgpu

Both the AMD GPU kernel drivers and Xorg drivers from Debian trixie are sufficient for the video adapter to operate properly. The XOrg driver is part of the xserver-xorg-video-amdgpu package. I also added the firmware package firmware-amd-graphics from the non-free-firmware section of the Debian archive.

Sound card

AMD HD audio

kernel driver module: snd-hda-intel

The on-board AMD sound card works fine with ALSA or the Pulse Audio and PipeWire soundservers.

Wireless card

802.11ax
2.4/5 GHz

kernel driver module: mt7921e

The wifi network adapter works very well after adding its firmware package firmware-mediatek from the non-free-firmware section of the Debian archive.

Bluetooth

MediaTek BlueTooth Adapter (Foxconn)

kernel driver module: btusb

The bluetooth adapter operates as expected. I tested it with Bluetooth headphones. However, some more configuration was needed in my case because of my OS history and when connecting devices using shell commands from CLI.

I installed the bluetooth and bluez-tools packages at first. The bluez-firmware package wasn't needed.

However, the bluetooth service journal contained the following error in its default Debian trixie configuration.

This can be simply fixed by creating the following additional bluetooth service configuration file:

/etc/systemd/system/bluetooth.service.d/override.conf

And by restarting the bluetooth service.

This step was sufficient to complete the bluetooth configuration itself, but I also had to fix my audio settings.

At first, I had to resolve the Pulse Audio and PipeWire conflict. Even if PipeWire was already in use, the older Pulse Audio soundserver was still historically installed on my system. I therefore removed it completely including the pulseaudio-module-bluetooth package and replaced it with pipewire, pipewire-alsa, pipewire-pulse and libspa-0.2-bluetooth packages to still get both Pulse Audio and bluetooth support.

I then got rid of the protocol not available error.

There was one more PipeWire issue. I wasn't able to connect my headphones via bluetooth from CLI and see it among my audio devices, even if pairing worked already. I had to adjust the WirePlumber configuration, i.e. the configuration of the session and policy manager for PipeWire. It allowed bluetooth CLI connections just from logind sessions by default and thus not from a terminal running inside X server.

This can be simply fixed by copying the default configuration file into standard /etc location and updating it there.

The required modification had to be done in the wireplumber.components section for bluez. It was sufficinent to comment the support.logind requirement.

And to restart the wireplumber user service under the non-privileged user account.

I was able to pair, connect and use my bluetooth headphones after that without other obstacles, e.g. see and control it in pulsemixer etc.

Webcam

Azurewave Integrated Camera

kernel driver module: uvcvideo

The integrated web camera works as it should, at least as it appears to me. I'm not using it very often.

Touchpad

Buttonless Mylar surface multi-touch touchpad

kernel driver module: hid_multitouch

The touchpad works fine by default, but you need to specify additional options to emulate the middle button click by pressing the left and right mouse/touchpad buttons simultaneously. Simply create a file /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/emulate-midclick.conf with the following content:

The emulation should start working after XOrg restart.

There's another option how to emulate the middle and/or right button click by pressing chosen keys. This can be accomplished by using the mouseemu package. Install it and edit its configuration file /etc/default/mouseemu, e.g.:

Don't forget to restart mouseemu, e.g.:

Summary of the compatibility with Debian trixie

All hardware components described in more detail above including the ports and slots were successfully tested under Debian trixie and operate properly even in the long term.

No packages from Debian forky were needed to get correct drivers. I tested everything around the time when trixie was released as a stable Debian distribution and everything was therefore supported. I just installed up-to-date firmware for the WiFi card, video adapter and CPU from the non-free-firmware section of the Debian archive.

I needed to adjust mainly the default Bluetooth configuration in my audio settings to be able to connect Bluetooth headphones directly from CLI even from inside an X session and also to get rid of a minor conflict between the older Pulse Audio and newer PipeWire soundserver with respect to Bluetooth settings, but both those issues were related to my specific OS history and even nowadays requirements.

To emulate the middle touchpad button click, either the installed and configured mouseemu package or an adjusted XOrg configuation was needed.

To summarize, not only everything's working fine, but I'm also very satisfied with this notebook's performance. Especially the NVMe disk speed pleasantly surprised me.