My experience with Arch Linux on my Lenovo Legion 5

[archiso]

I got a Lenovo Legion 5 about a month ago and since then I have dual booted with Arch Linux and Windows 11, with arch there has been A LOT of problems I have fixed some of them but others are still there. 

 

All problems I've had:

1. wifi didn't work, solved by installing a driver(I forget which one)

2. trackpad didn't work, fixed in a kernel update

3. brightness doesn't work, I haven't solved this yet

4. bluetooth doesn't work, also haven't solved this

5. USB C port doesn't work for an external monitor, I haven't tried anything other then a monitor 

 

If anyone could help it would be greatly appreciated. Overall I love this laptop, there is some problems but that is only to be expeted when using arch linux.

[grg994]

Hey! Welcome among Arch users on Lenovo laptops (I have an IdeaPad).

 

Here is the most important wiki page, about what others managed to get to work:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Laptop/Lenovo#Legion_series

 

16 hours ago, archiso said:

with arch there has been A LOT of problems

Wifi, Brightness, Bluetooth, external display (-> window manager) - non of these will have userspace utilities (packages) installed or configured with a base Arch install - as you saw it on the situation with the wifi network manager.

 

Generally you will get no better starting point then just reading the corresponding Arch Wiki page for each topic and going through the steps. Maybe there are some user-contributed install scripts / AUR packages to automate the install and configuration of these utilities - in someone else's favorite way - for some given laptop models.

 

If you can't get something working by going through the wiki, you may get the best help if you ask for it with your specs and the traced down problem step described in detail.

 

Some thoughts:

3. brightness:

Having the the brightness up/down keys being intercepted and having a way of brightness (at the end of the day just a number in /dev/...) control (utility or script) working are two distinct things here. Try 'evtest' to test the keys, a package like 'light' to do the control and you need to bind the keys to call the brightness control in your window manager / desktop environment.

 

4. bluetooth:

'lshw', 'lspci' to see if the bluetooth controller is properly detected and has proper driver; always check 'rfkill'; have a bluetooth capable network manager properly configured

 

5. USB C port doesn't work for an external monitor:

'lshw', 'lspci' to see USB-C as a video output is detected; check 'dmesg' after connecting a device to see if the kernel detects it; configure your window manager / desktop environment to output a second workspace on a second screen.

[archiso]

2 hours ago, grg994 said:

Hey! Welcome among Arch users on Lenovo laptops (I have an IdeaPad).

 

Here is the most important wiki page, about what others managed to get to work:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Laptop/Lenovo#Legion_series

 

Wifi, Brightness, Bluetooth, external display (-> window manager) - non of these will have userspace utilities (packages) installed or configured with a base Arch install - as you saw it on the situation with the wifi network manager.

 

Generally you will get no better starting point then just reading the corresponding Arch Wiki page for each topic and going through the steps. Maybe there are some user-contributed install scripts / AUR packages to automate the install and configuration of these utilities - in someone else's favorite way - for some given laptop models.

 

If you can't get something working by going through the wiki, you may get the best help if you ask for it with your specs and the traced down problem step described in detail.

 

Some thoughts:

3. brightness:

Having the the brightness up/down keys being intercepted and having a way of brightness (at the end of the day just a number in /dev/...) control (utility or script) working are two distinct things here. Try 'evtest' to test the keys, a package like 'light' to do the control and you need to bind the keys to call the brightness control in your window manager / desktop environment.

 

4. bluetooth:

'lshw', 'lspci' to see if the bluetooth controller is properly detected and has proper driver; always check 'rfkill'; have a bluetooth capable network manager properly configured

 

5. USB C port doesn't work for an external monitor:

'lshw', 'lspci' to see USB-C as a video output is detected; check 'dmesg' after connecting a device to see if the kernel detects it; configure your window manager / desktop environment to output a second workspace on a second screen.

so I probably should've mentioned that I've read the Wiki pages on all of this and been looking on google for a while. For the brightness issue no one seems to have gotten working without using the nvidia gpu. With bluetooth the problem is that when it's scaning for devices nothing shows up.

[OldTweaker]

A tip (which may not be the Arch way of doing things) is to boot from a Ubuntu USB drive. Just select try at bootup.  That way you can first of check if the hardware works in Ubuntu. If it doesn't the chance that it doesn't (yet) work in Linux is substantial. Also you can do an lsmod to see what mods Ubuntu loaded. This may tip you of on a next step on getting it to work in Arch.

Back in the day when I was still on Gentoo I did this quite often. Until I got lazy and switched to Ubuntu   

[Master Disaster]

I cases like this it would be helpful if we could see your dmesg logs however I don't recommend you post it as it can potentially contain identifiable info like IPs and MAC addresses.

 

Does your system log contain any errors?

 

As other have pointed out, chances are its just missing packages but it is possible that some of this stuff simply doesn't work yet.

[heimdali]

I would try out Fedora Workstation, it may work out of the box.  You can boot a life system from an USB stick that doesn't touch your disks to see if it works.

 

If it does work and if you want to stick to arch, it may help to figure out what you're missing with arch.

 

[archiso]

On 9/24/2021 at 4:16 AM, Master Disaster said:

As other have pointed out, chances are its just missing packages but it is possible that some of this stuff simply doesn't work yet.

From what I've seen googling I think you might be right about it just not working yet.

[Deki-petro]

Hello, i saw this forum while lookin for something else. Here's how i solved this on manjaro. There's little to no reason it would fail on arch:

https://forum.manjaro.org/t/lenovo-legion-5-cant-change-backlight-brightness/53188

 

The tldr is to open the /etc/grub/default  file as administrator or via sudo nano, and add or change GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="video.use_native_backlight=1"

then on terminal : sudo update-grub

and reboot.

Someone talked also about adding another command if you have nvidia, but i didn't need to. Here it is just in case : https://forum.manjaro.org/t/screen-backlight-not-working/88496/5

 

Hope it'll help you out as it did to me!

 

Now i go back to find a linux version of lenovo bloatware...