Best way to "mirror" existing EOS installation to a second laptop (Thinkpad T14 Gen 1)?

General system Newbie
18

Cheers for the helpful info!

I found the “does nothing” in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/30-touchpad.conf was actually a dumb user error—I simply forgot to change the “devname” in that. :blush:

Nevertheless, the touchpad problems persisted. Whenever coming back from sleep mode, tap-clicking and tap-dragging were unreliable as hell again. It drives me absolutely mad when I can’t tap-click and tap-drag on laptops! — I could never adjust to the Thinkpad’s TrackPoint, and, besides, not all my machines are Thinkpads or Dells.

Since my EOS has X11 Cinnamon, which is GNOME-based, and GNOME has used libinput and xf86-input-libinput in favour of the xf86-input-synaptics for a long time, I tried another way, which seems to survive sleep mode (cross fingers!):

  • removed the faulty /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/30-touchpad.conf
  • added a new “catchall” /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/40-libinput.conf with following content:
    # Needed to make touchpad tapping work after sleep
Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "libinput touchpad catchall"
        MatchIsTouchpad "on"
        MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
        Driver "libinput"
        Option "Tapping" "on"
        Option "ClickMethod" "clickfinger"
        Option "TappingDrag" "on"
        Option "ScrollMethod" "twofinger"
        Option "DisableWhileTyping" "on"
        Option "TappingButtonMap" "lmr"
EndSection

I somehow have the suspicion the well-meaning seller did me a disservice by putting a fresh Windows 11 Pro including all Lenovo drivers and firmware updates on this machine… I mean, I’m grateful for the BIOS update already done (2025-02-10!), but chances are he introduced the buggy latest Windows Synaptic firmware, too… and of course that would stick. Besides, the first thing after running all diagnostics was to remove the Windows install and put EOS on it. Didn’t even bother to backup that Windows—it’ll never be used anyway.

Well, let’s see. In all other respects, I just love this laptop.

Oh, wait, no. I never understood why Lenovo decided to put the Fn key at the lower left of the keyboard, where the Ctrl key should be! Countless times now I have typed Fn+C and Fn+V instead of Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V…

I mean, okay, they changed their BIOSes so we can swap these two keys again, but the key labelling is wrong now, and stickers don’t help much on a backlit keyboard.

I write. I’m a keyboard man. And this Thinkpad T14 Gen 1 definitely has one of the best keyboards I ever encountered on a laptop.

I guess I should change the thread title to mention “Thinkpad” now, so others can find it more easily…