As you might have noticed, I got myself a Thinkpad Tablet 10 which came pre-installed with Windows 8.1pro. Oh dear, what a pile of crap this is! The mixture of the new Metro GUI and the „old“ classic desktop is a nightmare. Some application are here, some are there, some settings are here, some other depending settings are there. A complete mess, incomprehensible and almost unusable. It takes ages to learn which program or settings to find where. The new Metro GUI looks pretty good though on a tablet style device, rendering is good and speed too. But the classic desktop sucks badly. Suddenly, compared to the Metro (tablet) GUI, font rendering a really bad, i.e. blurry. Usability is a real issue because on a 10″ screen with WUXGA (1900×1200) it is sometimes hard to hit the controls. Worst of all, Win8.1 showed me a list of almost 100 update packages, half of them critical system updates. I tried to let them install but it simply did not work! The device sat there with a busy notification and did seemingly nothing. Holy crap. How can a multi billion $ company release such a piece of junk to the public? Linux is far from being perfect concerning usability but lightyears ahead of this.

So Win8.1 got annoying pretty easily.

Then I thought, hey, Microsoft offers a free Win10 upgrade and Lenovo supports this too so why not give it a try? Well, I tried to search for an upgrade path online but everything I found sounded pretty bad to me, having to download a pre-release, burning a DVD and such. The device itself also did not show any offer though I heard from other users that the system should offer this for download all by itself. Then I found a small Windows Icon in the notification area, here we go! The upgrade went pretty smoothly, took about well over half an hour and – tata – Win10 booting up.

Win10 is quite better than the Win8.1pro. More settings and important applications have been moved to the Metro GUI. It starts to get usable. But the classic desktop still looks crappy and is equally hard to use as the Win8.1pro desktop.

But even more shocking is the fact that the power management seems weird. As soon as the device is not in standby but practically idle the right side of the TPT10 gets warm – this is where the electronics sit. So the CPU and other parts are busy while nothing is happening. For an OS that is the primary OS on this device which is a mobile device I am pretty disappointed. While having a dimmed display and just typing text the highest estimated runtime I see was 7.5 hours. This is not what I expected. And the shock continues, the connected standby draws extra power too, about 0.5% to 1% per hour, which means that the device will be flat within a week of standby without any use.

Good news though is, under Linux the device keeps cool in idle and I finally managed to get the freeze power state to somewhat work. It seems that some driver is blocking the suspend/freeze because when I boot into single user or recovery I can go to freeze and resume almost properly (Update: Freeze now works!). There seems to be an additional bug that causes the ACPI interrupt to be disabled after resume because, I guess, the ACPI subsystem is still in suspend state so the IRQ does not get handled and the kernel disables it. This causes a second freeze not to wake up again since the ACPI IRQ is the wake up source (Update: This is not exactly correct). This will hopefully be fixable. And I need to isolate the driver that is keeping the device from going into freeze – it is not the WiFi SDIO driver which I first suspected. Another bad issue is that I still get mmc0 timeouts from time to time (Update: Also fixed, I hope, see here). The MMC subsystem does not recover from these and thus the device becomes practically unusable when this happens. This is a known issue and I hope to find some workarounds somewhere.