The Lenovo T450s Is Working Beautifully With Linux

Benchmarks:

Specifications for the system are below with the benchmarks. I included benchmarks of my old system mostly for my own curiosity, but I thought it might be useful for those who are wondering what the difference is between a Sandy Bridge era machine and a new Broadwell era one.

Note about benchmarks: The system was running thermald-- Intel's Thermal Management daemon-- it assists in keeping the system from overheating during heavy workloads. It could skew the benchmark numbers since it can help to enforce / decide clockrates. If there is interest then I'm sure Michael and/or I could run comparison benchmarks to see what, if any, performance / efficiency difference that thermald makes.

View all of the benchmark results or conduct your own Linux performance comparison with the Phoronix Test Suite by visiting the OpenBenchmarking.org result page.

Additional note: Kwin was set to suspend compositing for full screen apps.

The only benchmark that absolutely blew me away in the difference was compiling the linux kernel. I don't know if this was simply because of the difference in RAM (8gbs instead of 4) or because Broadwell is just that good for tasks like code compilation, but compiling the Linux kernel was consistently multiple times faster on my new system vs my old.