NIXOS on ThinkPad X1 YOGA (Gen 5)

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1

I just bought a ThinkPad X1 YOGA 2-in-1 convertible laptop and installed NIXOS 20.03 on it.

I choose to use GDM+Gnome3 for the desktop environment. The reason why I choose to use Gnome3 is that this desktop environment intensionally supports tablet PCs, while plasma5 and XFCE are seemingly ignoring tablet PCs.

At the very beginning I notice that the microphone is not working, actually, the system did not recognize it. After some hours of digging on the internet, I find that I need to upgrade to newer Linux kernels. So I set

boot.kernelPackages = pkgs.linuxPackages_latest;

If you also want to do similar things, remember also to modify the version of extra modules to the corresponding version.

Then the mic was recognized, however still not working. After some more hours of digging, I find I missed the following configs:

hardware.pulseaudio.extraConfig = ''
  load-module module-alsa-sink device=hw:0,0 channels=4
  load-module module-alsa-source device=hw:0,7 channels=4
  '';

Then the mic worked!

Generally speaking, the new laptop is working now.

However, the on-screen keyboard is not working smoothly.

If I choose to use gnome (on wayland?)+GDM, the on-screen keyboard will not appear in most cases. It will only appear when I’m finding applications in the activities.

If I choose to use gnome (on Xorg) +GDM, the on-screen keyboard appears, but the screen display is sometimes abnormal. A small patch of the screen does not refresh I found that this may be related to the OSK or may be not. There are also some other small problems of the OSK.

Finally I install the onboard virtual keyboard software. It does work. However the gnome OSK still appears sometimes even if I turned it off in the accessibility.

In a word, above is the best that I can do by now. I hope in the future versions, gnome3 can work better especially in the tablet mode.

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2

Hi, about hardware.pulseaudio.extraConfig, can you elaborate on what it does and how I can use it? I’m having similar symptoms on a different computer and I might be able to adapt the solution you found.

Related: Audio problems on Dell Inspiron 7590

3

I did not figure out the solution myself. My solution came from here.

4

Hmm, not sure where the numbers came from, but at least I know some directions to try. Thanks.

5

@astrojhgu Consider adding an X1 Yoga Gen 5 entry to GitHub - NixOS/nixos-hardware: A collection of NixOS modules covering hardware quirks. :slight_smile: There’s a similar (but not identical) audio fix for the X1 Carbon Gen 7 in there.

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