Linux on the Fujitsu Lifebook U729

Summary

This post describes my experience using Linux on the Fujitsu Lifebook U729. The tl;dr is that it’s a delightful laptop, and Linux runs flawlessly, and all the hardware things I’ve needed run OOTB. The only difficulty I had was in disabling Secure Boot, but I figured out how to do it, which I explain below. Contents Background Troubleshooting Secure Boot Spyware Non-Problems BIOS Notes Links Background From early 2024 my daily driver was an M2 MacBook Air, until earlier this year I broke the screen, and the repair was quoted at almost 1000 AUD. Since I used it as a desktop most of the time, this didn’t affect me much. After some flip-flopping I decided to get an M4 Mac mini. Partly for the faster CPU and more RAM, but partly because I liked the idea of LARPing like it’s the 2000s, when computers, and by extension the Internet, where fixed in physical space, rather than following everyone around. Of course this was a terrible idea. I had three working computers—a Linux+Windows desktop, a Mac Mini, and a MacBook Air that I could use as a desktop—and none of them were portable. When I went to RustForge 2025 I just brought my phone. If I wanted to travel, even within Sydney, to a demo night or math club or some such, I didn’t have a laptop to bring with me. So I needed a new laptop. And the Tahoe release of macOS was so ugly (see e.g. 1, 2, 3) it made me boot up the old Linux desktop, and start playing around with NixOS again. And I fell in love with Linux again: with the tinkering and the experimentation and the freedom it affords you. So, I wanted a Linux laptop. I had a ThinkPad X1 some years ago and it was terribly: flimsy plastic build and hardware that vastly underperformed its price. I looked around for old, refursbished workstation laptops, and, randomly, I ran into an eBay seller offering a refurbished Fujitsu laptop. The specs/price ratio was pretty good: 16 GiB of RAM and 512GiB of SSD, all for 250 AUD. And it was 12in and 1.1kg, which I like: laptops should b...