I installed one before… and now I’m doing it again. This time around it seems way less trouble than last time — maybe that’s the newer hardware revision, who knows. Anyway, my old Intel 18625 card kept hard-locking the laptop on wake, and swapping it out fixed it instantly. Could be a hardware issue. If the card still gives up the ghost, I can always sell it to Wu Lao Er. So here’s a quick rundown on getting this card properly driven under Ubuntu.

First off, to use Vulkan on Linux you need an Intel or NVIDIA GPU. I’m not sure about AMD — it probably works too. On NVIDIA, you need the latest 370-series driver before Vulkan support can be enabled. If you don’t have the latest driver installed, use the official PPA: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install nvidia-370

Screen tearing is an old problem, and the fix is simple too: This only applies to Ubuntu; for Arch and the like, check the Wiki, which has a more detailed write-up: sudo vim /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf

The X250 is a bit of a pain on Ubuntu 14.04 — the touchpad doesn’t work right. Besides the mode tweak I mentioned before, the other fix is upgrading to a newer kernel. Kernels are everywhere; you can just grab one from Ubuntu’s Mainline and install it, like the latest 4.0.2: http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v4.0.2-wily/ But after installing, you’ll find the touchpad works fine and the WiFi is gone. So here is a fix.