Debian stable (code name "stretch") installed without any problems, but a few tweaks were in order.
Wireless
Since non free firmware isn't included in Debian, I had to manually
download and copy over firmware-iwlwifi to the machine using a USB
stick.
Once that was installed, the 4.9.0-6 kernel recognised my wireless
network card and I got it up and running with WPA EAP without any
problems.
Adjusting screen brightness
I prefer using a command line tool like xbacklight for
this. However, it failed with the message:
No outputs have backlight property
To remedy this, I added the following to /etc/X11/xorg.conf to make
it locate /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight:
Section "Device"
Identifier "Card0"
Driver "intel"
Option "Backlight" "intel_backlight"
EndSection
After restarting my login manager, xbacklight worked as it should.
i3
I added these lines to ~/.config/oi3/config to make the multimedia
keys work:
bindsym XF86MonBrightnessDown exec xbacklight -inc -10
bindsym XF86MonBrightnessUp exec xbacklight -inc 10
Network port on the Thunderbolt 3 dock
# echo r8152 >> /etc/modules
Updating BIOS
Download BIOS update ISO from
lenovo.com,
it was called n1mur19w.iso when I download it.
Convert it to a proper ISO:
# geteltorito -o lenovo-bios-update.iso n1mur19w.iso
Write it to the USB drive. Be sure to pick the correct device path for
your USB stick, in my case, this was /dev/sda:
# dd if=lenovo-bios-update.iso of=/dev/sda bs=1M
