My own experience has been wonderful. I’ve used ThinkPads with Linux for the past 15 years. Everything that I try works out of the box by default.
It is just wonderful experience. I have honestly nothing bad to say!
Does this sound like an advertisement?
My work has been providing an Ubuntu based Linux ThinkPad X1 for over a year and it’s been great not having to deal with MS nonsense. There are some growing pains, but it’s well worth it!
My previous laptop was a $300 Chromebook. It was nice enough, but it was s hassle to have to flash legacy coreboot onto it to run native Linux.
On a ThinkPad you just add your install media and boot that shit up.
Everything on my Thinkpad T440p works as well as I can reasonably expect it to. Everything from web browsing to light gaming even with my relatively resource heavy Hyprland setup.
Iam on linux about a year now on a thinkpad x1 yoga gen 4. The experience is so far really nice! The distro is kubuntu. Since some update the sleep got issues, i tried several fixes but, still sometimes its not possible to wake after the sleep and have to hard reset. But it looks like i pinned it down to NOT unplug the laptop of the Dockingstation when its in sleep. But that definitely worked prior.
It used to be Thinkpad = perfect Linux machine. YMMV though.
it really depends which thinkpad you have. Things might look like they work out of the box but when you use it daily, you’ll discover some annoying hiccups.
On my P14s AMD running Fedora, everything works except for the touchpad can freeze. This rarely happens but when it does, you can try to wiggle the touchpad to unfreeze. If that doesnt help, reboot is the only option. Also fan runs very high.
On a relative’s T14s Gen 3 running Ubuntu, suspend never works reliably. I tried all fixes, even switching distro. Intel seemed to disable a toggle that allows correct power management in the BIOS. We gave up so we put back Windows 10 to use lol.
My trusted T480s always works. Always. Regardless of distros, the darn thing can do every thing: suspend, hibernate, suspend then hibernare, bluetooth, ethernet, wifi, lid close action, double monitor setup…etc. It ran all kinds of distros: Ubuntu, Mint, Arch, Fedora,RHEL, Peppermint, Slackware, Gentoo. Currently settled on Fedora Silverblue.
The downside with T480s? I got one in silver. The paints are terrible now due to scratches. It is VERY difficult to find silver parts for the T480s at least in my country.
