Lenovo Selling Linux Laptops Directly in the US

I had a ThinkPad T14 AMD, which is Linux-certified by Lenovo. If you are used to the warts of Linux on laptops, it is quite ok. However, coming from MacBooks, the experience was comparatively bad.

Pros:

- The CPU fan on the Ryzen 7 Pro 4750U is not very loud.

- You can easily add more memory (bumped up mine to 32GB RAM).

- You can easily replace the SSD (replaced mine by 1TB) and there is M.2 slot for WWAN which can also be used for an SSD.

- Having a variety of ports is nicer than 2/4x USB-C + a stereo jack.

- Performance is good. Single core performance is of course worse than the M1, but having 8 high performance cores plus hyperthreading compensates a lot, especially for development.

Cons:

- I enabled S3 sleep (Linux compatibility), but the laptops drains the batteries like crazy in sleep. 1-2 days in a backpack and it's dead. To make it worse, Lenovo's own charger couldn't revive it. I had to borrow a MacBook Pro USB-C charger to get a reasonable charge again, after which the Lenovo charger would work again.

- Battery life on Linux is ok-ish (typically 6 hours with light use), but nowhere near an M1 Mac (or even an Intel Mac).

- Suspend/resume continues to have issues on Linux. Sometimes, the screen does not wake up. Especially after plugging or unplugging a DisplayPort alt-mode USB-C cable. Usually moving the TrackPoint fixes this.

Every few resumes, the TrackPad and the left button of the TrackPoint do not work anymore. Only switching off the machine fixes this. With a reboot, the TrackPoint still doesn't work.

- Suspend/resume has an issue in Windows, where resuming often results in an unusable TrackPad that continuously clicks. This is solved by disabling fast boot (or whatever it is called in Windows), after that suspend/resume works fine in Windows.

- The 14" 1080p screen is only well-readable with 125% or 150% scaling. Unfortunately, GNOME support for fractional scaling is not great (even with Wayland). XWayland applications are blurred, there are several open issues about this in the Mutter/gnome-shell issue tracker, but no solution. The only way to have a usable display is to set font zooming to 125%-150% and hope that you have an external screen where that scaling is also acceptable.

- The fingerprint scanner results a lot of false negatives on Linux (works fine on Windows).

- The speakers are much worse than modern MacBooks.

- I bought a Lenovo USB-C Gen 2 Dock. However, 4k@60Hz does not work on Linux through the Dock. The proper dock configuration is to use 2 lanes for USB 3.1 Gen 2 and 2 lanes for DP Alt with HBR3 (to have enough bandwidth for 4k@60Hz). However, Linux doesn't configure the 2 DP Alt lanes to use HBR3 and can only use 4k@30Hz [1]. Of course, the Dock works fine with Windows. There is an issue about this in the AMD DRM bug tracker, but it has been inactive for months.

I wanted to like Linux on the ThinkPad and it certainly has a lot going for it, but it still has many paper cuts. Since I use a laptop quite intensively for work, I decided to sell it after ~7 months and buy a MacBook again.

[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/1317

The Steam deck is certainly an intriguing device, but it isn't even out yet. It will be interesting to see what can be done with its "native" gamepad input and touch screen, might enable some interesting use cases for actual useful work on the field.

I'd like to see Pine offer a larger screen and battery.

I actually have an X280 in my hand. The reason why wanted it was so I would get 5 years of international warranty on it. Turns out most countries don't actually accept the accidental damage coverage from another country(I paid about $600-$700 in coverage, so for the first 3 years it's no better than an AppleCare, which is international as well).

Also when I wanted to switch it for an X1C because the new ones came out while I was waiting for the stock to arrive(and well they shipped me the wrong model without LTE). They wanted to charge me 15% restocking fee not only on the device, but also on Tax and Insurance.

Currently my touchpad randomly dies when the device goes into sleep. I suspect it's related to some recent firmware update that happened.

The amazing premium Lenovo warranty that everyone talks about must have been before my time.

But given that I want international coverage, I really don't know what options I have. Currently it seems better to just buy a framework laptop, save my money on the insurance and just pay for parts as I go.

Honest question: how does this firmware spyware affect Linux? If I get a ThinkPad and overwrite the pre-installed OS with my own, would spyware like this be able to do anything on Linux?

I guess they could do the same thing, extract some binary from the firmware pre-boot and inject it to /boot to mess with the boot process... but does that give them viable persistence and ability to do stuff in Linux once the OS is booted?