My experience running Fedora Linux on a Thinkpad P1 Gen 2:
It's mostly very good!
- I'm running Fedora 32 and using Gnome. I love it. Gnome continues to improve a lot with each release, and overall the operating system feels very stable. I can't think of the last time I saw any error.
- This machine doesn't have great battery life regardless of what OS you are running, but after properly configuring the GPU, battery life on linux is on par with Windows if not a bit better. I've also undervolted the cpu, which is easy to do and provides even better batter life.
- I was able to install all the software I needed using a combination of the Fedora rpm repositories, rpmfusion, and flathub. I actually have come to prefer flatpaks over other installation methods for software like bitwarden, spotify, riot, slack, etc. I don't notice the same performance issues I have seen with snaps on Ubuntu. I install Steam from rpmfusion, and am surprised at how nice the linux gaming experience is these days.
There are a few things that are less than stellar, though.
- It takes a little work to get decent battery life because of the nvidia gpu, and the setup isn't perfect. External displays must be run of the discrete gpu, so you can't get them to work if you are just running off the integrated intel chip, which provides the best battery life. In fact, external displays don't work when using "prime offloading" either. You need to set the nvidia gpu as the primary gpu to get external displays to work. What this all adds up to is that I need to change a config value and log out/back in depending on whether I am plugged in to an external display or not. I have a script that does this so it isn't that bad.
Interestingly, with the latest kernel release the nouveau driver is working for my nvidia card and, at least according to powertop, is able to dynamically switch from power-saving to primary mode when an external display is connected. I am also hopeful nvidia will resolve this in the next release.
- Docker is still a pain to set up on 32. There's no docker-ce repo, but you can install from the Fedora 31 repos, and to get it to work some system and firewall configuration is required. This is all pretty well documented in a github issue now, but it took a lot of troubleshooting at first.
That's my experience, and it has improved a lot since the machine first came out and I was running Fedora 30. There were initially several serious firmware bugs which took a long time to get resolved, and the OS/driver support was not nearly as good as it is now. Overall, I would recommend this combo if you need a powerful machine.