It's weird. I own two Thinkpads, a "golden era" model with the 7-row keyboard (x201) as well as a newer Skylake model (T460s). The difference between the two is noticeable, but not as much as people make it out to be. The older model feels like a really solidly built device, and the performance is surprisingly good while running Linux. It idles on the hot side (little less than 40c no matter what you're running), but CPU usage is low even on high-bloat desktop environments like KDE. Without anything running in the background, CPU usage stays below 2%, which kinda blows my mind for a machine pushing a decade old. The newer model I have is much the same way, but it's thinner and idles at a much more reasonable temp (28-30c). Frankly, I think they're both fine. The new keyboards aren't mind-blowing, but I'd still put them leagues beyond Dell and Apple's offerings these days. I'd frankly recommend either of them, as long as you can find one without a TN panel. The other advice I'd give is to not buy directly from Lenovo, since their prices are all over the place and tend to screw you over if you don't do your due diligence.
I mean, I use KDE Plasma on many of my devices. I'm pretty familiar with it's resource footprint, and while it's certainly better than it used to be, it's still on the high-end of resource usage when compared with it's contemporaries. It's gotten much better at memory management, but there's a considerable amount of latency and cruft surrounding the menus and dialogues the system uses. On every system I've ever used, krunner takes ~600ms to boot launch, menus have a good 200ms of lead-time and activity switching can be 1500ms+ on the right configuration. XFCE still feels faster to me, but maybe it's a hardware thing.
How did you measure all these latencies? Anecdotally , KDE on my OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is pretty fast on both new Ryzen and very old Intel laptops. Maybe something is wrong/buggy on your setup.
Yep, Best Buy and Amazon are both solid first-party retailers. I don't really buy Thinkpads new-in-box anymore, but from what I've seen, Lenovo's pricing is insanely inconsistent.
While not directly in the Thinkpad name, I have an older X1 Carbon (4th Gen) that has worked really well for me. Extensive travelling, multiple drops, etc. Thing still is solid. Runs Debian really well.
I have only ever owned Thinkpads (until the carbon) and I don't see any reason I would personally switch back to Thinkpad version. Carbons are so small and perfect for my usage.
I use a thinkpad chromebook using chromeos but because this is the high end thinkpad chromebook I run android studio and other linux desktop apps. It has a beautiful keyboard and amazing build quality. But I use linux apps on chrome rather than a desktop linux distro.
I have an X1 Carbon (6th or 7th gen, I forget) and I love it. I've handled dozens of other laptops and tried out loads at shops and nothing else feels as good to me. It ticks so many boxes for me:
- Dual boots Arch and Windows perfectly, never had issues.
- Several years old but still faster than I need with the i7, NVMe SSD and 16 GB memory.
- Soft plastic non metallic feel, doesn't get too hot or cold, fan only rarely comes on and it's way quieter than pre M1 MacBooks
- Feels like the lightest performance laptop I've ever used.
- The PERFECT laptop keyboard. Love the travel, love the dim click, love the positioning of every key, love the dedicated home, end, page up, page down, delete keys. Love the physical left, middle and right click buttons and of course the nipple for comedy factor (however the trackpad obviously sucks relative to MacBooks).
- Lid opens and closes easily.
- Perfect connectivity options, two USB C (PD, Thunderbolt, ethernet), 2/3 USB A, HDMI, microSD, SD.
- Matte screen.
- Physical camera slider.
I understand the latest X1 Carbons have most if not all of these features.
> Perfect connectivity options, two USB C (PD, Thunderbolt, ethernet), 2/3 USB A, HDMI, microSD, SD.
I miss USB-A ports on MacBooks. Every indication is I'll still miss them in 2025. Perhaps by 2030 it will seem like an OK choice.
I don't miss dedicated Thunderbolt ports, whatever those were called. Like they had on 2015 and earlier MacBooks. Replacing those with thunderbolt-capable USB-C ports is absolutely an improvement, and the right call for Thinkpads, too.
I'll just second everything said here. I have the same setup, mine is 2 years old, I think it's gen 7 maybe 8. I can't add anything else said here. It's solid.
Same here. I've gotten a lot of mileage out of my 7th generation X1C. Perhaps more than any laptop I've previously owned. I've had no problems with it whatsoever. I've been running Ubuntu on it since the day it arrived.
I’ve got a 6th gen and also absolutely love it. Also dual booting Linux/windows (95% use Linux) and it’s never let me down. Everything “just works” and I treat it like crap yet it keeps trudging along.
> I understand the latest X1 Carbons have most if not all of these features.
Definitely not all of them. They key travel and (I think) keyboard size have been reduced recently, Ethernet adapter is no longer included, matte option is only available for cheaper low-resolution screen options.
Since all laptop manufacturers are heavily influenced by trends set by Apple, I really hope that recent changes to MacBook Pro (bigger dimensions, more weight, return of old keyboard design) will make Lenovo reconsider in their mindless pursuit of kneecapping their designs to shave off some additional 30 grams of weight.
The cooling on the P51 is what sold it to me. I have a maxed out one with the quadro and everything, it's my photo editing and now DAW laptop. It's really nice to be able to work on it for an hour or more and know that I'm not going to loose 50% or my computing power while working on Ableton and have to stop until it cools down because I have too many plugins running.
Got it a year ago for 2500 and I'm a bit on the fence about having gotten it, it's a great computer but the new M1 Mac would smoke it and I prefer MacOS to Windows.
I have a T480 as my daily driver, my kids are using my old X220 and I still have an X60s around to experiment. I really like all of them.
Interestingly, my son, 14, told me, even after using desktops at school, the Mac we have at home and probably some other computers with friends, that the best keyboard is from the X220. I am never talking about the quality of the keyboards, this was the first time we discussed about it as he just told me that out of the blue.
At risk of sounding overly subjective, I've got an external Thinkpad USB keyboard with Trackpoint - the 2012 SK-8855 model - which is basically the X220 keyboard.
It is hands down the best keyboard experience I've ever had (and I've owned plenty, including mechanical boards, most recently the Logitech G915 TKL).
Sadly my backspace key is misfiring and it's beginning to show its age. Which really saddens me. I wish I bought several of these when they were still available. Now even second hand models are difficult to come by.
I have a brand new X1 extreme through work. The on-board sounds crackles and the on-board mic was broken for MONTHS awaiting a software fix from Lenovo that only corrected the mic issue. That is to say…no.
Zen 3 APU based ones are really good like T14 Gen 2 AMD. I wish though AMD would have started using RDNA 2 there instead of Vega GPUs. So for example no AV1 hardware decoder yet. For that we'd need to wait until Zen 4 APUs probably.
For Linux, make sure to replace the Mediatek WiFi horror with an Intel WiFi card.
And also get the correct one, since Lenovo has some fishy blacklists for WiFi cards. You can search for non blacklisted part codes here (narrow it down by your laptop model):
T14 gen2 is now shipping with a realtek wifi card that won't have mainline linux support until the next kernel (5.16) ships.
The main problem with the T14 is that the screens are either bad or horrifically bad, and you don't know what one you get until it arrives. The 400nit low power screens are more like a 30hz panel for the best one (~30ms grey to grey (g2g), and PWM so it causes headaches and eyestrain), or ~14hz for the worst one (74ms g2g! It's feels as slow as an eink screen.)
They're not actually using the Innolux display this year sadly, only the AUO and BOE panels (which both have awful ghosting). Once you know what to look for (or feel, since bad ghosting gives me headaches and eyestrain :/), it becomes obvious.
I'm not sure which exact 4k panel(s) Lenovo is shipping with the T14 this year. From what notebookcheck has tested, the P14 4k panel they had was pretty good (still a bit slow, but usable, and no PWM), while the X1 carbon 4k panel they got was unusable (fast enough, but 200hz PWM so basically guarantees that it'll cause headaches).
I think you need an oscilloscope and some other tools if you want to test what the PWM frequency is. The easiest way to check for PWM is to just look up reviews for laptops using the same panel (you can find the panel number using hwinfo on Windows). To just test for if your display has PWM, lower the brightness, and use the blurbusters test: https://www.testufo.com/blurtrail
Whats the problem with Mediateks? Thinking about getting bunch of P41s amd gen 1's for work but intel wifi is not available because chip shortag so it's either realtek or mediatek.
Lagging upstream support. Something is coming in 5.16 from what I've heard. Intel on the other hand support their WiFi in a timely fashion and their drivers are pretty solid. I simply made myself a rule to only use Intel WiFi becasue of so many problems with other drivers in the past even if the do exist. Save yourself the trouble and frustration.
> Intel wifi is not available because chip shortag so it's either realtek or mediatek.
They are not that hard to buy as a separate part. I bought one recently to replace this Mediatek chip.
I've been using two Thinkpad Extreme X1's for awhile now. I have a first-gen I use for personal programming projects and gaming and a second gen one that I use for work.
In my opinion, they're wonderful. I dual boot both of them. The process was simply shrinking the Windows partition using the built in Windows utility and then installing Linux into the free space. I don't have any issues with the system sleeping or not waking up. I haven't really messed with hibernation though since I haven't been very mobile the past two years or so.
The hybrid graphics work fine too, with one caveat. External displays require Nvidia mode, and mode switching can only be done with an X11 server restart. Hybrid mode has much better battery life but doesn't support external displays. My work laptop is generally plugged into 3 external displays so I keep it in Nvidia mode.
I haven't tried Wayland, so I have no idea how well it works vs X11.
I got a new P14sand it managed to die within the year, after a ton of power management issues where it just would not shut down or wake up.
As far as I can tell the board is completely dead. Hours of fiddling with the power button and trying anything I found online, but it doesn’t turn on anymore.
I just replaced a thinkpad x1 extreme gen 2 with a dell xps 17 (I wanted a 16:10 screen and shipping estimates for the x1 extreme gen 4 were ridiculous. Also, Lenovo of Canada are a bunch of dirty crooks).
The thinkpad was pretty good, and wayland on fedora worked beautifully (I only used integrated graphics in linux, didn't even try to get the discrete gpu working). The one thing that really didn't work in linux was the fingerprint scanner - it would fail about 7/8 times I used it, which is really too bad because fedora has really nice fingerprint integration with sudo.
Also, something seemed to be a bit funny about it's displayport implementation - when it was connected to my DP monitor and went to sleep, the monitor would wake it back up again almost instantly and it would get into this weird back-and-forth between sleep mode and waking. That happened in both linux and windows. This doesn't happen with my new xps.
Otherwise it was pretty smooth sailing. It was a well-built computer with a nice keyboard. I might get another thinkpad at some point, but I'm loving this super-compact 17" 16:10 display on the xps.
Tangentially related: How is XPS 17 doing? I've been pondering the idea of getting one, but have been scared away by some internet reputation (like not working sound, unstable wifi, etc.) Would love to hear second opinions like yours.
It seems to be pretty solid. Compared to the thinkpad extreme,
- The xps 17 "feels" more solid and less creaky. It's probably less survivable, but it feels like a higher-quality machine
- The wifi seems great, but lately I've been having problems with the microphone. It just stopped working in Windows a week ago, presumably after an update?
- The keyboard isn't quite as good as the thinkpad, but the thinkpad extreme's keyboard isn't nearly as good as the keyboard in my old thinkpad t520. Lenovo are hell-bent on gimping their keyboards until they're no better than anyone else's, and reviews suggest that they've finally succeeded with the x1 extreme gen 4. The xps 17 keyboard is nice, but I notice a squeaking noise from the enter and right shift keys when I type.
- The xps 17's battery life is a lot better. My thinkpad's battery life was puzzlingly bad, even under windows.
I had a p15 at a job a few years ago. I was onboarding on this large .NET project that had like a day of environment setup just to get it running.
After going through the grueling setup I couldn't get the damn thing to start and the errors were coming from some random windows service that I couldn't see referenced anywhere.
Fortunately I was on onboarding with another person and they had the exact same problem, so it wasn't just something I was doing wrong.
Two days worth of googling and fumbling around I figured out we were the first to get the updated model of the laptop everyone else was using and the dolby surround drivers that came with the new version were killing some windows messaging service used by some database feature.
A hard pass on Lenovo stuff after that experience, drivers breaking core OS services is not something I'd call a professional device. Who the hell buys a P15 for Dolby Atmos support anyway ? It could have no speakers included and be equally good for the intended use case.
I'm writing this from a P14s Gen1 (AMD) and it works great on Fedora 35 and that includes the fingerprint reader. It obviously works great on Windows but I don't use that.
They are worse than they used to be, but the bar is so low in the market that they are still among the best. My gripes are entirely with reliability.
I have had many issues with mine (Carbon X1 G6, then G7), all due to bad firmware, which lenovo swapped out the mainboard 5 times trying to fix. They also keep making the keyboard shittier on the X1, but then don't let you choose a good display on a larger model (at least in Aus when I was looking, but I know there is some variability in what is available where and when)
Have a look at frame.work laptops to see if that might suit you. I have never used them, but they look great. The major manufacturers seem to be on a treadmill, pumping out half-finished unreliable garbage to keep up with industry trends.
From the limited surveys etc I could find online, all windows laptops have roughly twice the failure rate of macs. As best I could determine, It seems you have about 1 in 5 chance of major failure from lenovo/dell etc. and about 1/10 chance from apple (from memory, could be 1/10 vs 1/20). Major failure being something that requires the device to be serviced or sent back, not necessarily a show stopping issue.
Get on-site servicing when its offered because it doesn't cost much and there is a good chance you will need to use it.
Thinkpads are generally better than Acer. That said:
1. Modular build is non existent. With new thinkpads you can’t even remove the battery. That sucks.
2. Cooling. A lot of their new models seem to have been modeled to be as thin as possible and then some, so there's no space for cooling. CPU/GPU throttling was unheard of from that brand for a long time and is no longer the case.
3. Warranty. Depending on where you are in the world you'll get very different attitude towards respecting warranty. As some have pointed out it can get pretty bad.
4. Linux support is mostly ok except for NVidia/primus/optirun shenanigans.
The current generation of ThinkPads are fairly easy to open up to replace ram and battery but the outer shell is much flimsier than Mac’s. There is an over reliance on the ‘roll cage’ for structural integrity and the area near the trackpad is easily deformed and warped by a spudger.
It depends. I'm a Linux user and my recent experiences are with two devices:
1. T470p - Out of the box it had a couple dead pixels, and the right click physical button to match the red nub had a hair trigger - I ended up disabling the nub entirely in BIOS so that I could type without triggering it. I also regularly (daily?) suffered video driver crashes. I don't know if it was faulty hardware or something with the i915 driver, but I think the former since my new device doesn't have this issue and others with the T470p didn't experience it. The battery life wasn't great either, which was surprising since it was one of the chunky-battery models. I hated this machine.
2. X1 Carbon (9th gen) - Works almost perfectly with very little fiddling. I do occasionally still have some brief issues with the Intel graphics causing freezes (both in Firefox and Zoom), but nothing like the crashes I saw before and everything just works. Plus it supports a USB-C dock that allows me to drive two monitors, connect my mouse and keyboard, and charge the laptop all with a single cable. Thin, light, with great battery life too.
I had a terrible experience with Lenovo. In October 2020 I ordered a laptop. In the next couple of months I called and tried to cancel (they would put in a "cancellation request"). Additionally, they sent an email saying the regulation required that since it hadn't shipped, if it still hadn't shipped in 5 days they would have to cancel the order. A few weeks later, it shipped and I had UPS "return to sender" before it even arrived at my apartment. It was returned to the address Lenovo put as the return address.
Paypal refunded me the money after reviewing the case, but I'm now fighting a debt collector for the ~1k USD.
I firmly believe Thinkpads are the best mainstream Linux laptops you can buy.
I have a 2nd gen P1 with a 4k OLED screen, 9400H, dual nvme SSDs and 64gb of decent RAM. It is the best laptop I've ever owned.
Dual booting Fedora ever since I've owned it, with 95% Fedora / 5% Windows split. Never a hiccup, perfect thermals, extremely servicable, tough as hell, best keyboard ever.
note that on many of the new thinkpads, the exhaust vent is on the right side. if you are right handed and use a mouse, it will blow hot air directly onto your hand.
I have an x13 gen 2, it’s just ok. 2 annoyances, I find the led next to the power button too bright and ctrl and fn are swapped and I hate it, I swapped them back in bios but now the labels are wrong.
It runs Ubuntu fine and feels sturdy. Keyboard feels good, but I don’t like those two touchpad buttons integrated into the pad, it feels cheap to bend the pad itself.
I've had a Lenovo x1 carbon (latest gen) earlier this year for work - hardware compatibility for linux is good, didn't really like the typing experience and the touchpad is imo awful.
For my personal laptop, I have Arch (Manjaro) on a 13" xps 9130, and wouldn't trade it for anything. Screen is beautiful, keyboard is the best I've ever used (including new m1 macbooks), touchpad is fantastic - It's the perfect little laptop, imo.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 151 ms ] threadWhich KDE is that and how exactly is it "high bloat"?
Definitely not Plasma. Modern KDE is very resource efficient, even giving XFCE a run for its money.
Turn off animations.
I have only ever owned Thinkpads (until the carbon) and I don't see any reason I would personally switch back to Thinkpad version. Carbons are so small and perfect for my usage.
- Dual boots Arch and Windows perfectly, never had issues.
- Several years old but still faster than I need with the i7, NVMe SSD and 16 GB memory.
- Soft plastic non metallic feel, doesn't get too hot or cold, fan only rarely comes on and it's way quieter than pre M1 MacBooks
- Feels like the lightest performance laptop I've ever used.
- The PERFECT laptop keyboard. Love the travel, love the dim click, love the positioning of every key, love the dedicated home, end, page up, page down, delete keys. Love the physical left, middle and right click buttons and of course the nipple for comedy factor (however the trackpad obviously sucks relative to MacBooks).
- Lid opens and closes easily.
- Perfect connectivity options, two USB C (PD, Thunderbolt, ethernet), 2/3 USB A, HDMI, microSD, SD.
- Matte screen.
- Physical camera slider.
I understand the latest X1 Carbons have most if not all of these features.
I miss USB-A ports on MacBooks. Every indication is I'll still miss them in 2025. Perhaps by 2030 it will seem like an OK choice.
I don't miss dedicated Thunderbolt ports, whatever those were called. Like they had on 2015 and earlier MacBooks. Replacing those with thunderbolt-capable USB-C ports is absolutely an improvement, and the right call for Thinkpads, too.
I'd rather see laptops get rid of HDMI ports and put in more USB-C ports instead.
I have a X1 Carbon 5th gen and it's awesome. No issues at all running Fedora and Windows. I'll likely buy the newest version next year to replace it.
Otherwise, its been very good. I used this guide to set up the dual boot with https://www.mikekasberg.com/blog/2020/04/08/dual-boot-ubuntu..., with some small changes because that is a dell machine.
I have the UHD display and the type is a bit small, but the scaling works well.
The only thing that is a little flaky is the fingerprint reader. The battery, with Ubuntu, is not great, but fine for my uses.
It’s the only non-Apple laptop I’ve ever loved.
Definitely not all of them. They key travel and (I think) keyboard size have been reduced recently, Ethernet adapter is no longer included, matte option is only available for cheaper low-resolution screen options.
Since all laptop manufacturers are heavily influenced by trends set by Apple, I really hope that recent changes to MacBook Pro (bigger dimensions, more weight, return of old keyboard design) will make Lenovo reconsider in their mindless pursuit of kneecapping their designs to shave off some additional 30 grams of weight.
Got it a year ago for 2500 and I'm a bit on the fence about having gotten it, it's a great computer but the new M1 Mac would smoke it and I prefer MacOS to Windows.
Interestingly, my son, 14, told me, even after using desktops at school, the Mac we have at home and probably some other computers with friends, that the best keyboard is from the X220. I am never talking about the quality of the keyboards, this was the first time we discussed about it as he just told me that out of the blue.
At risk of sounding overly subjective, I've got an external Thinkpad USB keyboard with Trackpoint - the 2012 SK-8855 model - which is basically the X220 keyboard.
It is hands down the best keyboard experience I've ever had (and I've owned plenty, including mechanical boards, most recently the Logitech G915 TKL).
Sadly my backspace key is misfiring and it's beginning to show its age. Which really saddens me. I wish I bought several of these when they were still available. Now even second hand models are difficult to come by.
For Linux, make sure to replace the Mediatek WiFi horror with an Intel WiFi card.
And also get the correct one, since Lenovo has some fishy blacklists for WiFi cards. You can search for non blacklisted part codes here (narrow it down by your laptop model):
https://pcsupport.lenovo.com/us/en/products/laptops-and-netb...
Other recent gotcha I had, if you are replacing the NVMe SSD too to something better than the stock one, make sure to buy a 0.5 mm thermal pad for it.
Another thing, in the UEFI change the suspend setting from Windows to Linux.
The main problem with the T14 is that the screens are either bad or horrifically bad, and you don't know what one you get until it arrives. The 400nit low power screens are more like a 30hz panel for the best one (~30ms grey to grey (g2g), and PWM so it causes headaches and eyestrain), or ~14hz for the worst one (74ms g2g! It's feels as slow as an eink screen.)
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-s-Panel-Lottery-continu...
I also replaced the SSD with 1 TB SK Hynix Gold P31.
I think my screen is 400 nit but I haven't really noticed major issues with it. I didn't do a lot of testing though.
They're not actually using the Innolux display this year sadly, only the AUO and BOE panels (which both have awful ghosting). Once you know what to look for (or feel, since bad ghosting gives me headaches and eyestrain :/), it becomes obvious.
Good article on PWM: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Why-Pulse-Width-Modulation-PWM...
I think you need an oscilloscope and some other tools if you want to test what the PWM frequency is. The easiest way to check for PWM is to just look up reviews for laptops using the same panel (you can find the panel number using hwinfo on Windows). To just test for if your display has PWM, lower the brightness, and use the blurbusters test: https://www.testufo.com/blurtrail
No 5750g so no ECC.
> Intel wifi is not available because chip shortag so it's either realtek or mediatek.
They are not that hard to buy as a separate part. I bought one recently to replace this Mediatek chip.
In my opinion, they're wonderful. I dual boot both of them. The process was simply shrinking the Windows partition using the built in Windows utility and then installing Linux into the free space. I don't have any issues with the system sleeping or not waking up. I haven't really messed with hibernation though since I haven't been very mobile the past two years or so.
The hybrid graphics work fine too, with one caveat. External displays require Nvidia mode, and mode switching can only be done with an X11 server restart. Hybrid mode has much better battery life but doesn't support external displays. My work laptop is generally plugged into 3 external displays so I keep it in Nvidia mode.
I haven't tried Wayland, so I have no idea how well it works vs X11.
As far as I can tell the board is completely dead. Hours of fiddling with the power button and trying anything I found online, but it doesn’t turn on anymore.
The thinkpad was pretty good, and wayland on fedora worked beautifully (I only used integrated graphics in linux, didn't even try to get the discrete gpu working). The one thing that really didn't work in linux was the fingerprint scanner - it would fail about 7/8 times I used it, which is really too bad because fedora has really nice fingerprint integration with sudo.
Also, something seemed to be a bit funny about it's displayport implementation - when it was connected to my DP monitor and went to sleep, the monitor would wake it back up again almost instantly and it would get into this weird back-and-forth between sleep mode and waking. That happened in both linux and windows. This doesn't happen with my new xps.
Otherwise it was pretty smooth sailing. It was a well-built computer with a nice keyboard. I might get another thinkpad at some point, but I'm loving this super-compact 17" 16:10 display on the xps.
- The xps 17 "feels" more solid and less creaky. It's probably less survivable, but it feels like a higher-quality machine
- The wifi seems great, but lately I've been having problems with the microphone. It just stopped working in Windows a week ago, presumably after an update?
- The keyboard isn't quite as good as the thinkpad, but the thinkpad extreme's keyboard isn't nearly as good as the keyboard in my old thinkpad t520. Lenovo are hell-bent on gimping their keyboards until they're no better than anyone else's, and reviews suggest that they've finally succeeded with the x1 extreme gen 4. The xps 17 keyboard is nice, but I notice a squeaking noise from the enter and right shift keys when I type.
- The xps 17's battery life is a lot better. My thinkpad's battery life was puzzlingly bad, even under windows.
After going through the grueling setup I couldn't get the damn thing to start and the errors were coming from some random windows service that I couldn't see referenced anywhere.
Fortunately I was on onboarding with another person and they had the exact same problem, so it wasn't just something I was doing wrong.
Two days worth of googling and fumbling around I figured out we were the first to get the updated model of the laptop everyone else was using and the dolby surround drivers that came with the new version were killing some windows messaging service used by some database feature.
A hard pass on Lenovo stuff after that experience, drivers breaking core OS services is not something I'd call a professional device. Who the hell buys a P15 for Dolby Atmos support anyway ? It could have no speakers included and be equally good for the intended use case.
There's a reason I stay away from these machines.
[0] https://www.cisa.gov/uscert/ncas/alerts/TA15-051A
I have had many issues with mine (Carbon X1 G6, then G7), all due to bad firmware, which lenovo swapped out the mainboard 5 times trying to fix. They also keep making the keyboard shittier on the X1, but then don't let you choose a good display on a larger model (at least in Aus when I was looking, but I know there is some variability in what is available where and when)
Have a look at frame.work laptops to see if that might suit you. I have never used them, but they look great. The major manufacturers seem to be on a treadmill, pumping out half-finished unreliable garbage to keep up with industry trends.
From the limited surveys etc I could find online, all windows laptops have roughly twice the failure rate of macs. As best I could determine, It seems you have about 1 in 5 chance of major failure from lenovo/dell etc. and about 1/10 chance from apple (from memory, could be 1/10 vs 1/20). Major failure being something that requires the device to be serviced or sent back, not necessarily a show stopping issue.
Get on-site servicing when its offered because it doesn't cost much and there is a good chance you will need to use it.
1. T470p - Out of the box it had a couple dead pixels, and the right click physical button to match the red nub had a hair trigger - I ended up disabling the nub entirely in BIOS so that I could type without triggering it. I also regularly (daily?) suffered video driver crashes. I don't know if it was faulty hardware or something with the i915 driver, but I think the former since my new device doesn't have this issue and others with the T470p didn't experience it. The battery life wasn't great either, which was surprising since it was one of the chunky-battery models. I hated this machine.
2. X1 Carbon (9th gen) - Works almost perfectly with very little fiddling. I do occasionally still have some brief issues with the Intel graphics causing freezes (both in Firefox and Zoom), but nothing like the crashes I saw before and everything just works. Plus it supports a USB-C dock that allows me to drive two monitors, connect my mouse and keyboard, and charge the laptop all with a single cable. Thin, light, with great battery life too.
Paypal refunded me the money after reviewing the case, but I'm now fighting a debt collector for the ~1k USD.
I have a 2nd gen P1 with a 4k OLED screen, 9400H, dual nvme SSDs and 64gb of decent RAM. It is the best laptop I've ever owned.
Dual booting Fedora ever since I've owned it, with 95% Fedora / 5% Windows split. Never a hiccup, perfect thermals, extremely servicable, tough as hell, best keyboard ever.
It runs Ubuntu fine and feels sturdy. Keyboard feels good, but I don’t like those two touchpad buttons integrated into the pad, it feels cheap to bend the pad itself.
For my personal laptop, I have Arch (Manjaro) on a 13" xps 9130, and wouldn't trade it for anything. Screen is beautiful, keyboard is the best I've ever used (including new m1 macbooks), touchpad is fantastic - It's the perfect little laptop, imo.