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Comment by 8organicbits | Hacker News Reader

I believe if you are running a ThinkPad designed for Linux, you get a great Linux experience. I've found great Linux support on older ones that only target Windows. What do you think is missing?

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The old ones (ivy bridge) are fine (for that generation). Current ones have regressed on several axes (worse keyboards, trackpads, soldered components), and have not really improved in any meaningful way. They still use poor screens, poor webcams (which are slowly being upgraded now due to macs), no ecc memory etc. Thinkpads are doing the bare minimum, nothing else.

I have a newish X13 and have owned several ThinkPads since the T40. It is the best made machine from them that I've used so far. The keyboard is still good, not as great as the X230 or previous (not full size). The memory is soldered I believe, but harddrive is not. Screen is fine. It is AMD and had a few problems to start with which have ironed out.

I would say, overall, this is an excellent machine for doing work and build quality is excellent. It's a shame that Lenovo have such dubious ethical standards.

I run a Lenovo X1E, which is supposed to be Linux compatible. The Linux experience is bad though. The Lenovo device drivers are just an incomplete buggy mess.

For some reason, people on HN praise Lenovo for Linux compatibility, but in my experience it is quite a bad experience. Yet, every time I bring up this subject, there is someone commenting about how their T430 runs just fine on Linux. Newsflash: the T-series is a 20(!) year old laptop, build by IBM.

Nowadays, the whole 'Linux compatible' thing with Lenovo seems like a marketing afterthought. My X1E is now a couple years old, and yet nobody at Lenovo bothered to provide any fixes for basic stuff like the ACPI driver.

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