Are you running macOS on your thinkpads? Do you have details on how to do so? Super curious if that’s the case.
Since Catalina randomly decided to destroy access to about 1/3rd of my software (I rely on old-school music plugins that won’t be updated) - I’m gonna link you here to the Mojave tool: http://dosdude1.com/mojave/
This is not my tool, it does require a Mac to use, in order to create the USB boot key you put in your PC.
I have successfully patched about a dozen ThinkPads and Dell computers with this.
Due to the ThinkPad’s popularity - support for virtually every unit that can support it hardware-wise exists. If you have any issues, there’s a great community around it, and personally, after patching, I don’t even worry about .x upgrades anymore and leave auto-update on - that’s how far it’s come.
I literally prefer the Lenovo to the Apple hardware.
And be prepared to swap your WiFi card, intel cards are unsupported, so are nvidia graphics.
Is there a workaround (replaceable card?), or does running Mac OS mean you can't use discrete graphics (which is a major degradation)?
https://github.com/mighildotcom/X230-Hackintosh is the guide i followed, it is very x230 specific, but should give you a good idea of the overall process.
Very occasionally I'll have a slight issue with resume from sleep, but otherwise pretty much everything just works. You will need to buy a new wifi card, and depending which you want to use may need to reflash a modified bios to get rid of the whitelist.