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Comment by wfleming | Hacker News Reader

Lenovo is selling several of the new T series Thinkpads with Ryzen chips. IHMO something like the T14s is pretty comparable to an XPS, but I don't know what your evaluation criteria are, and I have a personal preference for Thinkpads, so I'm biased.

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I just got my T14s that I customized with 32GB, Ryzen 4750u (8c/16t), and the 400nit display (sadly lost the display lottery, but I didn't notice until I checked the part#). However, it took 60+ days to ship as I ordered it Sep 1st. I suppose the shortage of the Ryzen chips mean long delays for Lenovo laptops which are customized as opposed to the preconfigured variants. All of the preconfigured ones had the 250nit screen and 8-16GB however.

I just received my similarly spec'd T14s AMD yesterday. I opted for the low power, high NIT screen as well. How do you check if you got a good screen?

I first checked which panels were the good ones here: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-s-Panel-Lottery-continu..., which indicates Innolux is the panel to get. Then I went to https://support.lenovo.com/ie/en/partslookup and punched in my serial number, located near the bar code on the bottom of the laptop. From the "Parts" tab select the "Commodity Type" as "LCD PANELS" and you should see something like "FRUofAUO14.0FHDIPSAG" indicating I get the "AUO" manufactured LCD panel. If you are particular about getting the Innolux, you can use the substitutes button to figure out the lenovo replacement part number for the desired LCD Panel. For the Innolux on the T14s, it could be ordered here: https://lenovo.encompass.com/item/12401836/Lenovo/01YN156/, but it seems to be currently out of stock.

Thanks for the links. Looks like I also got the AUO display (FRUofAUO14.0FHDIPSAG).

Edit: looks like you can get the Innolux on eBay for around $100 (shipped direct from China). Might have to consider that.

Yes. I have the X13 which is quite similar to the T14s (just smaller) with the same processor/ram and I'm quite happy. Best keyboard I've had on a laptop. Does suspend to ram/suspend to disk/hibernate work you for you though? Using Manjaro on 5.9 kernel and X, and most things work out of the box well enough for my purposes except for suspend/hibernate and I can't find any info online for how to fix it completely.

Added "idle=nomwait amd_iommu=off resume=<swap UUID>" kernel params and this seems to sometimes work but usually not...

And what is your battery life? I get ~5 hrs (up to 6.5hrs with most processes disabled except firefox), with around 6-8 watts discharge rate (using powertop --auto-tune).

Typical trials and tribulations of new hardware with linux. I was thinking of trying out Fedora/Ubuntu/Pop_OS to see how they are.

Totally agree about the keyboard and processor/ram. Originally thought about getting the X13, but I recall the screens options weren't that good, and I prefer the larger size and bigger battery anyways.

As for Linux, I fully intended to dual boot Arch and Windows. Due to circumstance, I am stuck with a tiny 128GB NVMe and so I am using the default Windows for now. I've been watching this playlist of a user installing Arch on their T14s to help prep me on some of the quirks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihFPynCqfzc&list=PLiKgVPlhUN.... I hope that helps answer some of your questions.

Yeah, for what it's worth--I also am dual booting Windows (solely for games, wine isn't worth the trouble) and I've had absolutely no problems with it. In fact, it's buttery smooth with every game I've tried it on (CK3, Noita, Synthetik, Kenshi, Factorio, etc.).

The lenovo x13, which comes in intel or amd variants, is closer to the XPS13. I have the prior generation x395 running pop_os and it's fantastic.

The T14s is great, but just needs a 16:10 screen. The new X1 Nano has that and is my ideal form factor, but it’s still Intel only.

Thanks for the suggestion, I'm looking at those, but it looks like they have 8 gigs of soldered RAM. I'd like my next laptop to be a bit more futureproof than that, especially with all the electron apps popping everywhere. My current laptop is 7 years old with 8 gigs of RAM, and sometimes it has to swap and starts choking up, when I try to open too many things at once.

You can upgrade it to 32gb, but it's soldered and non-upgradable unlike the regular T14.

Thanks for the hint. I will take a look about it.

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