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Comment by echlebek | Hacker News Reader

Stay away from the X1 Extreme lineup though. Mine is terrible and I would stay away from the entire segment.

To the contrary, do not judge an extremely successful great line of laptops based on the experience of a single person.

I can't wait for the X1 Extreme Gen 4 later this year and I am set to buy one at Black Friday if it comes at a reasonable price. I would even get the P1G4 if the RTX 3070 version can be had for anything even remotely reasonable but I have a bad suspicion it won't be. (4lbs 16" screen 16:10 resolution, two M.2 drives.)

Have you used one of the other ones with Linux?

Oh you are one of those.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17656645

Stop disparaging ThinkPads just because you are a Linux user.

That's what the thread is about. My recommendations are specifically about linux laptops, and why the X1 Extreme was a bad Linux laptop.

Was. Yours, specifically. You didn't even specify a generation. Sigh. These threads. There's always someone.

Can you share more details?

Mine is fine after some tweaking. Main problem is heat and battery life. Esp with the higher resolution displays it can get quite toasty and has 3 hours of usable battery. If you don’t need the GPU get the carbon.

The touchpad is essentially busted. I get about 1s of lag before the cursor starts moving on every touch. I was hoping that improvements to libinput would resolve this but I'm starting to think it's hopeless.

The dGPU is useless with Fedora, my preferred distribution. (nvidia something or other) This isn't Lenovo's fault per se, but an AMD GPU would have Just Worked. The integrated Intel graphics are simply not performant enough to drive the 4K display.

Battery life is abysmal. I get less than 2 hours on a full charge.

The screen arrived with an obvious defect and Lenovo ignored my complaints about it.

The SSD's performance is worse than the one I have in my X1 Carbon, which is older. I find this bizarre and frustrating.

He is using Linux. The problem is not with the machine.

My opinion on laptops and Linux: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17656645

> He is using Linux. The problem is not with the machine.

I get it, I got so frustrated with Linux on laptops* -- one literally set my kitchen table on fire and melted the glass when the fan drivers didn't work -- but, to be fair, this thread IS "A good Linux laptop below 1000 euro".

I don't think there is going to be a perfect Linux on a laptop experience anywhere. The manufacturer-supported Linux variants might be better (dunno, never tried), or a Chromebook, but short of that it's mostly shared components by a few OEMs anyhow.

*Recently bought a Mac, reluctantly, after 30 years of Windows on the desktop and decades of Linux on the server. It's a godsend not having to deal with WSL/Multipass/Docker/Lando etc. just to do some quick dev work AND never having to worry about drivers. The UI is fine, if a bit keyboard-unfriendly compared to Linux and Windows. I don't like Apple as an evil monopolist company, but macOS is admittedly pretty darned nice.

The touchpad doesn't work properly on windows either, and the CPU draws a lot of wattage no matter what OS you use. I would bet on most people having a similar experience between the X1 Extreme and the X1 Carbon, but sure, maybe the design has improved too.

The fact of the matter is that the X1 Extreme suffers the same disease as many other Intel ultrabooks. It doesn't have sufficient heat dissipation for the processor, or battery capacity to service its power hunger. And it comes with synaptics touch pad.

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