I chose the ThinkPad Z13 Gen1 as my Linux laptop

Which other ThinkPads models use this?

My first laptop was a thinkpad and I grew to love the nub (this was accidental, I had purchased a mouse, but found that I didn't move my fingers to use it unless I was gaming or something like that, much nicer to keep the fingers on the home row).

My point is, on any other laptop you might be right, but the trackpad doesn't matter much on a Thinkpad.

It's funny you mention Sensel. They had a product called Morph, which would have been my penultimate MIDI / OSC controller for music had they not discontinued it. I had no idea they were (primarily) into laptop touchpads, but post factum this does make a lot of sense (no pun intended)

Luckily now there's also Embodme Erae Touch (dropped a couple of months ago), which has an additional benefit of having LED matrix under the surface to provide visual feedback. I haven't tested one though, so it might not turn out to be equivalent to the Morph.

https://www.embodme.com/erae-touch

It's unfortunate that these are the same issues I had 18 years ago.

For context (in case anyone thinks I'm nitpicking and all laptops are horribly supported on Linux): Basically everything works on the Thinkpad X1 Carbon [2], even the latest model (Gen11) as long as you buy the right one (no MIPI webcam).

Unfortunately, Lenovo refuses to put AMD processors in X-series thinkpads (its top-of-the-line laptops).

[2] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Lenovo_ThinkPad_X1_Carbon_(...

I have a ThinkPad Z13 as well[1] and, at least on openSUSE Tumbleweed, there are no suspend issues that I can find. Everything works as it should out of the box.

[1] Two, actually, since my wife has one as well.

Like the other person, I too have a Z13 and don't have any suspend/resume issues on Nobara (a Fedora spin). I can't speak about fan control though, haven't tried messing around with it but the fan seems to work just fine as intended - spins up when needed, quiet otherwise.

P1 Gen3 w/ 4k OLED, best laptop I've had in my life. It gets a bit noisy and hot though.

Liked it so much I bought a 2nd as hot spare. Everything works with Debian stable. Do I wish it was AMD based? Yes. 8C16T + 64GB is still a lot of awesome.

Edit: As a warning, the display is so good you will have to purchase all new displays everywhere else in your life.

It's more manual, but I love that "sudo systemctl hibernate" works reliably on my X1 Carbon Gen6.

As much as I dislike the intel/amd "two party" thing we have now, why AMD when intel is the devil we know?

I realize performance and power and heat can be the concern but ultimately we know how to cripple ME, while the PSP isn't really fully understood yet.

System76 Serval WS - I ordered this and it arrives this week, however there is at least one AMD laptop they offer, again, I believe, with Coreboot and OpenEC.

They all offer this, but the key labels (obviously) don’t change, so it’s still a plus to buy one with the layout that’s “correct” to you.

Lenovo’s choices with U vs. P variants are confusing sometimes. For example, why on earth would you try to cram a hot power hungry P-series CPU into the X1 Nano, a machine with tight size/weight constraints reducing cooling and battery capacity, like they do? Everything about that model screams U series but you can’t build one with that config.

Recently bought an X1 Carbon with a 1270P CPU and had to return it.

In hindsight, the P processor was probably a bad idea, but I assumed if they had it as an option then it would be capable of cooling it. Unfortunately, that was not the case. It was very fast if you only used it for a few minutes from cold, but even just light office use would cause the laptop to warm up until it started to hit thermal throttling, even at only 10%-20% CPU use. Under heavy loads it was even worse, performance dropping to about 20% after 10 mins - equivalent to a desktop CPU from the early 2010s. Sure you don't buy an X1 for building kernels, but you do expect it to be able to handle Zoom screen sharing.

Ultimately, I found that it performed worse under normal usage than the 5 year old X1 Carbon it was intended to replace.

You aren’t wrong, but you can run linux on apple silicon if it’s that important to you.

Ryzen 7000 should be close to Apple Silicon.

The T14 runs at around 9W when the screen is not super bright and you only do light work. I think the Macbook Pro runs at around 6-7W with a similar configuration, which is arguably better. The 16' Macbook also has a much larger battery (almost 100 Wh I think), the Thinkpad has only a 50 Wh battery so it won't last nearly as long on battery. In practice it doesn't bother me much though, not many situations where I have trouble plugging in a charging cable or carrying a powerbank.

Biased perspective, but there are for sure Chromebooks playing in that league. Whether you consider those "Linux laptops" is more of a taste thing. But if you want an all-day battery on a box with a shell and kernel, you can have it.

Maybe, but according to the article Martin is getting 11 hours of battery life. Which is quite good. (I get about 6-8 with my amd 5600 laptop)

7390s have been sub $200 on ebay for the last year or more. They are circa 2019.

Great machine, I'm looking for a replacement currently but the new latitudes have moved the power button onto the keyboard and removed the touchpad buttons.

I also opted for this laptop even as it only has 2 usb-c ports (no other connectors) and even worse no physical mouse buttons. However, this is the first ThinkPad for a long time that has a really good thermal design and good battery life. I am happy. And I actually even find myself using the touch pad from time to time.

I went "mobile workstation" this time around and so I have sockets again, migrating from a desktop and my dead ultrabook...

I can live with having ~1hr battery life (which I can push further anyway) with the way I operate and work...

Everyone I guess has different priorities. My company went remote so I don't have to be in an office or flying around all the time anymore, so I need less battery power.

You seem to know what you're talking about, What is the actual power draw difference of socketed (LPDDR) vs soldered (SO-DIMM) RAM?

As someone with 128GB in my main workstation and 64 in my laptop this soldered RAM trend makes me so sad. RAM is the cheapest way to improve your compute experience and using massive amounts is how I've otherwise been able to make old machines feel nice to use. I have a Lenovo T580 from 2018 and with 64GB it's a fantastic machine 5 years later, but I doubt a machine I buy now will be anywhere as good in 5 years as I won't be able to supercharge its memory to what 2028 would consider obscene for a laptop.

I've been reading up on LPDDR here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LPDDR) but alas it did not have the answers to the power consumption questions I have. Maybe someone here will know:

I am primarily concerned with power consumption when the laptop is asleep and ram is NOT persisted to disk (no hibernation). On a Linux setup in sleep mode, will there be a power consumption difference if you have 32GB vs 16GB of LPDDR but only use say 8GB of memory? If so will it typically dominate the sleep power consumption?

I wish more people were aware that (seemingly now) mid and high end laptops with soldered ram actually have LPDDR RAM, which is faster and uses less power than conventional RAM. It isn't upgradable, but at least it offers those things. That said, there are laptop makers that do solder conventional, could-be-upgradable RAM (like Lenovo, on my ideapad...).

> socketed RAM basically wastes power.

the question is how much power compared to screen and cpu? If its like 4%, then I prefer not to have it.

I don't understand why modern thinkpads are so hyped.

Recently I bought a L14 AMD and it doesn't even come with a decent keyboard or touchpad. The touchpad feels laggy and clunky, there are many of such reports for L14 and T14 models. The built-in keyboard ocassionally gets stuck pressing a key, and the I need to suspend-and-resume to unstuck it.

As you said, usb-c dock problems are a nightmare. Better get a good usb 4 cable with 40 gbps and 100 watts, or else you will spend countless hours doubting if problems are because of the cable. Spoiler: it's not any particular cable, it's the laptop.

For comparison, we use dell latitutes (intel) at work and they just work fine. I wonder if problems are common to all modern thinkpads, or if it only affects AMD models.

You mean an X1 Tablet? The one with the 3000x2000 screen? I found it to be a somewhat disappointing Linux machine. The rear camera does not work, neither the built-in microphone. I was never able to get its GPS working either, after going down quite a rabbit hole with ModemManager. And battery life is awful, but that's not Linux's fault, it just has a tiny battery.

They are rather excellent for the price, however.

I usually have mine plugged in, but when I do run on battery, I get like 4 hours on it running Ubuntu. It doesn't bother me, since I am usually near an outlet anyway. But I suppose it can be better though (I don't really need the dGPU; I only have it because the computer is provided by work.) But, as a "thin" computer, it's pretty decent in that department.

The OEM kernel is available in the repo too, though requires that the kernel in the ISO works enough for your hardware to get to that point. More info about that OEM kernel is available at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/OEMKernel, and worth looking into when you have really new hardware and running slightly older OS releases.

Don't buy Intel at this point. Maybe the Meteor Lake Carbon will be better.

I don't know how to permalink to my other comment, but my experience is the below:

> I got the Z13 as my personal and loved it so much I got the Z16 for work.

> I was very displeased with the quality on the X1 Carbon Gen 9 I had for work before that, felt like a $400 laptop. Just creaky thin plastic everywhere, the click buttons worked 1/10th of the time, awful trackpad. Also the the crtl-alt-fn key placement on the X series is ridiculous.

> basically I wanted macbook-level hardware quality, with easy Linux support (safe for the now-long-gone butterfly keyboard issues) I figured Z series would be the closest thing and it has really delivered.

> I wish there were an in-between size - more screen real estate than the Z13, but not as gigantic and hefty as the Z16.

I have a p1g4 with W10 and it doesn't sleep correctly, either. Hibernate works, but the fans spin in sleep and it will try to cook itself in my backpack.

Not OP, but both suspend and hibernate works fine on my Z13 (on Fedora).

I love my E14 Gen 2. It’s actually sturdier than some of my other ThinkPads and I bought it on a whim with the explicit purpose of running ChromeOS Flex—works flawlessly.

You can just install Linux anyway right?

They lost my business just there

I don't think that's correct. I am in the USA and when I configure it, I can pick windows, Ubuntu, fedora or no preinsalled OS. Funnily enough, Ubuntu option is $25 cheaper than no OS option.

I don't believe this is shipping yet.

Control is supposed to be on the left edge. That way you use the meat of your hand to use the control key, not a finger.

The control key should be the bottom-most, left-most key on the keyboard. It should also be a different size or shape from the FN key so that you can tell it by feel.

Fn should be at the top, FFS.

I can't press Fn and any key on the right side of the keyboard on T440 with one hand and my hands aren't small.

>System76 >starlabs

Have you used a Thinkpad?

The brands you mention do not quite measure up in terms of overall quality.

The TrackPoint is a chain tying me to Thinkpads.

for now the System76 machines are mostly just rebadged (and corebooted) Clevos.

The ones that aren't Clevos are rebadged from other brands.

There are endless complaints about their build quality, keyboard plastic warped and peeling off and just destroyed after a couple years.

System76 is developing their own laptop though, which I will be keeping an eye on

I bought a Tuxedo with one of the first Gen3 AMD processors available, and even though the machine it's mostly OK, the build quality and the battery are terrible. I have a Thinkpad P14s for work which is miles ahead on those fronts.

Has the Linux support for these mixed-core CPUs improved?