Should You Buy a ThinkPad?

Anyone knows a website in Germany that sells these Thinkpads? TIA

My ThinkPad Z13 (aka AMD Carbon) was a piece of garbage: arrived without Fedora fully installed, crashed at least once per week, had GPU and dock and USB and sleep problems, sent back for repairs multiple times. I tried to return it after the multiple failed repairs and they refused. My greatest joy was that insurance covered it being stolen from my apartment in Dublin.

My X1 Carbon Gen 11? Not great. Crashed 7 times in the 9 days I had it. Didn't sleep properly. Ibus and wireplumber would randomly crash. I'd get a glib error if I type an invalid Bash command. I tried Fedora 38 and Kinoite, Ubuntu 22, Debian 12, RHEL 9.2, TUXEDO, Pop, and Tumbleweed. Nobody had the right mix. Red Hat didn't even make it through the installer. Debian overheated rather than suspended when you close the lid. I learned about and trialed all sorts of kernel flags: intel_idle.max_cstate, iommu=pt, Intel_iommu=on, Intel_iommu=pt, usbcore.autosuspend=-1, i915.enable_dc=0, i915.enable_psr=0, acpi.ec_no_wakeup=1, thinkpad_acpi.fan_control=1, acpi_osi, and a few others. Sometimes the 10-second power button shutdown was ignored; you have to use the little reset hole.

I can't even fully blame Lenovo. Their Linux lead puts in a ton of effort to do everything right. BIOS seems to be a major weak point. I'll read BIOS release notes for the laptops I hated, and they'll have a list with e.g. "fixed fingerprint reader problem, fixed hanging after hibernation, fixed hanging after resuming with lid closed, wake now works with any keyboard key instead of just F-keys, fixed issue where computer restarts unexpectedly, fixed overheating while charging, fixed problems related to docking and external monitors, fix sound, fix backlight, fix power profiles, fix slow boot, fixed USB port refusing to charge or enumerate (rarely (yes they actually said rarely in the release notes, this problem affected at least me)), improve lid behavior, fix touchpad ACPI, fix sleep from power button, trackpoint doesn't work if lid closed with suspend disabled (fixed), touchpad stops functioning after restart (fixed), system hangs during Modern Standby (fixed, we hope?), bunch of CVEs, camera shouldn't suck anymore, updated copyright year" This is less than half of the changes and was paraphrased from the actual Z13 release notes.

I mean... G. F-ing D. With so many EC/BIOS problems on nearly every peripheral, I'm baffled that this got released in the first place.

Also, if you're going to sell Linux laptops, at least have Linux support at the service center. On multiple occasions, I got a call, "we ran a Windows USB image, we didn't find any suspend problem."

My X1 Carbon Gen 12? Acceptable. Gets hot easily. Every now and then (twice a month) just stalls, sometimes I can unplug and close the lid and come back later and the OOM killer will finally do its job. I'd put 90 percent of the blame on KDE Plasma and Fedora. I almost blame myself for having too much stuff open at once, but then I recall that "having a lot of work open" generally can be done on older laptops, well-built desktops, and Windows machines.

My X1 Carbon Gen 13? Did not NOT have problems until Ubuntu 26.04. Screen would glitch green, some hardware was unsupported---in particular, wireless---had suspend problems, overly long boot, one CPU would always run at max (gnome-shell at 100% of CPU 0, whole machine at 13%). The biggest problem was learning that full-disk encryption and secure boot don't play nicely with installing the HWE kernel (which I would've needed for the unsupported hardware), requiring a full backup and reinstall while I was trying to start a new project during my probationary period at work. I need Ubuntu for work, and my colleagues were already annoyed that they couldn't find a Legion 5 with ANSI keyboard from a German vendor so that we would all have a common platform. Unfortunately, Rust coreutils and GNOME are still buggy in 26.04 and it affects my workflow, but at least the hardware (finally) works.

Partner's P-series? No problems so far. Coworkers' Legions? no complaints from them. Old-ass X301? Works fine. T480? Nice machine.

Lenovo itself has horrible dark patterns on their website (defaulting to 3-year premium warranty in the EU despite this being an optional upgrade and restoring this default every time you modify the device config from the checkout cart, market-specific pricing and customizations despite all units originating from the same factory such that Linux from another country was a better deal than "No OS" from my own country, basing price decisions on how long you view specific pages). The fact that the website has many glaring bugs (including in the feedback forms to report bugs) is not a great look for a computing company.

My dream machine was the XPS 9370 Developer. Dell went the wrong way for me with the bathroom shower tile keyboard and mostly OLED screens and no more explicit Linux support. If anyone can capture that lightning in a bottle again, I'll buy four.

> same USB C charger that came with your phone

Yeah, you'll need that phone charger for your Lenovo, because the latest few generations of Lenovo chargers break in a way that they'll only charge in one orientation for a while, and then they eventually break completely. Luckily, they do this quickly, so you can replace them under warranty for as long as you're willing to tolerate the issue.

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I choose Lenovo because every other PC laptop (plus quite a few Macs) is/are worse, but I can't call ThinkPads "good"