Really great to read through this. I'm a first-time Thinkpad owner and purchased an X230T [0]. I immediately installed Ubuntu 14.10 and moved all development into virtual machines and things have been fairly smooth. Owning a less svelte machine really doesn't affect me, but the bumps in the road running Ubuntu can get tiresome. Random setting changes after "security" updates e.g. enabling slow keys under accessibility (confusing!). Taking three hours to finally configure a printer and even then, the prints look like they were run through an antique Instagram filter. All in all, hanging out in Firefox and Terminal all day is mostly solid though.