ThinkPad T14s

[...] I got a Thinkpad T14s 2-in-1 last year from Lenovo, and it shipped with Ubuntu, which made the price around $50 cheaper if I recall. I replaced it with Debian, of course, but the battery life is fine and it is a quiet machine. I also purchased the T14s Snapdragon two years ago, and it gets longer battery life (if you just use a terminal only, the battery life remaining will sometimes say 20 hours, but it's more like 14-15 realistically). However, it can get uncomfortably hot on the left edge at the speaker. [...]

Almost two years ago I bought an opened but never used ThinkPad T14s from eBay very cheaply. It's not too specced but it does the job and it will easily last me 2-3 more years at which point I just buy another one. I see what Framework is doing, and they probably need the support of customers to get the scale of Lenovo/Dell to lower the cost of production.

I've been running Linux on my laptop and on my workstation since the 90's. [...] Fedora Kinoite is my distro of choice, and Lenovo AMD Thinkpad T14s the laptop. [...] Or the general sluggishness of Windows.

I am daily driving ThinkPad T14s Gen3 AMD that I bought off Ebay a year ago. It was opened but new with warranty until 2026 and I only paid for 600 British pounds for it. It is not as repairable as their other models but it has a premium quality build, a modern CPU and full Linux compatibility. It is also the first generation of T14 when they returned 16:10 screens, this aspect ratio is a must for coding. [...]

The Thinkpad T14s 2-in-1 with Intel Core Ultra 5 has great battery life: 10+ hours with moderate usage. [...] Note however, since I've been using my Thinkpad 2-in-1 on battery almost everyday for a year, it is somewhat degraded. upower shows energy-full: 50.61 Wh energy-full-design: 58 Wh But I still get more than 10 hours on a charge.

last time I tried Linux on ARM (a month ago) nothing worked. No sound, no webcam, no USB-C(iirc) and no video hardware acceleration. It was a Thinkpad T14s with Snapdragon Elite X-2 if it matters.

[...] Few paragraphs later they write: 20 hours, Netflix 4K streaming, 250nit brightness, 30% volume, Windows 11. [...] I just bought Thinkpad T14s upgrading from the same model of older generation, I wish Framework would expand its sales coverage, probably would buy it without second thought if it was available in my country without overseas shipping and customs tax hurdles.

I use thinkpad (T14s now, X1 Carbon and X220 in the past). The hard drive is just m.sata and very easy to upgrade. You really can't upgrade the disk on a Mac?

[...] For work I have a Thinkpad T14S (ARM also) and it is a better quality notebook than the Surface book others in my organisation have (those feel like a 95%-ish imitation of Macbooks, the only variations being strict downgrades in their respective areas). [...]

[...] Some people are buying Mac Minis for this, but there's many kinds of old/cheap hardware that works. An old 1U/2U server some company's throwing out with a tech refresh, lots of old RAM, an old GPU off eBay, is pretty perfect. [...] But even my ThinkPad T14s runs local models. [...] don't just buy hardware because you think it's cheaper; cloud models are generally cost effective)

Not 20h of regular laptop usage: The ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 Intel lasted for more than 21 hours in our Wi-Fi test (150 cd/m² brightness). [...]

[...] Very good keyboards too. [...] I'd very gladly sacrifice thinness for a decent keyboard. The Thinkpads had an OK compromise for a while but since the Thinkpad T14s gen2 or so they have been horrible as well. [...]

kinda similar experience with my thinkpad t14s gen 2 amd (what a name.) I like framework's philosophy, but there's so many refurbished business laptops out there (many unused) that I like upgrading every few years to a 3-4 yr old laptop. Getting a laptop that's linux certified has been better than I thought, things like sleep and power management "Just Work" whereas on other laptops I'd spend more time configuring TLP or even just hibernating every time because I couldn't get a good sleep experience. Hope this inspires the other manufacturers to work on getting this working out of the box.

[...] I bought an open box Thinkpad T14s Gen 6 with it - they come with a nicer GPU than the Ultra 7 255U.

I've used basically every Windows on Arm machine - I actually quite like my X Elite ThinkPad T14s Gen6, compared the the X13s - feels like they got everything right, that the X13s got wrong

ThinkPad T14s is silent, keyboard is known as one of the best across all laptops even if it has got thinner. [...] The display I will grant you, it is not as amazing as Apple's. But I'm using my laptop to code not watch movies.

Ordinary folks are going more and more chromebooks these days, those are the "low cost laptops" that are on the shelves at your local bestbuy/curry's/elgiganten etc; For everything more than that: the Macbook Air is equivalent or cheaper. People seem to continue the lie that Apple hardware is more expensive, yet I just closed a deal on a business thinkpad (T14s Gen6) which was double the price and 2/3rds as performant, because we're a Windows shop and we don't buy Apple. Forgive my annoyance here but someone told me that "at least we don't buy expensive Macs" after we signed the invoice and it really got under my skin because it's legitimately half the price for more power. [...] Upgrades might be expensive, sure, but anything of any quality has always been like-for-like with Apple being cheaper on the low-spec end. [...]

We’ve been using X Elite Snapdragon laptops (Thinkpad T14s and Yoga Slim running Ubuntu’s concept images) to build large amounts of ARM software without the need for cross-compiling. The hardware peripheral support isn’t 100% yet (good enough) but I’ve been impressed with the performance. ARM seems to be popular in the server space and it’s nice to see it trickling down to the PC market.

[...] At least it was possible on all EFI computers I owned. [...] That said, I'm using Lenovo Thinkpad T14s Gen4 Intel right now with all keys deleted and my custom key added and it works just fine. [...]

I have a Samsung Galaxy S10e, and a ThinkPad T14s Gen4 (AMD). [...] Every time I search Google on the phone, typing input into the search bar lags for 20 seconds, so badly that the letters randomly jump around in the text box (away from where the cursor is). It happens on the laptop too (to a lesser extent) when I'm on battery with power saving. [...] They blame me for using "old" or "buggy" devices (they're not that old or slow), and blame my internet connection (it's fast and stable). [...] Some weird platform-specific bug? [...] That means not using more resources then you have to, choosing a method that's fast rather than slow, trying to avoid unnecessary steps, etc. [...] But it isn't "premature" to pick a design that isn't bloated and slow. [...] Every year software is more bloated, more buggy. New software is released constantly, but it isn't materially better than what we had decades ago. [...]

Short answer to a pretty broad question: Yes More color: I was happy running Arch on a 2012 vintage Dell Latitude (Intel, integrated graphics) for several years. I'm currently quite happy running Arch on a Lenovo Thinkpad T14s (gen2, AMD, integrated graphics). Arch wiki does have many pages about arch-on-a-particular-model to help once you get a short list of models you're interested in, like this:

I have Lenovo ThinkPad T14s AMD, which always goes to sleep and wakes up just fine. Bluetooth works, it's fast, quiet and has a long battery life. AND I can use Linux, which is a dealbreaker for me as my favorite operating system.

[...] On my "Secured-Core" ARM ThinkPad T14s it's a simple toggle option. Even recently, a Windows updated added a number of Linux distributions to the Secure Boot blacklist, resulting in working dual boot systems being suddenly cripped. [...]

I have Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 3 AMD - it is the best Linux laptop I've ever had. They have 16" laptops too if you prefer this size.

[...] Which translates to the other problem that is battery life on laptops. I did a fairly simple test recently that basically opens Reddit main page in Firefox & Chrome and then scrolls it slowly until battery dies. Running on the same exact hardware - Thinkpad T14s AMD gen4 - the battery life was reduced by 30% on Linux with default settings (= no hardware acceleration in either browser). Manually enabling it means that test cannot complete at all because both browsers randomly crash. And then you look at battery life vs an ARM MacBook, and it's not even funny.

Recently got a ThinkPad T14s gen 4 with top-of-the-line AMD 7840U, 32GB RAM and 512GB SSD, for just a bit over $1k. It has very good build quality, is powerful yet quiet, and has decent battery life. It supports up to 4 displays. [...] Of course, it does not have high-DPI mini LED screen, great speakers or 18 hours of battery life, but none of that really matters, and I'd choose this any day over a similarly speced Macbook Pro 14 that would cost me $2,399.

I just got Thinkpad T14s Gen4 with AMD chipset and it's brilliant! The chipset works out of the box with great performance and battery (Tested on Arch and Nixos) and the 16:10 OLED semi-matte screen is a must upgrade (better than any other laptop screen on the market imo). [...]

Kalie's Macbook died (because I plugged the wrong charger into it and fried the logic board😔), so I bought myself a Thinkpad T14s Gen 2 (32 GB ram, 512 GB ssd) for like $300 off eBay to put Linux on and gonna give her my new-ish Macbook Air. Finally just going full nerd mode in my old age.

ThinkPad T14s Gen6 Snapdragon X Elite. I got a cheap version on ebay.de. [...]

I've had to use a ThinkPad T14s for almost a month now at my new job And just I'm sorry but it's so fucking awful. Every ThinkPad I've ever used from the T42 to the T60 to the T420 to this modern T14s has just been awful I get why ThinkPad fans […] [Original post on social.restless.systems]

[...] Hello Fedora Linux 43 KDE Edition, nice to meet you :-) :fedora: Upgrade on my daily driver (ThinkPad T14s Gen4 AMD) went absolute uneventful. [...]

I got a new laptop PC: ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 Strix Point. [...]

I just bought a Thinkpad T14s a couple of months ago. It’s lightweight, has great build quality. [...] So far, I have had no complaints. If you’re using Linux, the sleep and standby performance aren’t good. [...] Coming to my previous laptop which I still have with me, I bought a Thinkpad L480 in 2018. It was then a dirt cheap version of a Thinkpad. [...] I had to replace the battery after 4 years but that wasn’t an issue. It did everything a daily driver is supposed to do, reliable and never threw a fit. I only had to change it as I felt I needed a better screen and performance. [...]

The problem is that you pay with battery life. I did some Windows vs Linux laptop battery life testing when I bought my Thinkpad T14s AMD gen4. The test itself is simple: a Puppeteer script that loads the Reddit front page and scrolls it at 50 px/s for 10 minutes, in a loop until the battery dies. [...] On Windows 11, the battery dies in 500 minutes. [...] To be fair, it really is unstable - when I enabled it and watched the test as it was going, I saw the Firefox tab in a crashed state more than once. But even then, with Firefox + GPU acceleration, I got 470 minutes of battery life on Windows vs 340 minutes on Linux.

[...] So my experience with Ubuntu and Fedora on a new Thinkpad T14s Gen 3 (AMD) laptop has been a mixed bag. [...] The display flickers due to AMD's variable refresh rate feature (doesn't happen on Windows) - fixing this required a custom kernel with VRR disabled 2. The speakers sounded very quiet and anemic due to the laptop shipping with Dolby Atmos tuning - fixing this in Linux required installing Windows (which supports Atmos), recording a special diff file in Windows Audacity with Atmos tuning on/off and then importing that into PulseAudio on Ubuntu to give it the same speaker tuning profile 3. The trackpad scroll speed was way too fast and Gnome annoyingly offers no way to customize this - the solution is to edit one of the libinput-config files Granted the big stuff like Wifi, Bluetooth, GPU, printing and sleep all worked perfectly - even Steam + Proton worked out the box with games like Arkham Knight and Witcher running as well as Windows but little issues like those three above required a good few hours of tinkering in the command line and make things frustrating enough that I think The Verge author's point stands.

[...] I've been primarily a Linux user for years, but I bought a MBP after my ThinkPad T14s just died and became completely unresponsive in the middle of a work day. The screen is gorgeous, the trackpad is great, the keyboard is decent, but the battery life is incredible. My ThinkPad was advertised to have a 12 hour battery life, but I'd be lucky to get 8. I can go nearly two days without charging my MBP. [...]

I just bought a Thinkpad T14S Gen3 after evaluating a bunch of notebooks. [...] how recessed the USB-C port is and how much strain it can take), audio output quality (Macs have powered headphone jacks for high impedance headphones) and of course speaker quality which on Macs is second to none. The Thinkpad by comparison has poor quality speakers, no ambient light sensor so it doesn't auto adjust the screen or keyboard backlight. Its USB-C ports are also not very strong so the any strain on them or wiggle will cause them to disconnect - they certainly feel very fragile. I hear the Thinkpad Z13/Z16 is more comparable to a Macbook but again it doesn't have little details like an ambient light sensor which seems an odd omission in a luxury laptop and price wise it's practically the same. [...]

i bought a ThinkPad T14s off ebay, the idea is that it'll be a better machine to get through cc with. when i transfer to 4yr college i'll either keep it, or i'll buy a gaming laptop (and keep the ThinkPad too)

[...] What was the Python version you used, and what was the CPU? My runs were on 3.11 on Ryzen 7 Pro 6850U with whatever the TDP envelope is on a Thinkpad T14s.

Running on the same exact hardware - Thinkpad T14s AMD gen4 - the battery life was reduced by 30% on Linux with default settings (= no hardware acceleration in either browser). Manually enabling it means that test cannot complete at all because both browsers randomly crash. [...]