ThinkPad X1 Nano

[...] Google says your ipad is 1.5 lbs, my thinkpad X1 nano 13" is exactly 2 lbs and does everything iPad does, WITH A KEYBOARD! [...]

This month, my Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Nano G1 turns five years old. It's the longest-serving laptop I've had. While it is slowly showing its age as my demands increase, this machine has seen me through some amazing times. [...]

Three years ago today, I bought the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Nano G1. It survived several trips, a water spillage and more. Still going strong.

[...] The Mac wins regarding battery life (but deltas are shrinking) and - important when on the move - connecting with various WiFi SSDs (this can be quite critical). The Linux ThinkPads win regarding keyboard quality, and hackability (as UNIX/Linux person, I prefer Linux' directory organization to MacOS', which is a mix of BSD and non-standard /proprietary stuff). [...] Until recently, the Mac also won regarding weight, but now with the fantastic ThinkPad X1 Nano there's a high-quality high-mobility device with a great internal keyboard, good batteries and the weight of a feather that runs Ubuntu like a breeze. [...] As a result, it hardly gets used apart from taking photos and scanning documents with its excellent camera. [...]

[...] It’d be particularly nice on ultralights like the ThinkPad X1 Nano or discontinued 12” MacBook.

I have a thinkpad x1 nano, not sure if that is considered old or not. I've ran: Windows, Debian, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD on it and OpenBSD is the one I've gone back to and kept because everything works out of the box (except maybe the fingerprint reader - not sure because I don't use it anyway)

Thinkpad X1 Nano with an intel CPU because I needed Thunderbolt for my setup. I got a matte screen to reduce reflection and added a 5G modem for only $100 more. Highly recommend as a lightweight travel laptop.

It’s not my daily driver but the ThinkPad X1 Nano Gen 1 I use for studying runs Fedora pretty well. Only complaint is that its screen, while otherwise being excellent, requires 150% UI scaling and the only DE I’ve found that handles fractional scaling under Wayland almost fully competently is KDE, which isn’t quite my style. Have read that several Wayland tiling WMs handle fractional scaling well too but those are even less my thing.

[...] Linux it’s more fuzzy, but there are still some ways the macOS experience is a bit smoother once everything is up and running, like dodging the tinkeriness of X11 and awkwardness of the transition from X11 to Wayland… for example, you’ll never see blurry XWayland windows because someone forgot to update Electron. [...] These days I use real Macs alongside a custom built gaming tower running Windows and ThinkPad X1 Nano running Fedora.

Especially because the GPD G1, a new eGPU with an integrated GaN charger is using practically the same GPU as the Framework 16. [...] I am using it to change from the ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 4 to a ThinkPad X1 Nano. The X1E4 is 2kg, I have a third party GaN + SiC charger which is just 330g. The X1 Nano Gen 2 is 970g, the GPD G1 is 920g so the two together is less than the old laptop alone, with a hopefully similar CPU performance and vastly higher GPU performance. [...] Only disadvantage is I can't really game from battery but oh well that was never a goal. [...]

The ThinkPad X1 Nano Gen 2 is lighter (960 grams), and I now often use one for developing when traveling that I had originally intended for giving external presentations (when not traveling, logging in to our 2 TB RAM group server is more fun). I would say the MacBook Air M2 is superior to the X1 Nano in most categories, except (1) weight (it's lighter than my iPad, which since I got the Nano leave at home) and (2) keyboard quality (which is very important to me for working longer periods). Macs cases and screens look more sturdy but when dropped seem to break more easily than the Lenovo cases and screens, despite the latter being made from plastic (sadly, this is reporting from personal experience, sample size N=3).

I've been using the ThinkPad X1 Nano for almost a week now. [...]

[...] Sad to see the @Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Nano go though. The G1 is still my daily driver. [...]

There's a userspace frequency scaler ( that increases my battery life to well beyond what I actually need. I easily get 6-8 hours on my Thinkpad X1 Nano (previous generation). This is not even close to the M series Macbook battery lifes, but works well enough for me. I do not run heavyweight stuff though, but that's with WiFi, cwm/dwm, Emacs, compilers (go, cc) and Chrome. I've had a bit of trouble with Firefox performance, so having to use Chrome has been my biggest hurdle.

[...] My work/personal 16” M1 Pro/Max MBPs can end a day of work in Xcode and/or Android studio with 40-50% battery left. They do this out of the box with zero tweaking and have zero performance difference between plugged in or unplugged (no throttling). My ultraportable (ThinkPad X1 Nano Gen 1) gets 5-7h on a good day with the system set to “power saver” mode, with little difference between Windows and Fedora. [...] The best x86 ultraportable option I’ve seen from current gen offerings is probably the HP Dragonfly G4, which if configured with the 1920x1280 screen and lowest-TDP CPU can manage around 14h which sounds ok, but efficiency still isn’t as good as with the MacBooks because it’s only capable of that with light usage because it has a 16Wh larger battery than a Macbook Air, has a lower resolution display that’s about half as bright, and has to be in power saver mode.

[...] I buy displays that are capable of a clean 1x or 2x when I can, but there’s a ton of laptops that still need fractional scaling. Take my Thinkpad X1 Nano. Great laptop in a lot of ways, including the screen (500 nits brightness, excellent backlight consistency, color, and contrast, no glare) except that it runs at a resolution that requires 1.5x scaling to be usable. Looking at replacement candidate laptops, the only ones that have 2x screens that aren’t a downgrade somehow destroy battery life (e.g. 3000x2000 OLED panel in Dragonfly Elite G4, which docks 3-4h of battery). 1x screens in this category for some reason are all kinda crappy with e.g. [...]

[...] I had been using GNOME on my little “study pod” ThinkPad X1 Nano (which has a screen that requires 1.5x UI scale) but Anki was a real pain under that and so started using KDE instead. [...]

I really want to get to know more distros, and I've been thinking a bit about how to go about this. I found a retired Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Nano Gen 1 that I've had lying unused. The idea I've had is that I'll now use this as my main computer, and switch distros every 3 months.