My Thinkpad Woes

Maybe its my fault but my latest hardware purchase a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Extreme Gen4 has been nothing but issues for me. Lets start with the hardware. I thought purchasing a badass laptop with a 4K display, RTX 3070 mobile, a 16:10 aspect ratio, and all the other great aspects that a powerful laptop is known for would translate well into a beast of a machine that can handle anything I give it. Apart from this system not being very often used in the Linux world due to the lack of specific pages specifying what works and what doesn’t, the consensus was always the fact that Lenovo drivers were well supported on most or all Linux distros. If I was running Windows as my daily driver that assumption would reign true, the system would just work. Well…, I don’t want to run Windows nor do I like to use it if I can avoid it.

Firstly, I had owned another Lenovo latptop before and just loved it. It was a Thinkpad W520. This beast of a machine was awesome. It did however have a Nvidia graphics card that caused a few issues with battery and whatnot but you could turn off the graphics card in BIOS and it would just work. The X1 Extreme Gen4 too has a Nvidia graphics card that unfortunately is built-in to the display driver. If you want a second display to work you will need the discrete card turned on in the BIOS.

Secondly, it was found out that a this generation of intel CPU dropped support of S3 hibernation in the Linux kernel. Meaning this machine could not do what a laptop is designed to do which is hibernate when not in use. Sleep Mode worked but after seeing the red light on the Th"i"nkpad lit up constantly while the lid was closed pulled at my relitively mild OCD and annoyed me.

Thirdly, the laptop would flat-out not work on certain distros. My distro of choice is the meme one Arch BTW, and I tried it several different ways. Installing from scratch is always my preferred way but I could never get the WiFi to work right and throttling the CPU was basically out of the question. I hopped over to Manjaro and EndeavorOS which both great distros based on Arch, which offer lots for driver support in the kernel, and I even installed all three distros with the LTS and Zen kernels but none offered any difference in performance. I settled on Pop_OS! and when I mean settled I mean it in the harshest terms, but I digress. The system worked OK in Pop_OS!, but it still didn’t work how I have had other laptops work in the past in regards to hibernation and sleep.

Fourthly, the laptop gets very hot! :fire: :fire: :fire: Having it on you lap is like placing several McDonalds coffees on your laptop and maybe even then still a little hotter. The system will game very well but I now know why they went with a carbon fiber case which incidentally has more flex and seems more flimsy than aluminum or similar bodies but also retain much more heat than a carbon fiber case will.

The moral of the story is when running Linux on devices you might need to do a lot more research to see if the device you are wanting to use will run how you expect it to run. I currently have it running Windows 10 where everything works on it but because of this I only use it in the most rarest of cases.