I'm going to be honest: I never had any PC problems really until Windows 10 came around. Occasionally windows update would get bonked or I'd hose the machine myself but it was pretty reliable. That's going back to Windows NT 3.51 for me. Since Windows 10, screw it. QA is gone. So many little papercuts it's not worth it any more. I use my two Macs and rarely touch the PC, an HP z620 which has just been a total pile of crap to me really. Nothing but problem after problem.
I have clearly had three bad machines. I've got an X201 and a T440 as well. The Z620 was especially bad, but the X201 and T440 are perfect hardware-wise and existed before the whole windows 10 thing. The software is the main problem.
I'm using an X201 with Win 10 right now. The driver support was significantly better on Linux. With TLP and a lightweight window manager like i3, the battery consumption was miles better than windows. Without Wifi I was able to reduce the consumption to 8-9 W an hour, with wifi it was around 11-12W.
When I first switched back to windows, I was shocked to see the battery consumption being around 22 W. Lenovo's own battery management driver helped a lot. If I'm using firefox nightly I can reduce it to 16-18W an hour.
From my observation it seems to me that windows draws a lot of power when the system under low load, even on battery saver mode. With linux you can tune the battery consumption far better.
Performance-wise, due to Windows background services I experience occasional lags. The anti-malware engine, indexes etc. consume a lot of CPU cycles. The real bottleneck on X201 is the CPU. Due to heavy CPU usage, my laptop sometimes overheats and closes itself. I have only experienced this on Chakra Linux with an unstable version of KDE. Other linux distros and FreeBSD were absolutely fine.
Wifi connectivity was also very problematic. First couple of weeks wifi adapter stopped working everytime after I woke the laptop from sleep.
Now I don't have much to complain besides lags and the mediocre power consumption. Firefox nightly has helped immensely for a fluid browsing experience.
The bottomline is, for x201, if you want stability and performance but a more conservative experience go for linux. If you want a hassle-free cohesive but slower system go for Windows.
PS: Bugs on Windows might stem from X201 being an old machine.
Macs fail often. It's just annoying to hear this myth perpetuated that they never fail. They might fail less than other vendors' laptops, but 'macs never fail' is clearly not true - one simple example is 'staingate'.
They do fail. But when they do it doesn’t disappear into some independent repairers hole for six months and you get a messed up pile of tainted shit back (Acer, Sony, Asus I’m looking at you). I’ve never had a mac or thinkpad break where I haven’t killed it physically and I’ve fixed them myself then.
A little. I think it's been mostly fine. But my point is that he has spent a bunch of time building and optimizing a PC that he would not have had to invest into a pre-built, pre-configured machine. He does it because he finds it fun. His company doesn't want to spend time with that stuff, and they seem to be very happy with the consistency they are getting out of their Macs.