[bsdubernerd]

In my case, I'm in the need of a new laptop this year, and I'm explicitly waiting for an AMD Ryzen.

I don't even care about the performance to be honest, I'm sure it will be adequate and I simply don't want Intel anymore.

With all the mitigations applied, I've lost the performance gain of the last two Intel laptop generations I had.

The integrated intel gpu is ok performance-wise, but being on linux I'm also tired of their development model: there's a fresh new driver/engine being developed every year, and it always buggy. It's true that intel always gets the latest kernel features first, but by the time is stable and it _works_, it gets deprecated in favor of a new buggy one. Way to go!

I've been using top-of-the-line lenovo laptops for a decade now. This has been the same every year, year after year, and I'm tired.

[richajak]

I would suggest to get another Thinkpad as other brands may not not be tweaked to Thinkpad loyal customers. For me, I always find my Thinkpad is quiet and cool during heavy workload.

As for Ryzen, I just bought their budget laptop, E485 (with Ryzen 2200u+SSD+FHD screen) last year. I was waiting patiently for Thinkpad deal to come, it was worth to wait, as my aging SL410 was still working. It has been matching my expectation so far: affordable, snappy enough, and good battery.

As for Thinkpad models, I find that their budget ones are sufficient for my startup and personal usage, as I do not use enterprise-level features, like those in T series (that I used during my corporate lives).

[bsdubernerd]

Although thinkpads work fine, I attribute this due to the number of developers using them, definitely not because Lenovo is spending ANY money to make it work. This is not how it's supposed to be working. There are a few big issues that are making me reconsider them entirely.

You cannot buy a Lenovo without a Windows license. This is minor considering the price I'm usually going for, but since I don't use it at all, I consider it a microsoft tax.

Their "computrace" bios feature is still there in every new laptop.

With skylake, the last edition of the Yoga and X1 Carbon couldn't do S3 sleep by default anymore. For no other reason than to force windows use S2Idle. It requires a quite annoying work-around on linux to force S3, and only ~6 months ago we finally got a bios patch to re-enable S3...

The temperature throttling defaults are different from linux to windows, causing linux to throttle much more aggressively than needed on skylake. This is also caused by some bios issue which you can work-around with msr registers, but again... why?

I overall like the hardware. I'm quite fond of the built-in wacom pen too. I have minor quibs about the keyboard (QC issues) and screen (all TP I had in the last 5 years tend to develop bright spots in the backlight), but overall it's hard to find something similar. The dell XPS developer line is the only alternative I would be considering, and mostly due to their linux offering.

[bestham]

Where can I read more about these kernel / driver related regressions of each revision?

[bsdubernerd]

These are deaths by a 1000 papercuts, caused by a combination of kernel/kms drivers, xorg & dri. Reporting these bugs is an issue by itself, since it's really non-trivial to understand where some of these problems are and how to report them.

One example I like to give is how for the better part of 2018, xorg+kms with (if I remember correctly) broadwell was new, caused random tearing issues that required to use the legacy i915 driver. The i915 had also other issues at the same time, causing blits in xrender to copy dirty areas of memory. Different issues popped up depending if you were daring enough to switch the dri version, glamour and kernel version.

This got eventually resolved.. but by the time I switched to haswell. Things got better on the kms front, until I realized I couldn't rotate the screen anymore. When this got resolved, the driver couldn't restore the screen after dpms blanking... This one is fixed on skylake, but on haswell still isn't.

... and so on and so forth. All this was on the lenovo x1 carbon (various versions), then on the x1 yoga (1st, and I'm now on the 3rd version).