[hnbear]

In a previous role at a Macbook only shop one team requiring linux machines got X1 Carbons as they best linux machine generally available and easily supportable.

Through a roughly 5 year period of trying various models they were consistently pretty reliable, and very easy to run Debian or Ubuntu on (our standard linux OS), through multiple OS versions too.

The screens and trackpads definitely weren't Apple quality. Not bad, but switching between my Carbon and my Macbook was pretty jarring. That said, it paired up immediately with my Logitech mouse (MX Master) that I got for it, and it was easy to get the driver to show things like mouse battery in the linux menubar, something macOS won't do for you.

Generally everything just worked out of the box, including things like USB-C charging, which was great to share chargers with the Macbooks.

The biggest issue we consistently faced was TPM support. At least once a year a kernel upgrade would totally bork a couple of machines as the TPM got reset of corrupted, meaning the machines would need to be wiped and rebuilt. After the first people would update and get broken we'd just warn the team to be careful around those updates.