I also own a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen11. It's the most expensive laptop I've every owned. I will never buy another one.
Annoyingly but unimportantly, the paint started peeling off in year 1. That's not covered by warranty, according to Lenovo. The battery dropped to 80% in a year. Apparently that's not a warranty issue either.
It now throttles all the time. That's almost certainly due to overheating, possibly because of some fan issue, possibly because the interior of the fan is clogged - but I can't figure out how to get to it to clean it as it looks to require heat sink removal. It does have an absolutely gorgeous 4K OLED screen. Pity the keys rub against it when the lid is closed, leaving a keyboard pattern of scratches in that lovely screen.
It does indeed mostly work well with Linux. Except for the video, that has some funky video routing that both X and Wayland struggle with. The only way I can get it to work is to boot with X using an X display manager, but then flip to Wayland. Staying in X doesn't work, booting in Wayland doesn't work. Apparently that was fixed in GenIII. And while it does work well for Linux, Lenovo refuses to honour the 5 year warranty unless you boot Windows.
I did use ThinkPad's when IBM made them. They were expensive, but they were MacBook'est in quality. That's why I got the X1, but it seems Lenovo bought the name, only.
I would say the X1 Carbon is not a real ThinkPad, and anything with Yoga in the name even less so. His brother's P series should be fine, though. Stick to X (but not X1), T, W, P series, and note that T is the "normal one". Also avoid s variants, e.g. T14s is not the same beast as a T14. Once you've filtered to this point you should rule out a lot of problems with build quality or soldered parts, though even then they don't really make 'em like they used to. Speaking of soldered parts, there was a bit of a dark age where even most of the normal ThinkPads had half or fully soldered RAM, but they're just starting to come back from that. T14 gen 5 is unsoldered, but gens 1 through 3 had soldered RAM, IIRC. Wikipedia has a table you can check for this. So, sadly the used market is gonna be full of the soldered models for a while.
I also own a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen11. It's the most expensive laptop I've every owned. I will never buy another one.
Annoyingly but unimportantly, the paint started peeling off in year 1. That's not covered by warranty, according to Lenovo. The battery dropped to 80% in a year. Apparently that's not a warranty issue either.
It now throttles all the time. That's almost certainly due to overheating, possibly because of some fan issue, possibly because the interior of the fan is clogged - but I can't figure out how to get to it to clean it as it looks to require heat sink removal. It does have an absolutely gorgeous 4K OLED screen. Pity the keys rub against it when the lid is closed, leaving a keyboard pattern of scratches in that lovely screen.
It does indeed mostly work well with Linux. Except for the video, that has some funky video routing that both X and Wayland struggle with. The only way I can get it to work is to boot with X using an X display manager, but then flip to Wayland. Staying in X doesn't work, booting in Wayland doesn't work. Apparently that was fixed in GenIII. And while it does work well for Linux, Lenovo refuses to honour the 5 year warranty unless you boot Windows.
I did use ThinkPad's when IBM made them. They were expensive, but they were MacBook'est in quality. That's why I got the X1, but it seems Lenovo bought the name, only.
I would say the X1 Carbon is not a real ThinkPad, and anything with Yoga in the name even less so. His brother's P series should be fine, though. Stick to X (but not X1), T, W, P series, and note that T is the "normal one". Also avoid s variants, e.g. T14s is not the same beast as a T14. Once you've filtered to this point you should rule out a lot of problems with build quality or soldered parts, though even then they don't really make 'em like they used to. Speaking of soldered parts, there was a bit of a dark age where even most of the normal ThinkPads had half or fully soldered RAM, but they're just starting to come back from that. T14 gen 5 is unsoldered, but gens 1 through 3 had soldered RAM, IIRC. Wikipedia has a table you can check for this. So, sadly the used market is gonna be full of the soldered models for a while.
I'm replying so I can save this comment to share for others.
Why not add it to your favorites list instead?
I got to this point in the article:
“ You may ask why give up a laptop series known for good Linux support and rock-solid build for a brand known for Hinge Problems?”
And i said to myself, ‘yes, i am asking myself that’
Then i read the rest of the article and this ‘why’ question was never answered.
Weird.