ThinkPad T14 Linux Workstation

I'm starting to like to develop on Linux, instead of on macOS. Only issue I have with Linux is the lack of Adobe support when I have to open any Adobe files. I have a 2018 MacBook Pro but I wanted a new Linux laptop. I've always heard about how wonderful the ThinkPad keyboards were. I really dislike the MacBook's butterfly keyboard and the XPS keyboard isn't great either. Both are chicklet style.

My Dell XPS 13 only has 8gb of ram. Surprisingly I don't really notice the limitation. But I am running Arch Linux on it, which may be why. In my next Linux Developer Laptop I wanted to have at least 16gb of ram, preferably 32gb. The XPS has sodered ram, so what you get is what you get. You cannot upgrade it later. I didn't want to make that mistake again. I also wanted a CPU with more cores. So I decided to go with an AMD Ryzen.

I started doing my research and found that Lenovo now makes a T14 with an AMD Ryzen chip. Lenovo's site had a 3 month wait for the specs I wanted. I wanted at least a 500gb ssd, preferably NVMe. 16gb of ram or better, let's face it the more the merrier :P. I also wanted a Ryzen 5 or 7. Originally I was worried about cooling issues with the Ryzen 7. Since I had read that the T14's predecessor, the ThinkPad T495 had cooling issues. After watching a few reviews I decided to go with the Ryzen 7 version. I looked online for something close to the specs I wanted and found an Amazon listing for a T14 with a 1tb NVMe, 32gb of ram, and a Ryzen 7. The only spec I wasn't a fan of was the touch screen. I would have preferred a non-touch screen. I believe I can swap it out later but it's not really an issue other than battery life. I didn't want to wait 3 months for it to be built by Lenovo, so I purchased it on Amazon and It arrived fairly quickly.

The ThinkPad arrived with Windows 10 installed. I now had to choose what Linux distro to use. I tend to preffer Arch, or Arch based distros like Manjaro. My Dell XPS 13 and desktop PC are both currently running Arch. So Arch was very appealing. But I also like Fedora and Lenovo had just certified Fedora and Ubuntu on their machines. You could now purchase a ThinkPad with Fedora pre-installed. So I decided to give Fedora 33 a try. To my surprise everything just worked. From the touchscreen to the fingerprint reader. Even the firmware updater was flawless. Fedora has done a great job.

I might end up swapping Fedora for Arch on this machine in the future, but for now it just works and I like having both a Fedora and an Arch machine. So far I would recommend the Lenovo ThinkPad T14 to anyone looking for a Laptop to run Linux on.