I'm writing this from my recently bought Thinkpad X1C7 after moving from a 2015 MPB. Here are some notes about my experience so far:
The hardware is fantastic. Build quality is great, the keyboard is great, the screen is great, the selection of ports is great. It's not cheap though, price is very close to an MBP.
The software part is not so great. I tried Windows for a short while, but it's just a disaster. It's slow and inconsistent. I tried WSL, but it feels so alpha for now.
So quickly I decided to move Ubuntu. Overall Ubuntu feels so much better than Windows, but the caveat is hardware support. Thinkpads supposedly have very good Linux support, however, the microphone and the fingerprint reader didn't work. After googling a lot I found a way of making the mic work by manually compiling a kernel. No solution for the fingerprint reader yet. And the volume controls don't work properly, there are a few workarounds, but none fixes the issue 100%.
Another issue on Linux is that none of the stable web browsers (Firefox, Chrome) have hardware video decoding enabled, so watching YouTube drains your battery. I'm now using a Chromium Beta build which seems to be the only alternative for now.
Using Linux requires you to google and apply a ton of small fixes to make some things better. Things like installing TLP to have decent battery life, hacking grub fonts so that they don't appear tiny on the 4k screen and stuff like that.
The hardware issues are quite frustrating, but I know those will be resolved at some point. My Thinkpad model is fairly new. The lesson here is: if you want Linux to work out of the box on your hardware, don't get the latest model.
On the positive side, I'm really loving Ubuntu and Gnome. I don't have plans to move back to Mac, even if they fix their crappy new keyboards. The fact that you can make Linux work the way you want is very rewarding even if it takes some time to google and hack around. But I understand that not everyone likes to do that.
My advice for people using Linux on a laptop for the first time is to use Fedora - it has the best 'out of the box' support for hardware due to shipping the most recent kernels. With Thinkpads usually everything just works (in my case that included fingerprint reader, keyboard backlight, webcam).
The hardware is fantastic. Build quality is great, the keyboard is great, the screen is great, the selection of ports is great. It's not cheap though, price is very close to an MBP.
The software part is not so great. I tried Windows for a short while, but it's just a disaster. It's slow and inconsistent. I tried WSL, but it feels so alpha for now.
So quickly I decided to move Ubuntu. Overall Ubuntu feels so much better than Windows, but the caveat is hardware support. Thinkpads supposedly have very good Linux support, however, the microphone and the fingerprint reader didn't work. After googling a lot I found a way of making the mic work by manually compiling a kernel. No solution for the fingerprint reader yet. And the volume controls don't work properly, there are a few workarounds, but none fixes the issue 100%.
Another issue on Linux is that none of the stable web browsers (Firefox, Chrome) have hardware video decoding enabled, so watching YouTube drains your battery. I'm now using a Chromium Beta build which seems to be the only alternative for now.
Using Linux requires you to google and apply a ton of small fixes to make some things better. Things like installing TLP to have decent battery life, hacking grub fonts so that they don't appear tiny on the 4k screen and stuff like that.
The hardware issues are quite frustrating, but I know those will be resolved at some point. My Thinkpad model is fairly new. The lesson here is: if you want Linux to work out of the box on your hardware, don't get the latest model.
On the positive side, I'm really loving Ubuntu and Gnome. I don't have plans to move back to Mac, even if they fix their crappy new keyboards. The fact that you can make Linux work the way you want is very rewarding even if it takes some time to google and hack around. But I understand that not everyone likes to do that.