It seems to me this would be a function of available alternatives more than anything else. Some Lenovo products, as best I can tell, make for excellent Linux machines. What are the alternatives if that's your criteria? There are alternatives which might be acceptable depending on your other requirements for hardware, form factor, price, or geographic availability. But for some subset of requirements, Lenovo is still going to be the best option by a wide margin which is going to push someone to making that tradeoff. I don't think it's a function of time.

edit: "some Lenovo products"