My experience with ThinkPads is the opposite. I found them one of the more practical Linux brands.

Yep, and thing is, if you run RHEL or Fedora or really anything from Red Hat, they have a close collaboration with Lenovo and upstream, so everything Just Works™ out of the box.

I had a Lenovo Thinkpad that was certified for RHEL and used Fedora.

- Battery life was terrible compared to Windows (usually 3-4 hours, compared to 8 on Windows).

- The trackpad/trackpoint would often not come back after resume.

- The fingerprint scanner usually worked 20% of the time (while it always worked on Windows) and when it failed, you had to wait for a long timeout, because there is an issue where when IIRC PAM is performing authentication with one module (fingerprint), it cannot support simultaneous authentication through another method (e.g. password authentication).

- I had a Lenovo USB-C Gen 2 Dock, which worked great on Windows. On Linux, the lanes were misconfigured and HBR3 was not enabled, so it was not possible to use an external 4k screen with 60Hz.

It was the full Linux laptop experience as I remembered it. I decided to buy a Thinkpad after using Macs on the desktop for ~14 years. I had really good experiences with Linux on my Ryzen workstation as a desktop, so I thought it might be time to switch on the laptop again. Now I am fully back in Mac territory and probably won't try Linux on a laptop for at least another 5-10 years.

I could have kept the laptop since Windows worked very well. But my brain is just wired for Unix, so no dice.

In retrospect, I probably shouldn't have used a slogan that is usually associated with Apple to ThinkPads running Linux. FWIW, I was a huge fan of the IBM ThinkPads when they still had the great keyboards. So what happened to me is that I was excited when I heard about the close collaboration RedHat and Lenovo were doing on the P53 series ThinkPads. And if you have a P53 the experience is pretty good. Not sure about other models.

I've installed various Linux distros on many laptops, and even though I could usually get everything working, the deal breaker for me was often battery life. I wonder what kind of battery life the people with RHEL on a P53 are getting.

I didn't use redhat but arch and ubuntu with my T480 and both of these had terrible battery life and heat management. Throttling was a real issue. Probably a fault of intels but still it was annoying to have to fix.

I never really got battery life anywhere close to windows or macos and my T480 has an extended battery which weighs a tonne.