The literally first google hit for L14 gen 5 in my filter bubble has a tldr of 'mixed bag'; granted, for an AMD SKU.

Would you recommend an Intel version?

The L series are crap no matter what CPU

i have an E14 for work and its trackpad is garbage

same with the keyboard layout

T and P series are good, X series can be so-so

L and E are Lenovo's entry/low cost models

That "FN" Key placement boggles my mind.

Depending on the model, that's usually swappable with the left CTRL in the UEFI/BIOS settings.

Starting from T14 Gen 5 Ctrl is in the conventional position. On my Gen 3 I swap Ctrl and Fn in the bios.

I manage a fleet of Thinkpads at work, all AMD for the most part.

W11 and AMD has been fun. We had to disaple CPU Power Management in Bios and disable fast reboot as systems would struggle to come out of sleep.

Multiple models had hardware issues, especially E series (which are desktop replacements for us). Many of the T series will have chassis intrusion just trigger constantly and require depot work to fix.

None of these are insurmountable but they cant be ignored. Still doesnt have me going to back to Dell's build quality and Intels heat issues. Most AMD laptops can run on power saver for 98% of our workloads and be fine.

I've got a P14s Gen 5 AMD and am not running into any issues on Linux that I couldn't resolve. Just a sample of one though.

Right. But im supporting these in a business environment with users that arent techy. Windows is basically needed. Privacy isnt even on the radar. And secuirty is handled via companies like crowdstrike.

Yeah I hear you, sounds rough. Any experience with Linux on these devices? Windows BS isn't really an indictment of the hardware running Linux is it?

Hardware generally is great. Biggest complaint is them swapping the fn and ctrl keys, but you can change that in bios.

Most common failure points have been

1. Usb-c going bad on e an l series.

2. Chassis intrusion going off on t x or p series. Which will halt boot and require the user to ack

Got it, thanks. The model I got has the fn and Ctrl keys swapped back to normal. They seem to have gotten the message.

Not the OP, but while my X1 Nano runs Linux beautifully, its CPU and battery life are disappointing and it’s a bit on the slow side when unplugged, because getting what little battery life it’s capable of requires putting it in throttled down low power mode. It also spins up its fan for almost nothing.

I love the form factor, feel, weight, screen, etc… it’s really just the CPU that is ill-fit for the machine. I wish I could swap it out for a low-voltage Ryzen or Snapdragon, which would probably add 4-6 hours of life on the same battery.

This also doesn’t seem to be fixed on the newer Nano’s, which last I knew for some incomprehensible reason make use of higher power Intel Core models instead of the low voltage U-class CPUs that suit it better.