Lenovo ThinkPad P-series P53

Since late 2019 I have been using Lenovo P53 fitted with 128Gb of RAM and RT3000 NVidia GPU. I run Arch on it, I plan to stay on this laptop until something fatally breaks (my guess is it will be SSD, which I will replace) This laptop is more of a mobile workstation, very heavy and bulky. But I don't mind.

6-10 years. But I buy a really advanced laptop to start with. My previous laptop was a Lenovo T410 upgraded to a 2TB hard drive. Bought that in 2010, only replaced about 6 months ago with a Lenovo P53 with 4K screen and a total of 6TB of SSD and 32 gig of RAM.

Battery life optimization on Lenovos often involves installing and activating the correct GPU kernel module. My battery life on my P53 improved measurably after doing this, though installing new kernels involved a small build step. Are you just running with all the defaults?

I recently upgraded to Ubuntu 25.10, and decided to give Wayland another go since X.org isn't installed by default anymore. Good news: My laptop (Lenovo P53) can now suspend / resume successfully. With Ubuntu 25.04 / Wayland it wouldn't resume successfully, which was a deal breaker. Annoying thing: I had a script that I used to organize workspaces using wmctrl, which doesn't work anymore so I had to write a gnome-shell extension. Which (as somebody who's never written a gnome-shell extension before) was quite annoying as I had to keep logging out and in to test it. I got it working eventually but am still grumpy about it. Overall: From my point of view as a user, the switch to Wayland has wasted a lot of my time and has no visible benefits. But, it seems to basically work now and it seems like it's probably the way things are headed. Edit: Actually I've seen some gnome crashes that I think happen when I have mpv running, but I can't say for sure if that's down to Wayland.

I travel with my laptop a lot, but much prefer a beefy workstation for all the work I do when I get where I'm going. The weight of the laptop is not a big deal, even my big Lenovo P53 (~30mm thick 15.6" black brick) is only 3 kg. I do use an Osprey 22L hiking backpack for my daily driver, it's got a waist belt to transfer weight to my hips, a chest strap to keep the shoulder straps together, and internal semi-rigid frame... but that's more for all my other stuff, and for activities I do in the woods far from stuff like 'laptop computers'. Even if it's just in a handheld briefcase, 3 kg is not a lot. That's about as much as a water bottle - which I also have in the backpack, as well as a bunch of miscellaneous stuff that also weighs a few kg. I herniated a disk a couple years ago due to a waterskiing accident, but I've fully recovered and even while dealing with that injury, walking around airports and so forth with any laptop is not not strenuous. In hindsight, I wish I'd gone for the big P73, I miss the giant 17" screen of my old 40mm thick, 3.5 kg Dell Precision... but the OLED on the P53 is beautiful. 17" UHD OLED when, Lenovo?

I'm pleased that the Pro's base memory starts at 16 GB, but surprised they top out at 32 GB: > ...the new MacBook Pro starts with 16GB of faster unified memory with support for up to 32GB, along with 120GB/s of memory bandwidth... I haven't been an Apple user since 2012 when I graduated from college and retired my first computer, a mid-2007 Core2 Duo Macbook Pro, which I'd upgraded with a 2.5" SSD and 6GB of RAM with DDR2 SODIMMs. I switched to Dell Precision and Lenovo P-series workstations with user-upgradeable storage and memory... but I've got 64GB of RAM in the old 2019 Thinkpad P53 I'm using right now. A unified memory space is neat, but is it worth sacrificing that much space? I typically have a VM or two running, and in the host OS and VMs, today's software is hungry for RAM and it's typically cheap and upgradeable outside of the Apple ecosystem.

I'm typing this on the latest Lenovo P53, running Manjaro. Literally every single piece of hardware works out of the box with the default installer - down to the NVidia GPU. This is by far, the best Linux laptop I've owned since I started trying this in the 90s on a Compaq Presario. I'm pleasantly shocked that Linux is finally this stable.

For what it's worth, I have bought many laptops over the years. Acer, Asus, Toshiba, HP, Lenovo. Toshiba were my preference for a long time (mid-90s to about 2010), but lately (the last 12 years) I've been happiest with Lenovo. Having said that, the quest for ever lighter and thinner laptops means that compromises are necessary. My last Lenovo laptop's keyboard is not as pleasant as my 12 year-old Lenovo laptop's, but the screen is phenomenal. I had nothing but grief with several HP laptops. So much so that I put HP laptops on my 'never buy again' list. Acer and Asus were laptops that I quite liked to use, but they weren't as long-lived as the Lenovo. I've probably confused you further with the above comments. Good luck with your choice. My latest Lenovo laptop is the P53 with 32 GB of RAM and a 4K screen. I bought it with a 1GB SSD and I have added a 4GB SSD. I run Linux Mint on it. This laptop is bigger (15-inch) than what I usually buy (14-inch), but it's smaller than one of my HP laptops (17-inch). AFTERTHOUGHT: In many cases, Lenovo allow you to 'customise' your selection, with different screens, different disk sizes, different RAM sizes, etc. That can make a big difference to the amount you spend. I tend to get lots of RAM, and smallish disks which I can upgrade later. I also tend to get high-res screens. I believe there is a 14-inch version of the P53 (maybe a P43 ???).