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Laptops · Lenovo ThinkPad T-series

Lenovo ThinkPad T-series Gen 3 AMD

12owners with an opinion
50%of verdicts positive
3/6positive/negative since 2024
3 yrslongest happy owner
1happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance and reliability; criticized for design and battery.

What owners wrote

Recommends itOwned 1 year
After 13 years on MacBooks, in 2021 I've switched to ThinkPad T14s AMD (1st gen) and I love it. Don't get me wrong, Macs are still very good and reliable machines, but I missed the possibility to run a very minimalistic and very tailored for me OS (especially in terms of GUI choice). Previously, before 'Mac era', I was using FreeBSD, then Gentoo - but now, after 13 years I decided I will use a binary distribution for a while, so I've chosen Void Linux. Now I'm back on Gentoo, but sometimes I think I would like to return to Void - I'm too old and too impatient to compile everything ;-)
Doesn’t like it
> We noted a similar lack of modularity on the Wi-Fi module, where repairs or upgrades will be impractical at best. I'm the current owner of a T14s (gen3 AMD) and the non-replaceable wifi chip has been my biggest pain point with it. I'm somewhat disappointed to see them give this 10/10 score with that problem unresolved. according to lspci it's a Qualcomm QCNFA765 and it works great under Linux...until you suspend the machine. after it wakes up from suspend, it will only stay connected for a few seconds to a minute before dropping the connection and re-establishing it. I've replaced wifi chips in other Thinkpads I've owned, so I naively assumed this would be the same as well - just swapping out the M.2 card. but no such luck, it's soldered in place. I ended up using systemd to rmmod-then-modprobe the ath11k_pci module when the system resumes from sleep. this is annoying because it adds a delay of several extra seconds before the machine is ready to use, but none of the "smaller hammer" workarounds I attempted worked at all.
Doesn’t like it
I had a Thinkpad T480s that was absolutely perfect with Linux (Mint), although very underpowered, but that was due to Intel CPU. This year I got a T14s Gen6 AMD as a replacement, and it's essentially unusable on Debian-based distros (Ubuntu, Mint), but works fine with Fedora and with Windows. On Ubuntu and Mint, X just locks up every 80 seconds or so, and I have to hard-reboot it (or switch ttys and restart X). Nothing in syslog, nothing in dmesg, nothing in X.org.log to show what might be going on.
Likes it
kinda similar experience with my thinkpad t14s gen 2 amd (what a name.) I like framework's philosophy, but there's so many refurbished business laptops out there (many unused) that I like upgrading every few years to a 3-4 yr old laptop. Getting a laptop that's linux certified has been better than I thought, things like sleep and power management "Just Work" whereas on other laptops I'd spend more time configuring TLP or even just hibernating every time because I couldn't get a good sleep experience. Hope this inspires the other manufacturers to work on getting this working out of the box.
Doesn’t like it
My sweet spot is the Wooking X16 - 7840HS/8845HS from taobao in China for ~500usd bad trackpad, bad touchpad (bring your own for both), great thermals/performance, good screen, bad speakers, unbeatable value no usb4 (but has 1x usbc) I refused to get another thinkpad ever since the T14 AMD gen1 firmware debacle where plugging in a Dell usbc dock would cause the entire device to hard reboot their firmware garbage is off-putting I considered framework but the $2k+ price point to me was unreasonable it's literally cheaper for me to carry around the X16 + kb + mouse/trackpad than to buy a framework 16 (I know that's not the point, but still) https://4pda.to/forum/index.php?showtopic=1076401
Doesn’t like it
> As an aside, Lenovo are pretty awesome. These things would be important if they made products that actually work. My T14s Gen 3 AMD simply doesn’t work. Half the time I go to wake it from sleep, the firmware has crashed and I have to hard-reset it. I spent months trying to get Lenovo to fix this. They did replace the motherboard twice (once on-site, once shipped to them) and eventually replaced the entire laptop with a new one. None of this is useful when they can’t make a laptop that doesn’t crash while it sleeps.
Recommends it
I used to be quite cynical about these posts. I used Linux as my main desktop from 1994-2007 and switched to Mac then. I would periodically try on laptops Linux again, but there were always things broken in bad ways. Early this year I bought a ThinkPad T14 Gen 5 AMD. In contrast to when I had a T14 Gen 1 AMD early 2020s, everything just works. All the hardware works, suspend/resume works, all the hardware comes up after a resume, etc. Lately I have been using my ThinkPad much more than my MacBook Pro. NixOS is a superpower to me and having NixOS on a laptop is living the dream.
Likes it
and cpu speed and heat Intel CPUs from that era were quite bad and everyone has upped their ante since then. I was thinking about getting a second hand from ~2021-2022, but my wife convinced me to get a new one, so I got a Gen 5 T14 AMD. It has a Ryzen 7 Pro 8840U and I rarely hear the fans, mostly only when Nix has to rebuild some large packages (running NixOS unstable-small).
Doesn’t like it
The problem is that you pay with battery life. I did some Windows vs Linux laptop battery life testing when I bought my Thinkpad T14s AMD gen4. The test itself is simple: a Puppeteer script that loads the Reddit front page and scrolls it at 50 px/s for 10 minutes, in a loop until the battery dies. This actually produces a fairly decent load including video decoding (because Reddit autoplays by default, and there are plenty videos in the feed). I also had Thunderbird, Discord, and Telegram running in the background. On Windows 11, the battery dies in 500 minutes. On Linux Mint 21.3, it dies in 200 minutes. Now, this is because Chrome (and Firefox!) disable GPU-accelerated rendering by default on Linux due to "unstable drivers". To be fair, it really is unstable - when I enabled it and watched the test as it was going, I saw the Firefox tab in a crashed state more than once. But even then, with Firefox + GPU acceleration, I got 470 minutes of battery life on Windows vs 340 minutes on Linux.
Likes it
I just got Thinkpad T14s Gen4 with AMD chipset and it's brilliant! The chipset works out of the box with great performance and battery (Tested on Arch and Nixos) and the 16:10 OLED semi-matte screen is a must upgrade (better than any other laptop screen on the market imo). My only gripe is the fingerprint magnet body material which is annoying to care for. I'm running nixos and plasma wayland without any issues. Even the fractional scaling works out of the box.
Likes it
I've just bought the 2022 Asus X13 Flow with a Ryzen 9 6900HS and a 3050Ti. I wanted an ultra portable 2-in-1 so I didn't need a tablet and a laptop and because I wanted to travel in 2023. Fedora works very well. I used the instructions on https:///www.asus-linux.com and everything except the fingerprint reader works. I used a ThinkPad T14s AMD Gen 2 before this, and while I loved it, Lenovo is becoming increasingly difficult to order from. I couldn't custom build a 32GB laptop any more, and I found it harder to identify which of their thinkpads I wanted to buy. I love the X13 Flow.
Recommends itHasn’t owned it
geohot: "I want a laptop with a high-end AMD chip, great Linux power management, good docs, solid build, and a normal name" My brother in christ, the ThinkPad T14s Gen 5 AMD exists. Zen 5, aluminum chassis, legendary Linux support, actual power state documentation. They been doing this for 30 years. Dude, you're bikeshedding a product that's been sitting in the enterprise aisle this whole time ThinkPads have been the Linux laptop for decades precisely because of the things he's wishing for. Public ACPI/power management docs, upstream kernel support, and AMD options with sane power profiles. He even admits the ZBook touchpad is fine but fails to acknowledge ThinkPads have had excellent trackpoints + multi-touchpads since forever.