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Laptops · Lenovo ThinkPad

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme

16owners with an opinion
60%of verdicts positive
1/4positive/negative since 2024
7 yrslongest happy owner
1happy after 3+ years

Criticized for reliability and software.

What owners wrote

Likes itOwned 7 years
I was given a 2023 Dell XPS 13 for work. I was pretty stoked to go back to an XPS after using one in 2019 for work. For some reason, the MOBO was dying slowly after a year. My other coworkers also reported similar problems. Lenovo-wise: My personal Thinkpad X1 Extreme was a champ for 7+ years, and a few P series I've used over the years since 2021 were also great. At the end, I just built a desktop and use a Macbook Air. So far so good.
Doesn’t like it
I've had the same experience. My IBM ThinkPads had great keyboards. Lenovo modernized them, but introduced a bunch of quality issues. Oh, and I forgot to mention the most annoying issue of all: the TrackPoint still drifts on every modern ThinkPad! This was a big issue on IBM ThinkPads, and Lenovo hasn't bothered to fix it in all this time. I've had it on my 2018 X1 Extreme, and now on this 2025 X1 Carbon. It's enfuriating that such a high profile functionality has such a glaring issue for such a long time. Just shows Lenovo's lack of care and attention for this brand.
Doesn’t like it
My first ThinkPad had terrible battery life. It was a X1 Extreme or something like that, pretty high end but the battery was useless. Even brand new it wouldn't last an hour off leash. Also couldn't use usb-c charging from the monitors at the office, had to be plugged in. Also the Fn key is where the Ctrl key should be, which is endlessly annoying as a user of different laptop brands.
Doesn’t like it
I’ve been using Linux on the same timeline starting with RHEL3, then Gentoo, Ubuntu, and finally ArchLinux and I’ve had to arch-chroot from a live usb several times over the last five years to fix broken upgrades*. It hasn’t been more than an hour detour each time but it’s been far from painless. I just recently had to nuke and pave a Thinkpad X1 extreme to reset KDE/Plasma to a configuration that didn’t crash Plasma randomly or kernel panic when resuming from sleep (power management was especially bad for that old gen1 model until recently and I had to build a custom thermald or something). I’ve still got a problem with a monitor not working after power save - just monitor off, not even computer sleep - until I power cycle it. Some problems are even starting to crop up on my System76 Pangolin. A significant fraction of the software I use is installed through yay’s extra packages which do frequently require building from source so it’s not just a Gentoo thing. It’s far from as seamless (or as limited) as Android/iOS app stores. * and not even half of them can be blamed on NVIDIA
Doesn’t like it
ThinkPad X1 Extreme gen 2. Bought it years ago. Very powerful laptop. Too powerful, it turns out. Burns through its battery so quickly it's basically impossible to use unplugged. At times, it has gotten so hot I burned my fingers on the keyboard. And sometimes it throttles to a truly glacial speed. The 4k OLED screen is gorgeous but eats too much power, and 4k is simply wasted on a 15" screen. On the other hand, it did survive spilling an entire mug of tea over its keyboard without any problems.
Likes it
> what is it VMWare does that VirtualBox doesn't do? For my specific use case, it's display responsiveness. My main work machine is a ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 3. Our development environment is Ubuntu, so when I got the machine our IT guy had helpfully installed Ubuntu on it. There were two major problems though. I could only get my AirPods to pair as headphones, not as a full headset with microphone. And worse, I couldn't get my triple-monitor setup to work at all. (The ThinkPad has a 15" 4K display, and I use two 24" 4K displays with it: one in landscape mode immediately above the ThinkPad display, another in portrait mode to the left.) I could only get two displays out of the three to come up. I did like the hardware quite a lot - I've been a huge ThinkPad fan for 25 years. So I immediately bought a similar machine for personal use. It came with Windows, of course, and both of the above items worked "out of the box". So I looked at the bottom of the work machine and saw that it came with a Windows license. I downloaded the Windows 10 ISO from Lenovo and installed Windows on it, figuring I would run Ubuntu in a VM. I tried VirtualBox first, and it worked, but the display wasn't smooth. For example, I often use the Windows key + left/right arrow to move an Ubuntu window to one side of the display or the other. Ubuntu does a "sliding" animation when you do this, but it looked like it was only refreshing the display every tenth of a second or so. So I tried VMware and it was p
Likes it
My primary work computer is a Thinkpad X1 extreme from 2020. I use it when working from home, as if it were a desktop. I ordered it while I was hyper-irritable from high dose corticosteroids, and to its credit, there's nothing about it that irritates me. It replaced a Razer Stealth from 2017 that was plagued with bios and hardware bugs. I have another work laptop that I carry around when in the office, a Thinkpad P15s from the IT department. Its touchpad's middle click emulation is frustrating, but is otherwise fine. The touchpad is also polished shiny from my fingers, despite very infrequent use. Both ThinkPads are currently running Ubuntu 20.04. It works decently well as long as hybrid graphics are disabled.
Neutral
I don't know about Linux support, as I would use WSL, but I love Samsung laptops that have the S-Pen. It's Wacom EMR tech, which is the best you can get for a stylus and the only place to get it on the PC side that I know of. Other than a standalone Wacom digitizer of course. I also have a Thinkpad X1 Xtreme and it's solid, but nothing to write home about. If going for that, I'd compare (in person) with the latest Dell stuff. Otherwise, I'd go Samsung for me.
Doesn’t like it
It seems to be pretty solid. Compared to the thinkpad extreme, - The xps 17 "feels" more solid and less creaky. It's probably less survivable, but it feels like a higher-quality machine - The wifi seems great, but lately I've been having problems with the microphone. It just stopped working in Windows a week ago, presumably after an update? - The keyboard isn't quite as good as the thinkpad, but the thinkpad extreme's keyboard isn't nearly as good as the keyboard in my old thinkpad t520. Lenovo are hell-bent on gimping their keyboards until they're no better than anyone else's, and reviews suggest that they've finally succeeded with the x1 extreme gen 4. The xps 17 keyboard is nice, but I notice a squeaking noise from the enter and right shift keys when I type. - The xps 17's battery life is a lot better. My thinkpad's battery life was puzzlingly bad, even under windows.
Doesn’t like it
Well, maybe. My Thinkpad experience has been good, but not amazing. I own two Thinkpads, a 5th generation X1 carbon and a 2nd generation X1 extreme. Both very nice machines, but not perfect. On the newer machine in particular, the X1 extreme, I've had many annoying issues. Suspend did not work for over a year after purchase. If the laptop was left with the lid shut it would run out of battery in a couple of hours. It finally started working with Fedora 32. I don't know if it was fixed because of kernel updates or firmware updates. The laptop still uses way too much power when suspended, but at least I can stick it in my laptop bag for a few hours. Until Fedora shipped with Gnome running under Wayland, the integrated graphics were too slow to acceptably render the desktop at 4K, which is the native resolution of the panel, and the only resolution choice I am presented with in Gnome. I enabled the nvidia GPU with the proprietary driver, but then I'd get less than 2 hours of battery, and the thing could cook an egg. Compared to my 2012 Macbook Pro, which also has integrated graphics, the experience is much worse, even today, with Wayland. Battery life is not as good as Windows by default. For some reason, every Linux user with a laptop has to install tlp and powertop just to get decent battery life. Kernel development seems to consistently focus on this, and I'm confident than the situation is incrementally improving. The synaptics touchpad is hot garbage. If you compare it to a
Likes it
I got myself Thinkpad X1 Extreme last year with 16 GB RAM, 256 GB NVME SSD, 8th gen i7 running Linux, so far I'm very satisfied. It can be upgraded fairly easily, I already installed additional 1 TB SSD, and will probably upgrade RAM down the road. On Linux apart from switching between dedicated Nvidia GPU and integrated, everything worked out of the box for me.
Recommends it
I was in a similar place in December 2019. Two main options before me: Dell XPS or the Thinkpad X1 Extreme Both are great machines, but I went for the Thinkpad. Reasons: 1. The near zero bezels of the Dell XPS look great, but I use an external monitor most of the time. 2. Thinkpad keyboards. Enough said. Best in breed. 3. Upgradability. Thinkpads are still one of the most upgradable laptops. Almost every part can be upgraded. 4. Thinkpad aesthetics and military grade hardware testing. 5. I find the build quality of the Thinkpad's better than Dell XPS. Downsides of the Thinkpad is battery life, especially if you go for the 4k version of the screen. With that I get 4 to 6 hours depending on type of usages. Doesn't really bother me though. I find that enough. I'm not a sit in a cafe all day unplugged kind of users. I need my multiple external monitors. Here's an affiliate link to the Thinkpad X1 Extreme: https://amzn.to/2VJr5fr Non affiliate link: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-x/X1-... Linux support you ask? I have a dual boot with Windows 10. The Linux setup is Debian based XFCE desktop. Everything works fine. Bluetooth, HDMI, you name it. Even the Nvidia 1650 works perfect.