I bought a Carbon X1 in 2015 and it was so awful on Linux that I was grateful to unload the thing for $500 after a couple years (cost $1500). Issues:
* Palm detection. Good luck with that. Constant clicking when typing basically made the machine unusable. I tried really hard to improve it, got deep into X11 config, tried all sorts of libinput (Wayland) setups, nothing worked. Eventually I had to set it up so that typing disabled the trackpad for a half second or so, even that wasn't foolproof. Permanently disabling the trackpad would've been an option if they didn't turn the pointer nub into an unusable little flat disc.
* Display: Awful! I exported a color profile in Windows and it still looked like crap. Low contrast and barely gets as bright at 100% brightness as a MBP at 50%. Colors looked like crap no matter what I did.
* External monitors: Nope. Tried with Unity, KDE, GNOME, Xfce, new distros, old distros, all had issues waking from sleep with an external monitor. So if you suspend with the lid shut, you had to force power off (hold power button), lose work... Oh yea, and I had to manually disable the laptop screen whenever I shut the lid while on an external monitor or else something coming from the display would be seen as trackpad input (haywire cursor).
It was an embarrassingly bad experience and I felt totally ripped off. For comparison, a T43 years ago performed beautifully with pretty much every distro once you got the Atheros wifi working.
So yea, I'm still on a Mac now like everybody else.
* Palm detection: disable the trackpad, use the trackpoint like a boss.
* Display: did you have the WQHD IPS option? Did you calibrate it on Linux using DisplayCal and a calibrator, such as Datacolor Spyder? Mine (T25) is really nice even though it got some negative reviews. Doing a calibration really fixed lots of issues.
* External monitors: I'm using i3-gaps and xrandr setup, but can't really help because most of the time I don't need an external monitor with my laptop.
Linux is such a no-brainer for me as a development OS that there is no going back to OSX or Windows. A tiling window manager, minimal installation of software and the magic combo of Emacs + st + Firefox is a deal braker for me.
* See my note about the trackpoint ... it's sort of terrible now. Matter of taste, granted.
* Yep. Never got good results.
* Yep, the issue was not with display layout (I did configure with arandr and then xrandr directly, but that had more to do with some distros supporting old pre-display config Xfce).
And yep, agreed, that's why I'm just using a desktop tower now. I'm not saying the issues I experienced are truly intractable, but I've been using desktop Linux at a low level for a while now and got to the point where I threw up my hands... ymmv.
Everything up to the 2017 model is very well supported.
A friend of mine has the 2018 model and spent some time getting the touchpad/trackpoint to work (did not work out of the box with Debian unstable). Also there seem to be issues with suspend to ram/disk.
I’d recommend to wait a little while if you want a good out-of-the-box experience.
I have a 5th gen (previous) Thinkpad. Everything works out of the box. Don’t know how the latest fares, though. They’ve jacked up the price a lot. At that price point MBP becomes more attractive IMO.
exceptionally well, the only other comparable manufacturer would be Dell that offers some native Linux/Ubuntu machines. You can expect huge issues with all other vendors.
