Arch Linux is nearly entirely unusable with this Thinkpad, which is a shame since that's my distro of choice usually. I fiddled with drivers for a good while but was getting severe issues hanging with proprietary Nvidia, and Nouveau simply crashed on boot. I'm currently on Fedora, which is one of the few distros that seemed to work without crashing all the time.
Most painless config for me is to enable Nvidia only when I really need it. Say when I need to run a graphic-heavy application I spawn up a new X11 process running atop Nvidia drivers. For daily stuffs, I stick with Intel drivers
I got Arch working fine on a Thinkpad with a GTX 900m series card. I just followed the guide for bumblebee. This was a good number of years ago though, but it still works with updates and all
