I'm curious, what don't you like about the X1E? I have a Gen 3 and it's super wonky with an external monitor, nvidia + linux seems to still be a mistake.
Battery life isn't great (I occasionally take it out for about 2-2.5 hours which it does manage but a longer duration would probably kill it). Once froze and refused to resume when I tried to put it on standby and I had to do multiple hard resets to somehow make it going again (could be related to S3 config in BIOS) - scared me off to ever try to standby again. Also, I think you are 100% correct on Nvidia + Linux point; I did an upgrade to Nvidia driver version 460 (I think) and it basically made everything so slow that it was unusable. When I tried to downgrade, apt showed that uninstalling the driver would uninstall entire pop-desktop so had to do some hacks to downgrade back to version 450. Thankfully everything works well with that version including multiple external displays so I have locked the version via Synaptic. But yeah, not a great overall experience; someone less experienced with Linux might have (justifiably) given in to frustration and switched to Windows or Mac.
