Introduction

13 Jun 2026

Here is a brief summary of hardware:

The build quality is very high, similar to what you would see on an X1 Carbon. The outside of the laptop is matt and it attracts fingerprints, epecially if you have any grease on your fingers.

The OLED screen is an order of magnitude better than what was on my old T450s. Still anti-glare, but with deep, realistic colours. At 150% scale, everything looks sharp.

The keyboard, although different to the one on T450s, is as usually with Lenovo, fantastic to use. Just the right amount of travel and very silent, but with clear and distincive typing feel. This time, Ctrl key is in the bottom left corner, unlike Fn on the older laptops.

This time I opted for a machine with a fingerprint scanner, primarily to speed up boot from the encrypted SSD. Works as intended, with full disk encryption handled completely and transparently in hardware.

Fedora 44

The OS on this machine was installed by copying the existing T450s SSD, running within an external enclosure and attached to the laptop via USB C.

This generation of hardware requires kernel 7.1 to get the sound working. I tested this with a Rawhide 7.1 RC7 kernel. So, to get full functionality, a bit of customisation is required until this release of Fedora switches to stable 7.1 series.

I settled for 150% scale on the Gnome desktop. Everything looks great with this scale factor, at least to my eyes. The screen height to width ratio is different to what was on T450s, which means that more Gnome consoles now fit onto the screen (4) using default settings and traditional Mutter positioning algorithm.