Intro

Since my previous workhorse laptop was showing it's age, I had been looking for a replacement for a while. After much deliberation, I got the choice down to 2 options; The Frame.Work 13 with AMD Ryzen and 2.8K display (which is still in pre-order phase), and the Thinkpad T14 AMD Gen5 which can also be had with a 2.8K OLED display.

I've always been a Thinkpad user (at least for the last 20 years), and I've tried out the Frame.Work when some friends had one around, but I keep preferring the Lenovo keyboards and trackpad with buttons (for the trackpoint). The Lenovo also had the advantage of coming with more ports, as it has 2x USB-C, 2x USB-A and seperate UTP, HDMI and Minijack, where the Frame.Work only has the 4 USB-C ports with optional modules for other ports. The Thinkpad was also available directly (built-to-order, but with a 1 week lead-time) and seems to be as repairable as the Frame.Work, and comes with 3-year warranty and on-site service. So the Thinkpad was my choice again this time.

Specs

• Thinkpad T14 AMD Gen 5

• 2.8K Matte OLED

• AMD Ryzen 7 Pro 8840U

• 8GB Ram, but have upgraded this after-market to 64GB DDR5-5600

• 256GB WD-Black SSD, replaced with a 2TB model after-market (m2.2280)

• No OS, which gets you a $60 discount at Lenovo

• Fingerprint reader, Smartcard reader, both seem to 'work'

Installation

Installation of debian 12 went reletively smooth, though I did run into some issues downloading the kernel-package from the updates repository, which seems to have gotten corrupted. This was fixed by doing the installation from a German mirror first, and changing back to deb.debian.org later. For better support I've also enabled the bookworm-backports repository and installed the latest bpo kernel (6.9.7+bpo-amd64) at this time.

Secure-boot and UEFI didn't give me any issues and running with Luks+LVM+XFS also went smooth.

The only hardware related issue I've run into at this time, is the occasional amdgpu crashes (hopefully fixed now) and a hang when connecting to my thunderbolt-dock with attached HDMI monitor. In this case the AMDGPU driver tries to (and fails/hangs) read the EDID information for the HDMI monitor, and this pauses/hangs the entire system unill either the dock or the monitor is disconnected. Sometimes the monitor will be recognised as a 640x480 screen, and the system will continue, but this is quite useless.

For now I've disconnected the 2nd monitor from the dock, and it's connected directly to the HDMI port on the laptop, and there it works fine in 4k 60Hz mode (which is all this Acer KG281K can do).

Software setup

After 20+ years of using Gnome (and mostly Mate/Gnome-Classic the last few years), I've switched over to KDE on this laptop. So far I quite like it, but I've had to make some small tweaks here and there to get it working how I'm used to.

I quite like the KDE-Connect android app, which lets me control the laptop from the phone, This will be nice to use for presentations.

AMD GPU

The amdgpu driver and firmware that came with debian 12 has been giving me some issues, with random crashes of the GPU and wayland drivers, but after a lot off fiddling, it seems to be stable now with the following combination of changes from debian 12 default:

• Install latest backport kernel

• Manually install latest amdgpu firmware from kernel.org mirror

• Add the 'amdgpu.gpu_recovery=1 rtc_cmos.use_acpi_alarm=1' options to the kernel commandline

Weirdness

• The specsheet/ordersheet from Lenovo claims the display is 60Hz, but KDE's display properties will let me choose 120Hz on the internal display.

• Even in idle (with just some browsers running) the fans seem to be running at a quite audible level around 3000rpm, causing a constant wind-noise. For the time being i've propped up the laptop on a stand, which seems to keep it a bit cooler than just standing flat on my desk the entire day.