The laptop BIOS did see updates and now works fine running Cachy, but for over a year it was terible. A whole list of cryptic kerner boot arguments would make it boot, but then touchpad and keyboard issues would remain, and if it ever went to sleep it would hard lock again, not ideal on a laptop. I personally didn’t contact support, but on the official forum there was a thread with a tonne of comments about how support would say Linux is not officially supported on this model and people giving up and returning it. I couldn’t because I ordered from overseas, specifically because I heard Thinkpads worked great with Linux. Needless to say I was royally disappointed. At least it works now, and works better than with Windows.

I don’t care about photos, hardly take any, so can’t give you an exact answer, but I assume self-hosting is the best approach.

At least at launch it was a total mess, Linux would instantly hard freeze at boot time. They did eventually release BIOS updates that fixed them more than a year later, so mine is currently running Cachy, but just google for E484/E585 Linux issues, there’s a tonne of people complaining back in the day, and I was one of those early birds >_<

From what I remember, there was a similar-ish laptop a tier above which had received a BIOS update pretty fast, but even though the symptops were pretty much the same, Lenovo dragged their feet on this one.

The model is important! I had gotten an E series Ryzen gen 1 years ago and the Linux support on it was atrocious! I swore to never buy a Thinkpad again.

This year alone I had to reinstall 3 Windows systems that were failing to work. Then again, my Windows 11 work laptop also seems to work just fine.