I’ve had the opportunity to try out another new laptop at work. I’ve used a brand new laptop recently, and it was horrible.

But this time I’m pleasantly surprised.

The Lenovo ThinkPad P14s gen 4 has great specs:

I have used it for about a month at work, and so far I have not noticed anything outright broken about it. The Fedora Linux 39 installation that I copied over from the previous laptop (Dell Latitude 5411) simply works, no modifications required. The CPU is blazing fast. The GPU driver does not crash. No issues with Wi-Fi or Bluetooth so far. USB-C docks and monitors that I have just work. The webcam is also functional and has an acceptable image quality for meetings. CPU and GPU temperature data is present with lm-sensors.

The build quality is what you’d expect from a modern ThinkPad: better than consumer-grade crap, but not as solid as a ThinkPad T430. The case has a soft-feeling light gray finish to it, which will likely look horrible after a few years of use.

The battery life is not great: don’t expect to last a full 8-hour work day on battery with this thing. It’s been years since Apple has released Apple Silicon laptops with great battery life and somehow the rest of the industry still hasn’t caught up.

The fan has a really annoying high-pitched whine to it. You only hear it when pushing the CPU hard, like you’d do when compiling a legacy Java monolith, but in a quiet room it’s really annoying. I’m not even sure that the fan has to be run that hard, the AMD Ryzen CPU inside is very efficient and can regulate its power consumption based on the current temperature. You can tweak the fan curve on this laptop with a basic script.

I haven’t tried functionality that I don’t use myself, such as the fingerprint reader, so I cannot comment on that.

This laptop can also play games. I took an external SSD, installed Bazzite on it (GNOME + gamemode version), set everything up, and installed Forza Horizon 4 on it. It runs, and for an integrated GPU surprisingly well. I could push the game to run with medium-high settings on the internal 1920x1200 display at a solid 60 FPS, with very rare dips below it. That’s even better than what I got with the Steam Deck, and the CPU running near the 5 GHz mark certainly contributed to it. This makes the laptop a great candidate for a LAN party after work, unless you favor more demanding games, in which case you might want to temper your expectations a little bit.

It’s the first time that I’ve had a brand new laptop that just works on Linux. Hats off to the FOSS community for making this happen, AMD for getting their act together, and Lenovo for not completely fucking it up this time.