I always viewed the think pad line as more of a business line of products. I know it isn’t owned by IBM anymore, but considering how much involvement they had with Redhat, you might have better luck trying a fedora based distro. I’m running fedora Fedora 40 beta plasma and it was basically install and start working.
At the time (a couple of years ago), I tried a Dell… Precision? laptop, but it had a different cell modem in it (I was just starting my interest in cellular computers) and my provider AT&T locked it to an utter shit plan where I could pay like $45 for 15gb of data with overage fees per month, fuuuuuck that. I was searching for one that would be bound to their ‘tablet’ plans, as they got unlimited data for $20 (this is a business account, not consumer). AT&T offered the TP X13 Gen 2 Intel from them, that was guaranteed tied to the unlimited plan, with 0% financing, so I jumped. It is my first TP, but an ex has an older TP and had mostly positive things to say about it. And the modem (and antenna?) gets blazing fast speeds, like 400-500Mb/s. But that’s why I have the TP, it’s a “business” line for my (families) business.
I tried Fedora last year but again couldn’t get the X55 modem to work, which was frustrating. Information about it in the X13 is scarce since it wasn’t offered with Linux officially afaik, and you either got it early and Ubu or something ‘just worked’ with it out of the box, or you had to compile the driver from source for some reason (I don’t remember but they yanked the driver from newer releases I think). I guess at some point it was re-added but again nobody talks about this machine and it’s WWAN card so I got super lucky to find that one Debian 13 info page.
While I’ve played with Fedora briefly when I was distros hopping to see what worked last year (and before that), and the ex had it on his TP, I don’t actually know what the difference is vs Debian-based systems, since I try to stick with that as it’s what I started on and know/am comfortable with. All I know is its based (?) on RHEL. Care to give me a tl;dr major differences?
I always viewed the think pad line as more of a business line of products. I know it isn’t owned by IBM anymore, but considering how much involvement they had with Redhat, you might have better luck trying a fedora based distro. I’m running fedora Fedora 40 beta plasma and it was basically install and start working.
At the time (a couple of years ago), I tried a Dell… Precision? laptop, but it had a different cell modem in it (I was just starting my interest in cellular computers) and my provider AT&T locked it to an utter shit plan where I could pay like $45 for 15gb of data with overage fees per month, fuuuuuck that. I was searching for one that would be bound to their ‘tablet’ plans, as they got unlimited data for $20 (this is a business account, not consumer). AT&T offered the TP X13 Gen 2 Intel from them, that was guaranteed tied to the unlimited plan, with 0% financing, so I jumped. It is my first TP, but an ex has an older TP and had mostly positive things to say about it. And the modem (and antenna?) gets blazing fast speeds, like 400-500Mb/s. But that’s why I have the TP, it’s a “business” line for my (families) business.
I tried Fedora last year but again couldn’t get the X55 modem to work, which was frustrating. Information about it in the X13 is scarce since it wasn’t offered with Linux officially afaik, and you either got it early and Ubu or something ‘just worked’ with it out of the box, or you had to compile the driver from source for some reason (I don’t remember but they yanked the driver from newer releases I think). I guess at some point it was re-added but again nobody talks about this machine and it’s WWAN card so I got super lucky to find that one Debian 13 info page.
While I’ve played with Fedora briefly when I was distros hopping to see what worked last year (and before that), and the ex had it on his TP, I don’t actually know what the difference is vs Debian-based systems, since I try to stick with that as it’s what I started on and know/am comfortable with. All I know is its based (?) on RHEL. Care to give me a tl;dr major differences?