Thinkpad
Hey 👋, two blogposts on the same day? What is this? Xmas and Easter in one?
No just a regular Sunday with wet/cold autumn weather so I don’t want to go outside and don’t what to do things for university either.
Now to the main attraction: my new laptop. Yes, after 6 years of using my Dell XPS 13 9343, I finally bought a new device. A Lenovo Thinkpad P14s Gen 2 AMD.
Review Time ⏳
Here’s a quick review of the device.
Keyboard ⌨️
After using a Thinkpad keyboard for the entire summer, I immediately fell in love with typing on this thing. Maybe that’s why I’m writing longer and longer articles now. This keyboard is the pinnacle of laptop keyboards. There is literally no other laptop out there that has a keyboard this nice. Now every time I have to type something on my XPS I feel sick just thinking back at the 6 years wasted with such an awful typing experience. These super flush keyboards should be banned forever from all laptops. And don’t get me started on how “mAcBoOks hAvE thE BEsT kEYboArd, YoU dOn’T kNoW whAt gOoD iS”. These people don’t know any better because they don’t seen the light ☀️.
For obvious reasons, the paragraph above is a joke. The keyboard is still really nice though.
Chassis 🏎️
The build quality is really nice. I was a bit worried coming from an XPS with the aluminum body, that this laptop would be a downgrade but it’s not. It’s made of some kind of aluminum-magnesium alloy? so its really sturdy.
Performance ⚡
One of the reasons I bought this laptop, is performance. Mine has a
Ryzen 7 Pro 5850.
Here’s some data on the CPU:
In other words: it’s fast. Just look at the PassMark scores:
| CPU | Single | Multi |
|---|---|---|
| Ryzen 7 5850 | 3139 | 19074 |
| Intel i5 6600k | 2334 | 6288 |
| Intel i7 5500u vPro | 1640 | 2726 |
About 3x the performance of my desktop and 7x compared to the XPS. No wonder why running KDE completely sucked the Dell. With all the effects that it has to calculate…
Upgradability 🆙
Yes. I already opened the machine to remove the stupid RealTek WiFi card with an Intel AX-210 that is actually usable. When removing the backplate, just make sure to remove the SIM tray first, otherwise bad things could happen.
There is one empty SO-DIMM slot in the machine that I will fill at some point in the future when I feel that 16GB are to little.
Conclusion ✅
It’s a really nice machine and up until now it was 100% worth buying.
Software
It goes without saying that, as most of my machines, also gets to run Archlinux. I originally wanted to use maximbaz’s dotfiles/installation script but that did not work so I manually installed Arch with BTRFS and disk encryption. My current setup does not have secure boot since I did not jet have the time to read the wiki pages on how to set that up for Archlinux.
As for all the other configuration I plan on making my dotfiles publicly available, once I finished cleaning up everything that I don’t use anymore and created a good/usable setup for the services.
In the end all this config stuff should be available in a single repo that I can just clone on a new machine and have it ready with a minimal amount of effort.
That will take time.
In the mean time take a look at my rice 🍚:
Thx for reading and have a nice day 🙏.