Converting a Pristine Thinkpad to a Linux Laptop was a Ride

A Rough Start

Just a couple hours after unboxing my brand new Lenovo, it was booting to a blue screen. Something called “BitLocker” was asking for a recovery key.

The USB flashed with Ubuntu threw kernel errors. GPT-5 hallucinated that Linux Mint would work better with Lenovo hardware, but the newly flashed USB drive didn’t produce any message at all, not even an error. Things were tense.

While things turned out well, and there was some rare bad luck involved, I still can’t help feeling that this process was harder than it should have been given how easy and pleasant actually using Linux is. Yes, it will be obvious that I am not a hardware guy. Still, there are pitfalls I can share that will be helpful here beyond what the best AIs will provide out of the box. If you’re planning on putting Linux on a brand new Windows machine, jump right down to Lessons Learned and get those insights right now. If you want to read more about the experience, including why I went with a new Lenovo over modern options such as Framework and System76 after its own rocky history, keep reading. This case study also doubles as informal and unintentional test of GPT-5 for hardware support, where it failed miserably.

The Ups and Downs of Being a Lenovo Enthusiast

Lenovo and I have had a rocky past. In my earliest jobs, I always had Lenovo laptops at work. They were slowed down by corporate software but still liked them, and after practicing figure-8s with the trackpad, I felt somehow especially competent with them. When I was between jobs in 2015, I bought my first Thinkpad for personal use, a used T520 from eBay for just over $300 ($408 in 2025 money). The system info said the BIOS was first booted up in 2011, and the thing is still working great, VGA port and all.

Therefore, when I spent over $2,000 in 2019 ($2,520 in 2025 money) for a stacked T-570, I expected excellence. I did not receive excellence, and for a long time I was frustrated by that.

Ok, maybe the last one was my fault. And, to be fair, the 2019 T-570 machine still works, and it has been 6 years. However, with 32 GB of RAM, it feels sluggish and perhaps even slower than the T520 with 8 GB RAM.

The machine got off to a rough start as well. Less than 3 months after I bought it, I woke up to see a fatal blue-screened. I lost in progress work, had to put it in a box and ship it away, and the repair time was a leisurely 6 weeks. That time the hard drive was deemed faulty and needed to be replaced, but a few years later it blue-screened again whereby a clean reinstall of Windows alone was able to push it limping its way along to the present. Even the trusty rubber Trackpoint wore down until it barely worked, and then one day it just fell off. What is going on here?

That NVIDIA MX250 GPU upgrade was an insult to injury. It was only $150 but I thought, “better to have an NVIDIA GPU than not.” Strangely enough, even for training neural networks, it was nothing but a liability. If I was ever training a model and it was going 10 times slower than it should be, I needed to switch to CPU immediately because that stupid thing was trying to compute a gradient. What’s crazier to me is that, having this second GPU chip, the T570 still can’t run two external screens while its own display is active.

I want a real Linux laptop

When my 2019 Lenovo started to die, I wanted two things: 1) a break from Lenovo, and 2) a true Linux laptop. Yes, I wanted a real Linux laptop. Not the Ubuntu app on Windows. Not the macOS terminal app. Not a Docker container. A real Linux laptop.

I have my reasons, though they are very tuned to my needs and I don’t think they’d be particularly relatable if I wrote about them. You’ll know if you have yours. So Linux it is, and Lenovo it isn’t. I just needed a starting point for the investigation.

Framework Linux Laptops

I asked my mutuals on X for some advice, where the always helpful Bruno Rodrigues introduced me to Framework.

So I specked out a middle of the line Framework laptop, where you can see the price before tax is a little under $1,600 pre tax. If you don’t want to pay for Windows (not in the price below, nor is a charger), then you need to go with the “DIY Edition” which comes with a “T5 screwdriver,” which you will need to vigorously use. Only then can you experience the simple pleasure of booting from Linux without ever seeing Windows.

Most online accounts of the experience with Framework are positive, but there were some comments that bothered me. For instance, one Redditor said that “Framework is like a local bistro where you go because you like the audience and the owner is your friend. Probably not the best deal and probably not the best food.”

That was not what I was going for. Also, the thought of using that T5 Screwdriver to put together the computer piece by piece just didn’t sound fun. And I had to be honest with myself that I was an unlikely candidate for ever upgrading my laptop once it was put together. For a tinkerer at heart, that sounds like a place where someone could really enjoy their Framework.

System76 Linux Laptops

Enter System76. Apparently they’re going for the Mac experience for Linux laptop enjoyers where “it just works.” They even have their own distro called Pop!_OS 22.04. These machines are fairly pricey (I actually do think the price cut in the picture is real, because I don’t remember seeing it), but I did include the upgrades below that might have pushed it beyond an apples-to-apples comparison (e.g., a processor upgrade from the Ultra 7 from the Ultra 5 and the 40 GB of RAM vs 24 GB). But that price is with no charger, which would be another $75.

Even if the machine is more powerful than the framework equivalent, it still felt pretty expensive. More concerning, though, were comments on Reddit that the build quality of System76 might not be great. Maybe they’re employees of Framework. I just wasn’t ready to take the leap.

Linux Laptops on eBay

Similar to my T520, There are also previous generation Lenovo models with Ubuntu preinstalled on eBay for downright cheap prices. I assume such a purchase experience would be similar to mine in 2015. (The reviews are excellent for these sellers.) I really thought about this. But in the end, as I spend a third of my life on a computer, I decided I should spend the money on something new. And I only recently learned that CPUs did not in fact plateau in 2010 and stop getting faster. While gains have slowed, the equivalent CPU today is much faster than one from even 2019.

Lenovo started looking better and better

After more and more research, for the price point, a Lenovo just kept looking better and better as a dedicated Linux laptop. Gemini assured me that the hardware would run Linux without issue, and I remembered my days at Google (over a decade ago now) where almost all the serious engineers were running Ubuntu on a Thinkpad. (One engineer saw my Thinkpad assigned by the HR department and asked, with amused disbelief, “is that Windows?”) Plus, I love that Trackpoint and keyboard.

I made my decision: a ThinkPad T14 Gen 6 AMD with a 14" screen. Processor upgrade to the Ryzen 7. The other specs as shown below.

Though it’s not the point of the article, I’ll take a minute to justify these choices. First, there’s no GPU, just integrated graphics. While I am a data scientist, I get what I need from a good CPU, and, if I really need to train something big, there are options for that. A 14" screen might seem like a step backward from the large T5xx screens, and I think this one is lower in terms of resolution too, but I made sure to specifically choose a low power option. Over the years, I’ve realized that when you’re actually using a laptop away from home, the two things that matter (aside from performance) are how bulky it is to carry around and the battery life. The 512 GB of disk is half of what I put in the 2019 Lenovo. Last I looked, I was up about 320 GB after 6 years, even with Windows bloatware.

Though the machine looks small in real life compared to the T570, it feels sturdy and has a great keyboard. However, my joy was diminished as I booted up Windows for the first time and was bombarded with aggressive sales tactics by Microsoft and haunted by my old Desktop files. It was time for a clean start, and I opened up the best package of USBs money can buy, from the nearest Walmart.

The Bad Luck

Really, the brand new USB stick is bad?

Having a bad USB drive right out of a brand new package really messed me up. It wasn’t bad in any way that I could obviously tell. The image writing software would finish seemingly without problems. The image files would be there on the USB, and I could browse and see them.

That led me down an increasingly flustered path of trying everything and anything, and GPT 5, aside from its brief helpfulness as a therapist, could not have given worse advice. It repeatedly told me that the problem was caching and that hard reboots were necessary. I’m not a hardware guy, but with a clearer head I would have thought to question that and do more research. But I just did it, a bunch of times, which I later learned was very bad way to treat a machine.

It was Gemini that really came through in the end. (I suppose it was bad luck that GPT-5 had just been released, because otherwise I think I would have started with Gemini). It solved the mystery a long time before I finally accepted it, because my priors were just so strong against the new USB being faulty.

Another thing that helped me, and I have to give GPT 5 credit for eventually suggesting it, was to use balenaEtcher instead of Rufus as an image writer. Besides being a beautiful and intuitive tool, it runs a validation check after flashing. That check was failing on the defective USB, which was a key clue. Rufus did not offer a validation check.

That blue screen at the beginning was quickly resolved by turning back on Secure Boot in the startup menu, however I didn’t believe that because GPT-5 claimed Windows was long gone. With Windows back working, I could create another recovery stick later, and that’s when I was able to overwrite the USB stick (from the same pack) the Windows recovery contents on it, creating a working bootable drive which I tested on my 2019 Lenovo. Only then did I fully accept the situation that one of the two USB sticks was bad. After a trip to Best Buy, where there are more options than PNY and onn, everything worked.

Lessons Learned

For turning a pristine Thinkpad into a Linux laptop, below are the main lessons I learned. A good LLM can give you step-by-step instructions, but remember these principles attained by a human.

Use Gemini Pro (or equivalent)

Things are changing rapidly, but I can tell you that in August 2025, GPT-5 gave me absolutely horrible advice throughout this process, advice that may have caused premature wear and tear on my new beautiful machine.

Buy three good 32GB USBs

Take it from me, being cheap will ruin your life. Get one of the most trusted brands (e.g., SanDisk) with 32GB of RAM (do your homework here if it’s past 2025). Even the best ones are still very cheap. I’d recommend having an extra one on hand, because once you make your Windows recovery USB, you’re going to be down one.

Make the Windows recovery USB.

Even if the experience of booting up a new computer and being pressured by Microsoft and Lenovo to buy more angers you like it did me, it’s always good to have an undo button. Make the USB and put it somewhere safe. The Windows license is stored on the firmware, so you could get the Windows boot stick from somewhere else, but it’s better to have the OEM version.

Do the integrity checks on the downloaded images

While it’s a hassle to download extra files and look up how to run the hash algorithm, if you get stuck in a situation where things are not working, you want to be able to cross off the downloaded image as a possible cause.

Use a modern image writer

Rufus is a standard and respected tool, but it wasn’t until balenaEtcher gave me validation diagnostics that I was able to isolate a brand new USB drive as the problem. balenaEtcher is a beautiful tool and completely free, and much more intuitive to use than Rufus without technical terms (e.g., UEFI non CSM) in the dropdowns.

Go ahead and turn off Secure Boot

All the AIs were sure that turning off Secure Boot in the startup menu (F1 on my machine) was essential. The interesting thing was, my 2019 Lenovo seemed to do fine with it on. The new one did not, so I turned it off and left it off. I’m still unclear if I could have enabled it after the install, but the advice I got is that Ubuntu is a very secure system and I’m probably fine without it (hackers leave me alone).

If the USB is still not being read, ask Gemini about other settings

Once I knew my bootable USB was good, I still had one last set of problems getting it to be booted from on the new machine, where the USB was just being ignored. The culprit ended up being in the power settings, where I had to use administrative privileges to disable a “quick boot” setting. Gemini is very good with diagnosing these issues.

Practice on an older laptop.

It’s stressful to keep changing things on your new machine, rebooting, and having it not working, so get the boot disk working on an older computer first if that’s possible. Remember that you don’t have to install from the boot disk, you can just try out the OS from the USB. Then you’ve done a dry run without touching your new machine. Caveat: you probably won’t be able to try out certain drivers that require a reboot (e.g., DisplayLink).

Conclusion

It’s awesome.

I’ve never had Linux running on a machine that wasn’t an old machine being brought back to life. (I used Ubuntu on an old Chromebook for years.) It’s so snappy I can’t even believe it. And now I can appreciate the beauty and performance of the new hardware without Microsoft’s and Lenovo’s aggressive sales tactics. I can run 3 screens! The aLogic docking station worked after an install of the DisplayLink drivers, and the webcam, microphone, keyboard and mouse just worked.

So far I’ve done a full day of work with it. Slack threw me off a bit, because from the website it looked like it was in beta for Linux without a .deb file ready. But, during a proofread, Gemini told me that was false and indeed I just found and installed Slack for Desktop. If I really need Windows, I can still log on to T570 and T520, or pull out the recovery USB (which I hope never to use).

I’ll update this article if anything crazy happens. Leave a comment if you have any thoughts or questions about decisions I made. In my 40s I’ve become thick-skinned, but I am a little touchy about the hard reboot thing so go easy on me there.