I’ve recently had the opportunity to start using a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon (X1C) Gen11 as my primary work system. Since I am not a Windows person—I don’t think I’ve used Windows as a daily driver since before the turn of the century—I’m running Linux on the X1C Gen11. Now that I’ve had a few weeks of regular use, in this post I’ll provide my review of this laptop.

This is my second ThinkPad X1 Carbon; my first was a Gen 5 that I received when I joined Heptio in 2018 (see my review of the X1C Gen5). I loved that laptop; my experience with the Gen5 was what made me choose the X1C Gen11 when given the opportunity. What I’ve found is that the Gen11 improves upon the X1C experience in some ways, but falls short in other ways.

Before getting into the details, here’s a quick rundown on the specifications:

• 10-core Intel 13th generation Core i7-1365U (two performance cores and eight efficiency cores)
• 32GB of RAM
• 512GB NVMe storage
• 2880×1800 display
• Two USB-C ports, two USB-A ports, and an HDMI port

As with the Gen5, I’m happy with the build quality and subjective “feel” of the laptop; it feels sturdy and well-built. It’s light, and it’s comfortable to carry around. The outside of the laptop isn’t “slippery” like a MacBook Air/Pro. Instead, it has a good tactile grip. I have no complaints with performance or battery life, although it probably doesn’t need saying that the battery life doesn’t compare with an M-series Mac. The onboard Intel wireless and integrated Intel graphics are more than capable, but won’t win any performance competitions. They’re more than adequate for my use case, though.

As I mentioned earlier, the Gen11 improves on the X1 Carbon experience in some ways but falls short in other ways:

• The display on the Gen5 might have been good for its time (in my review I wrote that the screen quality and brightness were “really good”), the screen on the Gen11 is great. It’s bright, the colors are vivid, and text is sharp and crisp. (It’s bright enough that most of the time I have the screen turned down to half of the full brightness.) Comparatively speaking, it puts the display from the Gen5 to shame.
• The keyboard on the X1C Gen5 was—and still is—probably my favorite laptop keyboard. Unfortunately, at some point between the Gen5 and the Gen11 Lenovo decided to revise the keyboard, and the result is less than stellar. Compared to the earlier keyboard, it’s downright disappointing. My advice to the Lenovo engineers: go back to the earlier keyboard design! If Apple can admit that changing keyboards was a bad idea (recall the infamous butterfly keyboard?), then I think it’s OK for you to admit it and go back.

Finally: how is the Linux support on the Gen11? It’s good, equally as good if not better than previous generations. Although I tend to use Arch Linux these days instead of Fedora, I haven’t encountered any problems or issues with any of the hardware working as expected. Screen brightness controls work, volume controls work, and suspend works (just close the lid). I’m seeing indications that the fingerprint reader works, although I haven’t actually tried to set it up yet.

As I did in 2018 with the X1C Gen5, I’d recommend the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen11 to folks looking for a well-performing lightweight Linux laptop.