I'd love to have one of these, but I'll wait and get one used/refurb, and after Linux support is better ironed out. I'm very interested in having a high-performance Arm CPU in a tried-and-true ThinkPad chassis. I love that there are 3 physical buttons above the trackpad, as well!
I'd never used the middle button in the old days (started with an IBM Thinkpad 770ED), but then scrolling wasn't nearly as important then as it is today.
But scrolling being today's most important and common input gesture, on the X13 I then decided to give the middle button a try, only to notice that it scrolls in the wrong direction and cannot be changed!
It's becoming quite an issue with laptops that might also combine a touch screen and an external mouse, which I still prefer most of the time: gestures between the various input devices just don't match up when they could, e.g. most of the three and four finger touch gestures on the pad and touch screen.
And then on Linux most of the extra gestures are simply not recognized at all or cannot be adapted to the degree in Windows... Since I really need to switch between both (and plenty of systems), I mostly need some degree of consistency and that's moving away further with every variant added.
And the trackpoint turned out rather disappointingly hard to use, even at the highest sensitivity: I'll try using it in a pinch when I don't really want my fingers to leave the keyboard, but then I find that I'm actually on a system which doesn't have one...
Apart from those lesser gripes, Linux support on the Ryzen based X13 is obviously great, functionally.
Power savings on battery with Linux might be an entirely different matter: I quite honestly haven't found the time to evaluate that yet, but I'm not very hopeful. Matter of fact, dual booting with suspend, hibernation, hybrid and removeable storage have created so much havoc in years past, including battery meltdown during flights, that I'm quite scared to try.
I'm still very skeptical that Qualcomm is actually committed enough to have Linux running on their Elite chips and then you still need the vendors to individually support all the hardware bits they add to the product. Who does what and how is a widly complex dance on x86, but with ARM on Windows, they don't even seem to know who should be kept involved, let alone be put on stage.
If I were a betting man I'd bet you a case of beer that you won't be seeing that by that end of 2025, if ever.
Which is obviously a big shame, considering what this hardware could do on Linux.
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