Lenovo ThinkPad P72 Setup, and the Sad State of Linux Laptops
A decade ago I wrote up setting up a System76 Oryx Pro. Time to play the laptop setup game again - except this time the interesting part isn’t the setup, it’s how little the setup has changed and how few good options there are to set up in the first place.
My daily driver is now a Lenovo ThinkPad P72 mobile workstation, hostname
lasersword. The specs, for posterity:
- CPU: Intel Xeon E-2176M, 6 cores / 12 threads (Coffee Lake, 2018-era)
- RAM: 128GB, across four SO-DIMM slots
- GPU: NVIDIA Quadro P4200 Mobile (Pascal, 8GB GDDR5)
- OS: Debian 13 (Trixie), running btrfs-on-LUKS full disk encryption
- A 17-inch chassis you could stop a door with, and the best non-Mac keyboard I have ever used
That is a seven-plus-year-old machine and I am still using it as my main computer in 2026, which should tell you something. Some of that is that it’s overbuilt - 128GB of RAM in a laptop is absurd and I love it - and some of it is that when I go shopping for a replacement, I keep failing to find one I actually want to buy.
The setup, which is boring now, and that’s the point
The whole song and dance from the Oryx post - test everything in the stock OS,
burn a Debian netinst, use entire volume for encrypted LVM, uncheck the desktop
environment because I throw your Gnome on the ground, install my
zsh/tmux/ratpoison/vim world by hand, remap the devil’s own capslock key to
control - all of it still works basically verbatim. The capslock fix is still:
edit /etc/default/keyboard and set:
XKBOPTIONS="ctrl:nocaps"
sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh console-setup
The one real change from 2015: I finally moved to btrfs, which I hedged on back then as “almost ready.” It has been my root filesystem for years now, on top of LUKS, and I wouldn’t go back - snapshots alone are worth it. So on that count, “not if, but when” turned out to be right. When was “a few years ago.”
The NVIDIA situation is the thing that has technically improved and yet somehow still ruins my week on a regular basis. NVIDIA finally open-sourced their GPU kernel modules in 2022, which is the thing I was furious they wouldn’t do in the Oryx post. Great. But my Pascal card is too old to benefit from most of that, Wayland is now the default on most distros and the proprietary blob’s relationship with it is still “it depends,” and to this day I can’t get HEVC or AV1 hardware decode working in Chrome on Linux on this GPU because the whole NVIDIA/VAAPI story on Linux is a mess. In 2015 I was angry NVIDIA couldn’t be fucked to support the open driver. In 2026 they sort of can, and it’s still the flakiest part of my machine. Progress!
Now for the part where I complain
Here’s the actual reason I’m writing this. I want to replace this laptop and I can’t find anything I want.
My requirements aren’t even that exotic. I want a workstation-class laptop with a genuinely great keyboard, a lot of RAM that I can upgrade later, and hardware that runs Linux without a fight. The P72 does all three. In 2026, that combination is quietly going extinct.
The ThinkPad P-series is regressing on the thing I care about most. The current thin-and-light workstation, the ThinkPad P1 Gen 8, tops out at 64GB of RAM (Notebookcheck). Sixty-four. On my seven-year-old machine I have twice that. The industry has been quietly walking back user-serviceable, high-capacity RAM in favor of soldered or single-module memory that runs faster on a spec sheet and boxes you in forever. Yes, the newer P1s moved to LPCAMM2, which is at least a removable module and not soldered - but a 64GB ceiling is still a downgrade from what I’m holding today. If I want to keep 128GB-plus with real headroom I’m looking at the big P16-class desk-anchors, which defeats the purpose of a laptop.
In fairness, memory is insanely expensive right now, and I suspect that is part of why nobody at Lenovo expects complaints about a 64GB cap. Most buyers would choke on what 128GB costs today. But I am a well-paid software engineer and this is the machine I spend my working life in front of. I will happily pony up the money. I just want to be allowed to.
Framework is the closest thing to hope, and it’s not close enough. The Framework Laptop 16 is the only mainstream machine actually betting on user-repairable, upgradable, modular hardware, and I want to root for it. Real DDR5 SO-DIMMs you can swap. Modular ports. A GPU module. My hangup has always been the keyboard, which on the ones I’ve tried didn’t touch a ThinkPad’s, and I have a very specific, very expensive relationship with my keyboard. I hear the newest revision improved it, which is exactly the complaint I had, so I owe it a hands-on before I write it off. Even so, it’s no MacBook Pro on build, and the whole thing still feels a generation away from being the workstation I’d trust as a daily driver.
System76, my old vendor, is still out here doing good work and their Pop!_OS and COSMIC efforts are genuinely admirable, but their laptops are Clevo chassis underneath, and I’ve been down the “great software, mediocre chassis” road before. I want the tank, not the reference design.
So the depressing conclusion is that the best Linux laptop I can buy in 2026 is, for my particular priorities, arguably the one I already own. That’s not a victory lap, that’s a market failure.
The heresy: my next machine is probably a Mac
I’ll say the quiet part out loud. My next personal machine is very likely going to be an Apple Silicon MacBook.
Go ahead and revoke my Linux card. But look at what those chips are: absurd performance per watt, a keyboard and trackpad nobody has matched, a build quality that makes every PC laptop feel like a kit, and battery life that reads like a typo. The hardware is, annoyingly, the best in the industry, and it isn’t close.
The catch, obviously, is that I want to run Linux on it, and today that’s a maybe. Asahi Linux has done heroic reverse engineering work and the M1 and M2 machines are in genuinely good shape - most things work, GPU acceleration included. But the newer silicon is the problem: as of early 2026, M3 support is still early-stage with no ETA for a shippable state (Phoronix), and M4 and beyond are barely off the ground, partly because Apple keeps shipping firmware changes that have to be re-reverse-engineered. Every generation Apple ships, the Asahi team has to climb the mountain again, without Apple’s help.
So the bet I’m making is a timing bet: that by the time I actually buy one, Asahi (or whatever comes after it) will have caught up to whatever chip is current, and I’ll get the best hardware on the planet and a real Linux underneath it. If Apple ever decided to actually help that effort instead of tolerating it, it’d be a done deal tomorrow. I’m not holding my breath on that part, but the hardware gap has gotten big enough that I’m willing to wait for the software to catch up rather than buy another compromise PC laptop.
Until then, lasersword soldiers on. Seven years and counting. Ask me again next
time I have to fight the NVIDIA driver.