Fir desktop use I personally think Fedora has the best balance between stability and being up-to-date, while staying fairly easy to use and with a large community. If the person wants something even harder to break and doesn’t mind a bit of an extra learning curve, atomic variants like Silverblue are alo a nice pick. My cousin went for Silverblue and loved it.

From what I’ve seen, there are 4 core issues people complain with snaps:

1. For full functionality, snap requires Ubuntu specific kernel patches, and has a hard dependence on Systemd, whereas Flatpaks work everywhere.
2. Most Flatpak users default to the flarhub repo, however, just like you can have other apt sources, Flatpak supports other repos. Snaps on the other hand are exclusively tied to and controlled by Canonical, which seems very unlike Unix and rubs many wrong.
3. You can install packages as a non-root user into your home with Flatpaks, but snaps can only be managed by root, since they are system packages. This means that they are very unsuitable for atomic distros like Fedora Silverblue.
4. Technically not the fault of snaps but the decision by Canonical, when you try to install something with apt on Ubuntu (and derived) it may instead install it through snap, which, because of sandboxing and other security measures, may result in very unexpected and hard to diagnose issues. I personally wasted a day trying to fix a broken Docker daemon, which turned out to be due to snap, when I explicitly wanted an apt! I personally have no major issues with snaps in general, but ffs let me decide whether it’s a snap or not >_<

Bonus: Some also complain about security, that snaps have had many vulnerabilities, and that malware was distributed as snaps, but the same has been true for Flatpaks too, so I don’t think it’s fair to point that out.

Yeah, that and avoid very new things when using Linux are the morals of my story. But I can’t help it, I am a human and hate all Thinkpads now :P

The laptop BIOS did see updates and now works fine running Cachy, but for over a year it was terible. A whole list of cryptic kerner boot arguments would make it boot, but then touchpad and keyboard issues would remain, and if it ever went to sleep it would hard lock again, not ideal on a laptop. I personally didn’t contact support, but on the official forum there was a thread with a tonne of comments about how support would say Linux is not officially supported on this model and people giving up and returning it. I couldn’t because I ordered from overseas, specifically because I heard Thinkpads worked great with Linux. Needless to say I was royally disappointed. At least it works now, and works better than with Windows.

At least at launch it was a total mess, Linux would instantly hard freeze at boot time. They did eventually release BIOS updates that fixed them more than a year later, so mine is currently running Cachy, but just google for E484/E585 Linux issues, there’s a tonne of people complaining back in the day, and I was one of those early birds >_<

From what I remember, there was a similar-ish laptop a tier above which had received a BIOS update pretty fast, but even though the symptops were pretty much the same, Lenovo dragged their feet on this one.

The model is important! I had gotten an E series Ryzen gen 1 years ago and the Linux support on it was atrocious! I swore to never buy a Thinkpad again.

This year alone I had to reinstall 3 Windows systems that were failing to work. Then again, my Windows 11 work laptop also seems to work just fine.