That sure sounds like a crummy situation and I'm sorry you have to put up with it. I don't buy new computers very often (except Rasberry Pi, I buy a fuck-ton o

That sure sounds like a crummy situation and I'm sorry you have to put up with it. I don't buy new computers very often (except Rasberry Pi, I buy a fuck-ton of those), but when I do, I always do an inordinate amount of research beforehand to make sure there are no major issues with the laptop running Linux. The two most important pieces of hardware I look at when buying a laptop are: 1) Does it have _only_ Intel video? 2) Does it have Intel wifi? If both of those are true, then there's a strong chance most everything will work out of the box. I'm no Intel fan boy, but they are very good at maintaining their hardware in the kernel. This also means staying away from the latest-and-greatest. I don't know how new the X1 Carbon 7th gen is, but I would never buy a machine that has been out for less than 6 months. A year would be just about the right time frame, that's more than enough time to let the early adopters work out the bugs and write blog posts about it.