Thank you for your comment. I find it assuring that I actually had followed every point you mentioned before. My observations are below. 1. I tried every po

Thank you for your comment. I find it assuring that I actually had followed every point you mentioned before. My observations are below. 1. I tried every power saving option available at every layer (snd_hda_intel, pulseaudio, TLP). None of that eliminated the problem. 2. ThinkPad fans are aggressive indeed, and I did use thinkfan to reduce the noise, but it turns out the physical fan was just terribly pasted. Re-pasting with a higher quality paste helped immensely. 3. I did try Wayland, but I am told it has its own issues. In the end, I put up with shearing under X as it didn't bother me that much. The most recent kernel mitigates shearing. 4. Indeed, a recent kernel automatically solves many issues that I had previously solved manually (mic, speakers, etc) I had thought LTS with its continual updates should address these problems as well as a more recently released distro should. It seems that I was mistaken.