I currently own a glitchy T520 that Lenovo has been increasingly reluctant to service as it periodically refuses to turn on. It's been in the shop 4 times. 2-6

I currently own a glitchy T520 that Lenovo has been increasingly reluctant to service as it periodically refuses to turn on. It's been in the shop 4 times. 2-6 on my list are not complete garbage, they're all problems I or other friends I've worked with have experienced with various Lenovo boxes over the last year or so. I actually got Bumblebee/Ironhide working on my T520 without issue, but I couldn't ever do what everyone else could do: get the DisplayPort out to drive an external display. So effectively I was limited to VGA-only for a second monitor (and running Ironhide in such a condition caused a system freeze). Not acceptable. And the one game I do enjoy, Minecraft? Renders unreliably without Ironhide. So... yeah. I had display problems. Not to mention despite the most assiduous reading of FAQs, consulting with powertop-savvy-friends, and appealing for help on twitter I never got more than four hours of light-use battery life from my T520 with the stock battery. This, of course, ignores the nightmare ordering process, the late delivery, the snippy service, and the inability to FIX my machine despite having sent it back a few times now. It's great you have managed to build a decent experience for your specific requirements. I'm glad, I don't wish my pain on anyone. And I really do wish it was better, I miss XMonad dearly. I miss a JVM with good performance dearly. I miss a sane linker dearly. But if your expectations are, "My laptop is fully supported and gets good battery life and does things a macbook would be good at doing" then you will be disappointed with Linux on the laptop, and Lenovo will not be an impressive vendor.