I've been in the market for a new laptop for a while, recently the new Thinkpad X9 caught my eye. It had an answer for every gripe I had about my current Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 10. Not that that isn't also an excellent laptop, it's very sturdy, high-performing, has great Linux support (read: runs faster under Linux), and is solid in pretty much every category for its time. However, the future is now and I was no longer willing to put up with having to run this thing in front of the air conditioner in order to use the "Performance" mode without the keyboard literally burning my fingertips (not an exaggeration, my Gen 6 had the same problem). I was also eyeing a direct upgrade in the Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 13, which allegedly solves some of the thermal issues, but there is no universe in which you can convince me to pay $3,500 for a laptop, and doubly so when said laptop is made out of GLORIFIED PLASTIC—hot take but the carbon fiber just feels cheap. From where I stood the only selling point the X1C13 had over this one was being lighter (skill issue, go to the gym). The X9, on the other hand, seemed to be swimming in victories (made of metal, better thermals, better performance [presumably due to less thermal throttling], WUXGA screen option without mandatory touchscreen, collects far less fingerprints and dust, and even what appear to be better speakers, though that's currently moot). I won't lie, I thought the "Engine Hub" was weird and it caused me to hesitate on this purchase for a while, but eventually I came to terms with the fact that I've been using a laptop with a clitoris for very close to a decade now, so it's pretty much a sidegrade in that regard. Ultimately Lenovo actually hiked the price on the X1C from about $2,700 (which was already ridiculous), and I figured I could literally buy the X9 AND something else for that price in case it ended up being shit (if they come out with the T14 with AMD Strix Halo this summer I'll be super hyped) so I just pulled the trigger.

First Impressions

Upon unboxing the X9 I noticed four things immediately:

This machine is sexy. The all-metal design looks amazing and even feels amazing to the touch. The weird engine hub thing is on the bottom where you can't see it, and is actually much smaller than pictured. It's subtle enough to be very tolerable (first thing I checked.)
It's astonishingly heavy. I lug a 3.5-pound Macbook Pro back and forth to work and this thing is like 95% of that weight, despite having the same dimensions and half (or less) the thickness. I interpret this as a sign that it's built with solid materials and I don't struggle to carry it at all, so despite the surprise I consider this a positive.
I was warned that the keyboard, while alright, isn't the superlative Thinkpad keyboard that the brand has grown famous for blah blah--no. This thing is WAY better. I've been destroying Thinkpad keyboards for years, the last one that even came close was from 2018. Thinkpad keyboards used to be awesome because of their bounce, but the key travel that came along with that created a problem where keys would literally tip over and come loose after a while if you hit them off-center. By recent generations they'd lost the bounce, too, so their only real defining factors were collecting fingerprints and losing keys at an unusually high rate. This keyboard gets half of that bounce back with none of the key travel issue, and it repels fingerprints like nothing I've ever seen. It's incredible.
Windows utterly BLOWS now. I've been using Ubuntu primarily since I was 12 (Precise Pangolin era), but always used to keep a Windows partition around just in case I had to run some obscure program for school that didn't have good alternatives. I stopped doing that right around the beginning of the Windows era 11 so I've been out of the loop on most of the enshittification that's been taking place and ho..ly...shit was I not prepared for it. I'm well aware that Linux isn't well-supported on this laptop yet, so my plan was to just run Windows for a month or two while the kernel devs hashed it out and boot up my old pc from time to time for my Linux-related needs.

I did not last 15 minutes. I booted up the laptop and was immediately forced to sign in to a Microsoft account (there's no option to say no), spent my first three minutes in the OS trying to navigate my way through a maze of scams with no clear "don't sign me up for this bullshit" button, and finally landed on a desktop utterly littered with ads. I don't mean ads the way Linux people say ads to mean "you searched in the search bar so we gave you results from a search engine" (which is something Ubuntu still gets heat for more than a decade later despite immediately reverting), though it has that too. I mean that while sitting idle on the desktop there was a rotating jumbotron of third-party ads pulled from internet camping the whole left side of my taskbar. Between that and 3 of my 5 taskbar buttons ALSO BEING ADS (Edge, Copilot, and Office 365—literally the file explorer and the desktop switcher were the only buttons on my screen not trying to sell me something), I came to the conclusion that if this OS remained on my hard drive I would simply never open this laptop again. So, with that presenting a very low-stakes alternative, I decided I could eat a couple bugs, missing features, and "hack-arounds" for the sake of my sanity, and formatted a fresh USB stick with Ubuntu.

Linux Install Experience

I'm not stupid enough to try and install LTS on bleeding edge hardware. You always see people posting about how Linux is so awful and buggy (Linux Mint users are the worst offenders here) and then come to find out they're using a kernel version from four years before their hardware existed. The X1C13 actually has an official review where a guy does this (this guy!), which is not relevant at all but I thought was a cool easter egg.

Not sure what these people want kernel devs to do, time travel and grab hardware before it's for sale? Think Mark, Think!

Anyway, I grabbed the latest Ubuntu nightly build of 25.04 (which should be close to mature by now, given that at the time of writing it is currently 25.03871), so you can at least rest assured everything I'm talking about is actually current as of the date of the article. I was willing to give Fedora or Arch a go too, but the latest stable Fedora still had kernel version 6.11, and the Ubuntu nightly already had 6.14. If I'm going to eat the pain of a beta release (or Arch, which is a permanent alpha release) I'd rather eat it on an OS I actually like and am familiar with.

Getting to Boot

First issue, this laptop does not have any USB-A ports, so how are we supposed to boot from a USB stick? Turns out USB-C thumb drives do exist but I didn't really want to go spend money on one and I had a dongle lying around that my job issued me (not sure why, we're not allowed to plug any USB storage into our work laptops full stop, but fine, we accept free shit in this house), so I just used that. Wasn't aware you could boot from a USB stick plugged into an adapter, but apparently you can. The more you know.

Next, secure boot. Normally Canonical signs their images with a secure boot key, but trying to boot from USB kept giving me secure boot failures. Tried it without any tampering, no dice, tried it in user mode, still no dice, so I just turned it off. Wouldn't be surprised if Canonical doesn't bother to sign nightly builds. Honestly, can't blame them.

Finally, the installer itself. Ran incredibly smoothly, found my wifi immediately and stayed connected to it throughout the whole installation (Windows did not :/), let me play around with keyboard and trackpad out of the box, everything seemed in order. One issue, I had originally planned to leave the Windows partition around, but apparently this nightly build has a bug where it displays every possible partition as the partition you've selected to install to, so I said "fuck it" and went ahead and erased the disk. It does seem like they've fixed the bug with "Device for Bootloader Installation" being ignored though, which is nice. Installation was very fast, I set the power mode to "Peformance" and walked away for 10 minutes. It was done by the time I got back. Thermals never got close to anything I would consider "hot", even the underside of the laptop barely registered as warm, in stark Contrast to my X1C10 that literally burns me through the keyboard.

Performance

First order of business was of course to run GeekBench on the new installation and see how badly I'd be gimped for not running the OS that gets to actually optimize for hardware ahead of release. Turns out, zero. Here are the results:

Single-core: 2800
Multi-core: 10851

Specifically, here are the results I care about:

Single-core (clang): 3100
Multi-core (clang): 15937

Full score breakdown here: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/11226502

I was blown away. Not only has Linux already caught up with Windows's optimization, these are top-quartile results for this processor—it's already beat it. The compilation results are also competitive with what we see from Macbooks (not the M4 Max obviously, the Macbooks people actually buy), which is completely unexpected. I could not be happier in this category. I bought the top-end processor that comes in this laptop (Core Ultra 7 268V) to try and avoid lagging behind quite as badly on this front, but I guess it was never an issue. It does turn out this CPU is astonishingly bad at ray tracing in particular, but it's actually physically impossible for me to give less of a fuck about that.

Screen Brightness

At this point my eyes were starting to hurt from staring at 98 nits for a couple of hours (I usually run my screens on max brightness :D) and the brightness adjustment keys appeared to be just for decoration at this time. The brightness slider was also missing from all the GNOME interfaces where it should have been, so I figured this was going to be my first headache with this laptop. After mucho googling, though, I found out you can adjust the screen brightness by just writing the number of nits you want directly to /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0/drm/card1/card1-eDP-1/intel_backlight/brightness (this screen supports anywhere from 0 to 400). Go figure. I honestly wasn't expecting this to work, so

echo 400 >/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0/drm/card1/card1-eDP-1/intel_backlight/brightness

was like getting flashbanged when it more than quadrupled my brightness. Seems like this value persists after reboot, too, so as someone that just leaves the brightness on max this was honestly not too much of an inconvenience already. Just in case I made a script called brightness.sh to adjust it, though:

#!/bin/sh
echo $1 | sudo tee /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0/drm/card1/card1-eDP-1/intel_backlight/brightness

Getting to control the number of nits directly instead of some arbitrary 10-point scale honestly seems like a boon from this.

Speakers

The laptop speakers don't work at all. Seeing as I am not a freak* and whenever I want to play music out loud I use an actual speaker, this is a non-issue. For those of you who are freaks, however, the Arch Wiki has a fix.

Bluetooth

This also does not work at all. Trying to enable bluetooth just loads for a couple seconds and then re-disables. ArchWiki doesn't mention this one so I took a look in /var/log/syslog and found this line while searching for bluetooth (well, actually hci, which means bluetooth):

Bluetooth: hci0: Failed to load Intel firmware file intel/ibt-0190-0291-pci.sfi (-2)

Lo and behold there was no file in /usr/lib/firmware called intel/ibt-0190-0291-pci.sfi, so I googled the name and found that it was taken out of the linux-firmware package recently (probably by mistake) and was just added back a week ago. Perils of running nightly builds I suppose. The latest release of linux-firmware is between the break and the fix, so I just downloaded the current unreleased repo state from their Gitlab and ran:

tar -xzf linux-firmware-main.tar.gz
cd linux-firmware-main
sudo ./copy-firmware.sh /usr/lib/firmware

The package came with a nice automatic copying script so I figured it was safe (or I'd nuke my bluetoothless system and install Arch on top, not the end of the world). After a quick reboot, bluetooth worked like a charm, including streaming audio to my airpods.

Conclusion

9.5/10 machine. Surprisingly premium, also surprisingly heavy. Those two are likely related. Points deducted for having the weird engine hub and still not figuring out how to put 3 USB-C ports on this thing (only minor ones though, it's very ignorable).

Feels like port selection was done at random. Who decided that out of all the legacy ports you could include, the wired headphones hole was more important than a USB-A? Doesn't meaningfully detract from the experience, however.

Would buy again, would install Ubuntu on it again, would wipe out Windows again. Could do all of these things right now and still have spent less money than it would cost me to buy one decked-out X1 Carbon Gen 13.

Thinkpad X9-14 Review (Linux POV)

Carson Fleming

Mar 27, 2025 | Hardware