There were a bunch of things that impressed me as a gestalt of the machine and the company behind it. I think the clincher was the help I got resolving the sleep issue from the staff on the Lenovo forums. All considered, it’s a keeper.

Pluses

  1. Perfect Linux laptop: runs Linux flawlessly, including touchscreen, sleep and bluetooth peripherals.
  2. A nice sturdy case with user serviceable internals.
  3. Nice keyboard, nice touch screen
  4. Lenovo has good support, even for Linux users.
  5. The fan rarely goes off – good cooling

Minor plusses

  1. Charging light changes color based on state of battery
  2. PrtSc button which opens Linux’s screenshot tool
  3. Configurable keys
  4. The key surfaces have a nice texture

Minuses

  1. Single thunderbolt (USB-C) port which is the charging port. I addressed this by adding a fabulous magnetic connector (~$10) which gives me some peace of mind.
  2. The speakers are indeed a bit weak compared to the MacBook, say, which is slightly annoying when I’m watching a movie with my spouse.
  3. The screen took a little bit of getting used to. I was initially convinced that there was something very sub-par about it when streaming movies, but it when I compared it with the mac book it was similar enough.
  4. Battery life is not as spectacular as the macs

A side note on the sleep issue

As you will recall I was unhappy with the E14’s power consumption in sleep, which looked to be around 2W. I bounced around a bunch of web-forums where I learned about s2idle and S3. My x220 has two sleep options s2idle and deep, it’s set to deep mode and burns about 0.4 W during sleep.

On the E14 I could only see the s2idle mode until I found the “Linux S3” option in the BIOS and when I enabled it (Instead of “Windows and Linux”). I did indeed get a “deep” sleep option, but waking from this was a nightmare: it took a long time to wake up, and none of the mouse/touchpad inputs worked.

I created an issue on the Lenovo forums not really expecting much, but I got very prompt and helpful responses.. In the end the resolution was most likely was some firmware updates which I had not applied yet. After applying the pending firmware updates, I’m getting 0.3 W consumption during s2idle.