[Not sure if this is the right forum as I’m not asking a question. I did get a request, at the time, to provide some feedback on this combo. Now that I’ve posted it, it’s not as quick as I intended!]
Bottom line: I have returned to the Fedora fold after a somewhat brief flirtation with Arch on a Lenovo Thinkpad P1 Gen 6 that I bought from Lenovo’s website as a clearance item at the start of this year. It was a very good price, given the state of the PC industry the past 18 months, but then I stuck 64GB DDR5 SODIMM in it at these prices which rendered the deal somewhat less good (and increased the cost by about 33%!). Hey ho.
(TBH, I didn’t actually leave the Fedora fold: I’m running it on other laptops and desktops every day. I just flirted with Arch on one particular laptop.)
Once I’d upgraded the Thinkpad - i7-13800H, 16GB DDR5, 512GB SSD, Nvidia RTX 3500 GPU, 4K 16" screen as pre-configured on the site - with a new SSD and the aforementioned 64GB DDR5 I went to install Fedora 43 KDE but although the Live ISO worked fine, as soon as I rebooted to the installed version I was met with the infamous black screen, and couldn’t get beyond it. The machine was still alive according to the caps lock key, but to all intents and purposes unusable (I don’t recall if I tried ssh. I don’t believe I did; if I did it didn’t help).
For some reason I couldn’t make the installation work properly, even after several helpful back-and-forths with this forum. I cleanly reinstalled the OS several times, even switching SSDs and re-inserting the original RAM to try and troubleshoot (the new memory passed a subsequent memtest). Finally I got the GNOME variant installed and working, but I’m not a GNOMEster, so I used dnf to switch to KDE.
I called the GNOME-to-KDE installation a “FrankenFedora” because it never felt quite right and seemed to suffer from some apparent performance degradations: all the GNOME stuff was still there and was unnecessarily updated, etc. I didn’t attempt to take any measurements, it was just subjective, compared to my experience with Dell XPS laptops that I’ve been daily driving for about 5 years with Fedora, and they’ve been generally working flawlessly.
After not feeling entirely satisfied with the system I decided to search for an alternative: I swapped out the SSD for a new one and installed Debian 13 with KDE which worked fine. I love Debian, but it’s a bit too far behind the curve for a daily driver I find: I want the latest KDE bits (especially after using them on Fedora 43), and the thing that saw me decamp from Debian to Fedora 5 years ago was because the toolchain was too far behind: I’m writing code every day and want the latest compiler, etc.
So I decided to forsake Debian and the next thing I tried - for the first time on actual hardware - was Arch, BTW (you have to say that: it’s obligatory, apparently). I’d already experimented with it in a VM so installation wasn’t an issue, although I did make sure to have an LTS kernel alongside the bleeding-edge version. The downsides of Arch are mainly that things you take for granted that have been configured by maintainers for other distros just aren’t included in Arch by default. Case in point: there was no sound when I installed Arch, I had to set up ALSA or Pipewire which I haven’t had to do with any other distro, e.g. This wasn’t a huge impediment, and there’s the Arch Wiki which may be the most comprehensive Linux DIY help guide available. It’s invaluable really, and is even helpful for other Linux distros. That and Reddit. After the initial install, I added a bunch of other programs via the package manager, but that’s no different to every other distro I install on a new machine, regardless of distro.
Pacman does seem to be more performant than DNF or APT, not that I took any measurements, certainly not on the same hardware, but plugged into the same net (not literally plugged in - wifi) as other machines running Fedora and Debian. Overall, while it feels faster, it’s not like DNF is particularly sluggish. It’s not Windows Update.
However, there were downsides (which is why I’m back on Fedora). I experienced several kernel panics (more than a few). I have never experienced a kernel panic in 7+ years of running Linux full-time, except once on a MacBook Pro when I ran the kernel out of memory with no page file/swap space: I upgraded to 16GB and configured a swap file and it never happened again. The panics on Arch were all down to “Not all CPUs entered broadcast exception handler”. The LTS kernel ameliorated this mostly, but not entirely. From what I could garner from Reddit it seems to be related to the Lenovo line of Intel-based laptops (others like Yoga seemed to suffer from the same error), and quite possibly specific BIOS versions (paradoxically newer ones seemed to introduce the problem so upgrading via fwupdmgr was out).
I had to make various changes to the GRUB script too, in part because of excessive interrupts via ACPI (gpe6E for example; that’s happened with Fedora too, probably unsurprisingly: same hardware, same kernel, more-or-less). I think several problems that I experienced were down to ACPI and also poor management of C-states which again, seemed to be better with an LTS kernel, although not entirely vanquished.
Most recently, about 10 days ago, what seemed like a mismatch between the latest kernel and Nvidia driver led to hundreds of kernel Oops occurring in nv.c. and the machine appearing to auto-reboot and recover itself. I caught it one time whilst just sitting on a table, spontaneously go into text mode, fill the screen with what looked like the usual kernel boot messages, although without coloration, and then recover to graphical mode. The journal was filled with worrying messages that implicated the Nvidia driver. I decided that I should remove the Nvidia driver altogether, but reasoned that I had more than an evens chance of ending up with the dreaded Nvidia black screen and an un-bootable laptop again, even though most of the time all these laptops are running on the Intel iGPU. I figured that I’d end up reinstalling the operating system anyway so I decided that before I attempted to remove the Nvidia driver, the less drastic course of action was to attempt a re-install, and I decided to give KDE Fedora another chance on this hardware, especially now that 44 was out, and again, I’d never experienced any kernel problems with Fedora. I swapped out the SSD once again, this time for the “FrankenFedora” drive that I’d previously parked, downloaded the latest bits from the getfedora website, did a completely clean installation of Fedora 44 KDE over the previous GNOME-KDE 43, and it’s been working like the proverbial charm ever since, with nary a worrying entry in journalctl (although, TBF, I haven’t checked for over 48 hours!)
Bottom line: Arch is good, it’s light (not really an issue with lots of RAM and disk space), it feels zippy, but it does feel a bit more experimental than solid - in my experience - distros such as Fedora and Debian. I don’t know how much testing Arch gets before new bits are released. I get the feeling that it’s a more cursory level and users are the ultimate testers. I don’t get the impression that there’s a performance difference running Fedora 44 compared to Arch, both with KDE.
That’s not to say that Arch is unreliable. Lots of people have only good experiences. I have a feeling that I was probably tempting fate by installing an Nvidia driver that I didn’t really need (I have the chip so why not?), but at the same time, in June 2026, I really shouldn’t have to say that an Nvidia driver caused problems to the level where I had to quit the entire operating system, when Linux works so well on so many machines (with and without dGPUs and with Nvidia and Radeon dGPUs).
Overall this Thinkpad - which is no longer available, I just checked - is a very good laptop, especially with 64GB RAM (which I’ve stuck in all my laptops: it used to be affordable; try telling that to the kids these days…). The screen is 4K, which my first Dell XPS came with, and is a joy to use and look at. It’s also touch-sensitive (same as the Dell) which I don’t really use, but it’s nice to have the option. Bottom line: I like it. The Dells have been stalwart performers and I would recommend them, especially the older models with replaceable parts, but this Thinkpad does feel a bit of step up.
The Thinkpad keyboard has taken a little familiarization, mostly because of muscle memory - the left control and function keys are reversed from what I’m used to. They’ve fixed it on newer models. It’s the same layout as older MacBooks which I used (with macOS and Debian) so it’s not too bad but going back and forth between the Dells and this means I hit the wrong key on both platforms for a while. The Print Screen key is in a ludicrous position - between the right Alt and Ctrl keys, so you can imagine… I’ve inadvertently hit that and saved some image to disk that I didn’t want many times already. It’s probably defeatable or reassignable in the BIOS. I don’t see anything in KDE SystemSettings related to that key in particular but I presume I could do a new map if I were so inclined. The keys do seem to require being depressed more than I’m used to sometimes, or at least that’s my supposition, as on both Arch and Fedora occasionally key presses seem to get lost. I’ve had several characters go missing in files leading to compiler errors, e.g. (the only reason I get compiler errors… Cool story bro.)
The cursor keys are also a bit problematic: there are 6. The cluster is nicely detented at the right of the keyboard but there are small PgUp and PgDn keys above the right arrow and left arrow respectively. My fingers are used to the larger arrow keys in the 4 key cluster on the Dells so I keep inadvertently paging up or down in a file or inadvertently tabbing back and forth in Konsole. After 6 months I still haven’t got used to it and doubt I will.
The trackpad, with three physical buttons, is too small for a modern laptop although I haven’t had too much trouble in daily use; then, I’m not so far doing any graphical work. I think I’d be having more issues if I were working on image processing. Again, that’s something they’ve fixed in newer models with larger trackpads and no traditional clicky buttons, fine by me. The traditional Thinkpad red joystick is nice to have but TBH I never use it except for novelty purposes.
As an engineering type I value laptops that are upgradable and repairable. The main reason I looked for something new after Dell discontinued - and now re-continued! - the XPS line (and after I went to Dell after the disastrous and disastrously expensive 2015+ MacBook Pro) is that I wanted a replacement machine where I could upgrade RAM and SSD. The original reason for that - being more cost-effective than paying OEM prices - has been largely made moot by the fact that thanks to AI data centers hoovering up any and all computer industry parts, 3rd party components are now more expensive than component upgrade prices from constructors and system integrators. I don’t know if Lenovo saw this trend coming, or they just went with the anti-consumer move of fixed, un-upgradable RAM but newer models have fixed RAM sizes; not all: I believe the CAMM models have upgradable parts, but they have also significantly upgraded the price to match.
The Thinkpad P1 Gen 6 running Arch & KDE was a very good combination, until it wasn’t (6 months was a good run). The same Thinkpad running Fedora 44 KDE feels like home again. The only “downside” to switching back to Fedora is that I don’t get to say “I run Arch BTW” anymore (I think I said that once in an online comment, and ironically (other than here, also ironically)). The Arch experiment was fun, but I rely on computers to work without drama (unless I’m the one creating it) so I’ll be sticking with Fedora now that it’s working the way I originally expected. The only reason I tried something else was because the Fedora I wanted wouldn’t work with the hardware I had, for whatever reason. Now it does.