► マリウス . Lenovo X1 Carbon Gen 14 Aura
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A review of theLenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 14 Aura EditionwithIntel
Panther LakeCore Ultra X7 368H vPro, from the perspective of a Linux user
coming from aStar LabsStarBook Mk VI AMD, and running a hardened Gentoo
installation.
tl;dr:Afterthe longandpainful
goodbyeto myStar Labs StarBook Mk VI AMD, I caved and did
what every Linux nerd eventually does, which is buying aThinkPad. I leftTeam Redand chose theX1 Carbon Gen 14 Aura EditionwithIntel’s newPanther LakeCore Ultra X7 368H vPro, 32GB of (sadly soldered) RAM and the
2.8K OLED panel. It’s a sub-1kg, repairable carbon-fibre slab that runs Linux
beautifully and that I can service (or get serviced) pretty much anywhere on the
planet thanks to the widespread availability of parts and service points.
Migration consisted of installing the latestGentoodistribution kernel (to
have all necessary modules available), pulling the SSD with myhardened Gentoo installationout of theStarBook, dropping it
into theLenovo, and booting the system. Plus one round of recompiling all
packages for the new architecture, but that’s… details.
Sadly there’s noCoreboot, theIntel Management Engineis silentlyplottingin the background, and you’re trusting a closed firmware stack from a
vendor with aninterestingpast. If you’re looking for a
fully liberated laptop, this sadly isn’t it. But then again, even in 2026, sadlyalmost nothing really is.
As some of you who suffered throughthe lasttwo
updatesalready know, the first half of 2026 was, to put it
mildly, ahardware massacre. Phones broke, a tablet got preemptively retired,
head- and earphones died, and my primary workstation (theStar Labs StarBook Mk VI AMD) suffered increasing stability
issues and finallybricked itself during a firmware update. I wrote at
length about why I ultimately decided to part ways withStar Labs, so I won’t
rehash all of it here, but the short version is, that with theStar Labslaptop I loved the idea, I loved the design, but I could no longer rely on the
hardware, and I needed a device that I could repair no matter where in the world
I happen to be.
I had been eyeing theASUS ExpertBook Ultrawith theX9
388Hfor a while, but it remained a paper launch, and after my misadventures
trying to sourceASUShardware across the globe, I lost faith in the service
and spare-part situation, so I did the boring, sensible,adultthing and
bought the laptop that has authorised service centres and spare parts on every
continent: ALenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon.
Wait, weren’t you Team Red?, you might ask. I was, and in spirit I still am.
For the better part of a decade I bought almost exclusively AMD. But as I ranted
aboutpreviously, with AMD laptops it’salways something.
The ports, the display, the chassis, the TDP,somethingalways forces a
compromise I don’t want to make at this price point.Panther Lakemade enough
of a splash, performance-per-watt-wise, that I was willing to giveTeam Blueanother shot, despiteIntel’s long history of monopolistic behaviour, security
holes and general d!ckhead-ish behaviour. And to be fair, AMD’s behaviourisn’tmuchbetterthesedaysanyway.
What it is
TheThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 14 Aura EditionisLenovo’s 2026
flagship ultrabook. It’s the fourteenth iteration of a line that, at this point,
basicallyisthe archetype of the“business ultrabook”. The“Aura Edition”branding is anIntelco-marketing thing, and the singleX7sticker went
straight into the bin. Speaking of which, yes, it’s going to getstickerbombed, but that’ll take some time.
The interesting part however is not the age-oldThinkPadaesthetic, but what
lies underneath, namely a brand-newPanther Lakechip, a redesigned
repairable chassis, and crucially proper Linux support straight from the
manufacturer. My specific configuration is the one I’ll be reviewing here, but
keep in mind thatLenovosells this chassis in a dozen permutations.
Specifications
These figures reflect my specific machine type (21V7) and the official
platform specs come fromLenovo’s PSREF spec sheet.
Speaking of which, on Linux you can read the model, marketing name and serial
straight from theDMItables (handy for aPSREFlookup), and pull a broader
hardware overview withinxi/lscpu:
The Panther
The star of the show isIntel’sCore Ultra X7 368H vPro, part of
thePanther Lakegeneration. After years ofIntelembarrassing itself, this
is the most interesting mobile chip the company has shipped in a long while, and
the first one in ages that made me, a committed AMD user, go back toTeam
Blue.
It’s a 16-core, 16-thread unit, and no, there’s noHyperThreadinghere. The
cores break down into:
It carries 12.5MB of L2 and 18MB of L3 (Smart Cache, shared), andIntelrates it at a 25W base (PL1) with an 80W maximum turbo (PL2).Lenovoconfigures it for roughly 30W sustained in this chassis, which is a step up from
the ~17-20W that last year’sLunar LakeGen 13ran at.
What makesPanther Lakearchitecturally interesting is that it’s a
disaggregated, multi-process design. The compute tile is built onIntel’s own18Anode, while the GPU tile is fabbed byTSMConN3E.
Note:TheX1 Carbon Gen 14is offered“up to”theX7 368H, and only
the X7 tier gets the 12-coreArc B390iGPU. Every cheaperCore Ultra 5/7option makes do withIntel’s weaker standard integrated graphics. That GPU
split is the whole reason I went for the X7, as it is, in my opinion, the only
configuration worth buying, if you care about graphics at all.
Numbers
InGeekbench 6the368Hlands at around 2,870 single-core and somewhere
between16,422,16,885and17,318multi-core. These
(along with thegraphicsand AI numbers below) were captured on a*cough*factory*cough*Windows 11install on its 256GB SSD.
For context,XDAmeasured the mid-tierCore Ultra 7 355review unit
at 2,610 / 11,263 inGeekbench 6. And for comparison, myStar Labs StarBook
Mk VI AMDscores1,906 / 6,245 inGeekbench 6, with anOpenCLscore of 13,051and aVulkanscore of 11,932.
Note:Despite having set the power setting onWindows 11toPerformance,
theGeekbenchreport still lists thePower PlanasBalanced.
For my purposes, however, the more relevant metric is real-world responsiveness,
and the chip isquick. Cold-compilingungoogled-chromiumon Gentoo, juggling
a few dozen terminal panes, a couple of browsers and the usual pile of
background daemons and it still doesn’t break a sweat. On theStarBookqlopwould normally report something between 12 to 48 hours forungoogled-chromium, depending on how many pre-compiled system libraries the
specific release would be able to utilize without errors. On theX1that
number more than halved, with the average runtime being well below six hours.
Here are the exactqloptimings for a couple of the usual heavyweights, on theStarBookversus theX1:
Graphics
The integrated GPU isIntel’s newArc B390with 12 Xe3 cores clocked up to
~2.5 GHz, with hardware ray tracing included. TheXe3iGPU scores56,930 inGeekbench 6’s OpenCL test, and between49,213and63,874 inVulkan, which puts it roughly in the territory of a discrete
desktopGeForce RTX 3050. UnlikeNVIDIA’s hardware, however, theB390is
still backed by open-source, in-treexedrivers.
I’m not much of a gamer, but for the curious, here’s how a handful of titles
fare on theB390:
So nothing that’ll trouble a discrete GPU, but for an iGPU in a sub-1kg
ultrabook, playable frame rates in actual games at sensible settings is more
than I’d ever have asked of integrated graphics a couple of generations ago.
What surprised me the most out of all of this was theCyberpunk 2077result,
since I would never have expected an iGPU sitting inside a lightweight ultrabook
to hold somewhere between 40 and 60 fps atUltrasettings and a 1920x1200
resolution in what is still one of the most punishing games you can throw at a
machine, and yet it does exactly that, with the frame rate only ever falling off
a cliff the very moment I enabled one of the ray-traced lighting presets.
The curious part, however, is that this drop isn’t a case of the hardware
lacking the feature altogether, because theArc B390actually ships withnative hardware ray tracing, carrying one dedicated ray-tracing unit
perXe3core, so twelve RTUs in total. The question is whether the silicon can
be fed fast enough to do ray tracing at a frame rate worth having, and the
answer seems to be“nope”. Ray tracing, andBVH traversalin particular,
generates an enormous amount of scattered, incoherent memory accesses, and
unlike a discrete card that gets to service all those random reads out of its
own dedicated, high-bandwidthGDDR, an iGPU like theB390has noVRAMof
its own and instead shares the very sameLPDDR5xpool as the CPU, which leaves
it to contend for a fraction of the bandwidth that a proper GPU would have. And
once you throw in the fact that a dozen RTUs is a tiny number next to the many
dozens you’d find on a discreteArc,RadeonorGeForce, as well as the
shared ~30W power budget that the GPU has to split with the rest of theSoC,
ray tracing ends up being the one workload in which the gap between this little
chip and an actual graphics card still shows.
None of that really bothers me, though, since ray tracing on an iGPU was always
going to be more of a party trick than something I’d lean on day to day, and for
the rare occasions on which I actuallydo need that sort of horsepower, I can always just hang an
external GPU off one of the Thunderbolt ports somewhere down the line. This
appears to be a route that, judging by the various reports of people running
eGPUs over Thunderbolt on previousX1 Carbongenerations under Linux, all the
way from a relatively tameAkitio Nodewith anNVIDIAcard on aGen 5to a
frankly unhinged dual-RTX 3090contraption hanging off aGen 9runningFedora, appears to work well enough in practice. And while a fair share of
those write-ups inevitably involve someone making their peace withNVIDIA’s
proprietary driver, that’s precisely the part I’d happily skip, because the far
more appealing option for me would be to pair the laptop with one of theRadeoncards I already own (such as theRX 6700 XTthat currently lives
insidemyother computer). Thanks to the open, in-treeamdgpudriver there’s no out-of-tree blob to wrangle in the first place, native
kernel-level Thunderbolt hotplug is simplythere, and onWaylandin
particular, which is whatmy Sway setupruns on, the whole
thing sidesteps the old X.OrgHotplugDrivergymnastics entirely. But it
remains to be seen how good/reliable a setup like that can work.
Local“AI”
TheOllamaversion used here iscecd26and it was compiled usingcmake -B build -DOLLAMA_LLAMA_BACKENDS=vulkan. TheVulkanversion is1.4.341.0andMesa26.0.7. Here are the results of theLLM benchmark:
According to theresults, theUltra X7appears to perform similarly to
e.g. theAMD Ryzen 9 7900 12-Core Processor, theAMD Ryzen AI 7 350withRadeon 860M, the12th Gen Intel Core i9-12900H, and theAMD Ryzen 7 7700X
8-Corefor theDeepSeek R1 8bmodel.
Anyway, there’s also anNPUrated at 50 TOPS, which I still need to test.
Memory and storage
Here’s the first gripe with theLenovo, which is the RAM. Sadly my model only
comes with 32GB ofLPDDR5x-8533memory, and it’s soldered. On theX7the
memory should be able to run at the full 9600 MT/s, but for whatever reasonLenovodecided that, unless you’re willing to add another $1,000 on top,
you’ll only be getting the“slower”RAM. And while the SoC theoretically
supports up to 96GB,Lenovowill only sell you a maximum of 64GB. Swallowing a
non-upgradeable 32GB config stung, especially in the current“AI”-driven hardware climate, in which most people (including
myself) are looking at prolonged lifespans for their hardware. I gambled on 32GB
being enough for a terminal-centric workflow for the foreseeable future, and so
far it is, but I’d be lying if I said I was okay with not being able to change
my mind later.
Storage-wise the machine shipped with a bare-minimum 256GB M.2 2280 TLCOpalself-encrypting drive, which I promptly removed. The slot itself is PCIe Gen5
with sequential reads near 12,850 MB/s (with a Gen5 drive in it), but it only
supports single-sided 2280 drives. Luckily my 2TBSK hynix Gold P31(SHGP31-2000GM), which had been living in theStarBooksinceI upgraded it, is exactly that, so it dropped straight in. Yes,
the P31 isonlya Gen3 drive in a Gen5 slot, but it goes without saying that
SSD pricing these days is absolute nonsense. Also, while theOpalself-encrypting drives arecooland all, I run my ownfull-disk encryption withdm-cryptrather than relying on the
drive’s implementation. The 2TB I already owned is plenty, and I do not care
that much about sequential SSD benchmarks that I’m unlikely to ever notice in
practice.
Display
The 2.8K OLED panel is, frankly, the nicest display I’ve had on a laptop. It’s a
14", 16:10, 2880x1800 OLED running at 120Hz with variable refresh (it’ll drop as
low as ~30Hz to save power), rated at 500 nits SDR and covering 100% ofDCI-P3. It also carries anHDR 500 True Blackcertification worth precisely
nothing to me on Linux, but there it is. In properThinkPadfashion, the hinge
lets the lid lay completely flat, which is something that my initial candidate,
theASUS ExpertBook Ultra, would not have been able to do. Critically for me,Lenovoships it with an anti-reflective and anti-smudge coating, which means
it’s matte enough to actually use in various lighting conditions.
Coming from theStarBook’s perfectly-fine-but-unremarkable 1080p IPS panel,
the jump to a high-refresh OLED is the kind of upgrade you don’t think you need
until you have it. Blacks are black, like,reallyblack and text is
razor-sharp, and at 120Hz animations are buttery smooth. My only real
reservation is the usual OLED burn-in over a multi-year ownership period,
especially with things like aWaybarthat’s always there, not moving and
barely changing any of the text it displays. I might need to tweak that part of
my setup long-term.
If there’s one thing one might complain about it’s the brightness ceiling. The
panel tops out at 500 nits, which, for today’s standards is nota lot.
However, personally I find the display bright enough and I tend to run it at
around 50% brightness throughout the day while indoors, which visually is equal
to theStarBook’s display running at almost 100% brightness. As an added
bonus, the OLED PWM dimming runs at a far higher frequency than older panels, so
those of us sensitive to flicker can stare at it all day without the headache.
Connectivity and I/O
The port selection is great, especially compared to theStarBook:
Wireless duties are handled by anIntel BE211Wi-Fi 7 card with Bluetooth 5.4,
and my unit also has NFC becauseyolo.Lenovoadditionally offers an
optional 5GWWANmodem with a nano-SIM slot, which I skipped, because I’d
ratheruse my dedicated router, and because Linux support
doesn’t seem to be quite there yet anyway. TheIntelWLAN card, on the other
hand, is supported out of the box by the in-treeiwlwifidriver under Linux.
The webcam is a 10MP RGB + IR module (withImmerVisionwide-FOV optics), aTime-of-Flightsensor for presence detection, and, most importantly, a
physicalThinkShuttera.k.a. a way to physically cover it without the use of
dot-stickers, which is a very welcome feature. The IR camera is there forWindows Hello, which is useless to me, but thehowdy-on-IR crowd
will appreciate it.
On my specific model (with the OLED display) thewebcam hasnot beenworking, as of the time of writing this
post.
As for the keyboard, the following will probably earn mesomea lot of hate,
and while I agree that compared to every other laptop keyboard theThinkPad’s
integrated one is a masterpiece with 1.5mm of travel, slightly concave keycaps,
asanearrow-key layout, spill resistance, and two backlight levels plus an
auto mode, … I frankly still prefer typingon my own keyboardSonshi-style. But yeah, don’t worry, if you’re the type of person that
exclusively uses theThinkPad’s keyboard then you will be happy to hear that
it’s a solid integrated keyboard, still. Also, don’t ever talk to me about
keyboards.
(-:
Note:TwoGen 14tweaks that are worth mentioning are the key legends,
which are now centred and spelled out in full (“Backspace”rather than a
glyph), and the power button, that has migrated into the top-right of the
keyboard deck with the fingerprint reader built into it, right next to the
longishDeletekey.
The redTrackPointnub, however, is still superior to every touchpad I have
ever operated (including the integrated one) and I’m happy thatLenovois
still holding on to it. One buying tip that I’m glad I caught beforehand
concerns the touchpad configuration.Lenovooffers two different touchpads on
theX1 Carbon, the good old regular touchpad with actual buttons on its upper
border, and ahaptic ForcePad, which technically seems to be the sleeker one.
However, choosing it will cost you the discrete physicalTrackPointbuttons
that only the regular touchpad brings. If, like me, you actually plan to use the
nub, the plain mechanical“diving board”pad keeps those buttons, and that’s
the one I went for.
Lastly, audio finally comes from a stereo system that theSpace Framenow
firesupwardthrough the keyboard deck rather than down at the desk. It’s
startlingly loud for a 14" laptop, though it’s still laptop audio, so better get
headphones. That said, these sound likeBowers & Wilkins603s in comparison
to the bad speakers on theStarBook.
Space Frame
This is one of the main reasons I picked theX1 Carbonover its alternatives.
ForGen 14,Lenovocompletely redesigned the internals around what they call
aSpace Frame, which is a structural redesign that lets them mount components
on both sides of the mainboard, shrink the internal footprint, and fit a 70%
larger fan for better sustained performance.
Materially it remains the classicX1 Carboncomposition however. The device
has a carbon-fibre lid over a magnesium (and aluminium) body, rated toMIL-STD-810Hand starting at 0.977kg, which is absurdly light for a
14" machine.Lenovodid let it grow in one dimension though, as theCarbonis now a gentle wedge of roughly 7.7mm at the front to 17.6mm at the back. The
14th iteration is hence a notch chunkier toward the rear than the near-uniformGen 13, which is a deliberate trade to make room for the bigger fans. The
footprint is otherwise unchanged, so existing sleeves will probably still fit.
The soft matte finish feels great, but I willstickerbombit nevertheless, in
an effort to camouflage my workstation as a somewhat unhinged comic book that
nobody in their right mind would ever try to steal.
Going back to theSpace Framedesign, for someone whose past year has been
defined by hardware failures, theLenovois ultimately a properly and easily
repairable device, thanks to its new build.iFixitgave it a 9/10, all while,
for context, theMacBook Pro 14"only scored a 4/10. And frankly on theX1the score seems well-deserved.
To get into theSpace Frameyou undo four screws, and the bottom comes off.
The keyboard deck then lifts away magnetically, without the need for any tools.
The battery comes out with a few screws and a connector that releases itself,
while the SSD, the fans, the I/O ports and even the display assembly are all
individually serviceable.Lenovoeven publishesstep-by-step repair videoswith photos and difficulty ratings for
each repair. After theStarBooksaga, which ended with mehunting down a CH341A programmerand having to reach out toStar Labsdirectly to un-brick the thing, this properly documentedLego-brickserviceability, that actually has a replacement-parts market online and offline,
is exactly what I wanted.
Battery
The battery is a 58Wh cell that is barely up from theGen 13’s 57Wh, asLenovois seemingly leaning onPanther Lake’s efficiency rather than on
capacity, and this is probably my second-biggest gripe. While it appears that in
looping-video tests reviewers got anywhere from9.5to14hours (depending on configuration and brightness) my realistic mixed working day
in browsers and terminals lands around 6 to 7 hours. The moment I’m starting to
compile things, however, this figure takes a nosedive to something closer to 2
to 3 hours.
58Wh is definitely on the small side for a 2026 flagship. However, with
higher-density battery cells becoming available, an added lightweight power bank
could be a viable compromise for days on which the integrated battery won’t last
long enough, while still accounting for a total weight below that of your
regularT14.
Lenovobundles a relatively compact 65W USB-C brick that rapid-charges the
cell to 80% in about an hour, and because it’s bog-standard USB-C PD, any
charger or a dock pushing >60W will run it at full performance.
“Why no Framework?”
“You wanted repairable and Linux-friendly, why not a Framework?”, I hear you
asking. It’s a fair question, and generally I would like the idea behindFramework’s computers to succeed. I would like to see a future in which you
can put together your laptop the same way you do your standard ITX build. I
would love to see independent manufacturers producing parts for laptops like theFramework, that would allow you to, I don’t know, replace the default keyboard
with anHHKBvariant, or that would make it possible to pick which processor,
which RAM and which GPU you’d like to have in your device. And whileFrameworkkind of built this“ecosystem”for themselves, six years into their saga the
third-party components are still nowhere to be found, with a handful of
exceptions which, however, are clearly driven byFramework(think theCooler
Mastercase or theDeepComputing RISC-Vmainboard).
I don’t mean to rain on anyone’s parade here, but unless the ecosystem broadens
significantly, so that users can find third-party expansion cards, and
mainboards, and keyboards, and macropads, and graphics modules, and are not
dependent solely onFramework(a company thatmightat some pointenshittify), I don’t quite see the point of putting up with a device that is
significantly bulkier, has had aninferiorbuildqualityand comes withitsfairshareofissues.
However, none of this would have been a true deal-breaker for me, if it wasn’t
forFrameworksupporting aseventh-grade computer science projectoveractualLinux
distributions, which cooled my enthusiasm considerably. Because let’s be real,
when comparing purely the hardware itself, the newFramework Laptop 13 Proseems like a legitimately good machine, despite its soullessApple-esque
aesthetic. TheX7 Panther Lakeoption that comes with a modularLPCAMM2RAM
definitely beatsLenovo’s soldered memory outright, and the brighter 700-nit
display might also work better than theX1in outdoor environments, despite it
not being as beautiful to look at asLenovo’s OLED. Lastly, the 74Wh battery
of theFrameworkpacks significantly more juice into the13 Pro, which is
definitely a plus over the lightweight 58Wh of theX1 Carbon.
Apart from that, however, I’d like to think that the build quality and
specifically theweight-to-power ratioof theGen 14Lenovoremains
superior to theFramework Laptop 13 Pro. And yes, this is subjective, but theX1 Carbonis simply thenicer devicewhen compared to theFramework, with
its expansion-card slots, visible seams and sort-ofmakeshiftaesthetic. TheThinkPad, with its clean lines and total absence of visual clutter looks and
feels like a finished, more premium product. And with around 400g less in weight
than theFramework 13 Pro, which also happens to be noticeably thicker, theX1is more of the type of device that I don’t mindcarrying around.
Linux
Now, as for Linux compatibility, it turns out thatPanther Lakeis, somewhat
surprisingly, in excellent shape on Linux.Phoronixran theX7 358Hthrougharound 300 benchmarks on Ubuntu 26.04 with the Linux 6.19 kerneland
found it already“in very good shape for both performance and power efficiency,
exceeding expectations […] relative to prior generation Intel laptop
processors as well as the AMD Strix Point competition”. For a brand-new
architecture, that is about as good a verdict as you can hope for, and it
matches my experience with the newer 7.x kernels.
A few things that I’ve stumbled upon during my first few weeks with theLenovothat still need to be sorted out are …
For anyone considering this machine for Linux, you’ll want a recent Kernel
version.Panther Lakesupport landed and matured around Linux 6.19 / 7.x, so
don’t try to run this on some ancienteNtErPrIsELTS kernel and expect theXe3graphics or power management to behave. Speaking of which, theXe3iGPU
uses the modernxeDRM driver and theIntelMesa stack. OnWayland/Swayit’s beenalmostflawless and does everything,
from hardware acceleration, to external displays.
Migration
The actual switch from theStarBookto theThinkPadwas almost painless,
which is the highest praise I can give it. With thehardened Gentoothat I’m running the“migration”consisted of
basically 1. taking theSK hynix P31out of theStarBook, 2.
putting it into theThinkPad, 3. and booting (and 4. recompiling the whole
system*cough*).
The one sensible precaution I took was switching from my hand-rolled,
hardware-specific kernel to Gentoo’s pre-built binary kernel on the latest Linux
7.x series for the move. A distribution kernel ships with essentially every
important driver, so it doesn’t care that it suddenly woke up on completely
different silicon.
Once I’d confirmed everything worked, I could go back to trimming the kernel
down at my leisure. MySway/Wayland setup, mydotfilesand
my entire terminal-centric workflow are deliberatelysystem-agnostic, so beyond the kernel swap there wasalmostnothing to reconfigure.
Where it did take a little while, though, was the rebuild. My system had been
optimised forZen 3(theStarBook’sRyzen) which means the entire thing
had been compiled with-march=znver3. So I changed themarchflag to suit
the newPanther Lakeand rebuilt the whole system from scratch with the usualemerge --ask --emptytree --newuse --keep-going --verbose --deep @worldcommand, which amounted to somewhere around 1600 packages churning through the
compiler before everything was once again native to the hardware it was actually
running on.
Note:The system ran just fine on thePanther Lake, despite having been
compiled with Zen 3 architecture optimizations, with the exception of browsers
(Ungoogled Chromium,LibreWolf). Those would suffer from crashing tabs all
the time, with a correspondingtrap invalid opcodeindmesg. However, it is
nevertheless a good idea to rebuild the whole system, rather than only the
obviously affected packages, to avoid any surprises down the road.
On top of that there were some hardware-specific bits to sort out. I had to
install additional firmware (sof-firmware,intel-microcode), and I had to
migrate fromamdgputointelinVIDEO_CARDSfor packages likemesaandlibdrmto use theIntelhardware, and I also needed thelibva-intel-media-driverpackage.
Firmware
Now for the part that, as aprivacy-focuseduser, is pretty bad.
TheX1 Carbon Gen 14runsLenovo’s proprietary UEFI firmware, and theIntel
Management Engineis present and active. There is noCorebootport for this
machine, and there almost certainly never will be.
This was, hands down, the hardest pill to swallow. One of the few things theStarBookpromised(even ifStar Labstook actual years to
ship the first version for AMD) was an eventualCorebootpath. On theLenovo, however, you are trusting a closed firmware blob and a processor with
a co-processor, engineered by a company that ispartially owned by the US government, that you cannot audit, sitting
below your operating system, with its own network-capable stack, that was built
by aChinese company.
Lenovospecifically does not have a spotless record here. This is the company
that shipped theSuperfishadware with a self-signed root CA that
actively broke TLS on consumer machines in 2015, and that same year was caught
using theLenovo Service Enginefirmware mechanism (via Windows'WPBT) to silently reinstall software from the BIOS. To be fair, both of those
scandals hit the consumerIdeaPad/Yogalines rather than the businessThinkPads, and they’re a decade old, but they’re a reminder of what this
vendor can do when seemingly nobody’s watching.
Of course this is not unique toLenovoand the exact sameIME-and-no-Corebootreality applies to thatFrameworkI was just comparing
it to, to theASUSI was chasing, and to essentially every modern x86 laptop
you can actually buy and use as a daily driver in 2026. There is no liberated,Coreboot-running,ME-less machine with a current CPU, a 2.8K OLED and
worldwide service. You either run a decade-oldThinkPadas a matter of
principle, or you make peace with the fact that the firmware layer is a
compromise and that you simplycannot guarantee to not be compromised.
If a fully open firmware stack is a hard requirement for you, then this laptop,
like nearly all of its contemporaries, will disappoint you, and it’ll likely not
be for you.
Price
None of this is cheap, and the ongoinghardware crisishasn’t helped.
Pricing starts at around $2,000 for aCore Ultra 5with the FHD IPS panel, a
configuration like mine lands well above that, with maxed-out units sailing
confidently past the $3,000-mark. I was lucky to get a good deal (relatively
speaking) on my specific device, but ultimately paying top money for a 32GB,
soldered-RAM machine still stings. However,as I explained,
after the year I’ve had,reliability and serviceabilitywere worth the premium
to me.
Verdict
TheThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 14 Aura Editionis not the laptop I would buy in a
perfect world. In a perfect world I would get something with user-replaceable
RAM, a bigger battery and an open firmware stack with noManagement Enginelurking beneath it. All of that ideally designed and at least partially
manufactured by a European company that could potentially tip the global scales
away from the US/China duopoly.
But we don’t live in that world, and given the options that actually exist, this
is the mostsensiblemachine that would fit my life right now. It’s
astonishingly light, the OLED is gorgeous,Panther Lakeis fast and efficient
on Linux, theSpace Framemakes it repairable, and there’s an authorised
service centre for it on every continent I’m likely to find myself on. After the
year of hardware attrition I’ve had,boring reliabilityandserviceability
anywhereturned out to be the features I valued most.
If theStarBookwas thedreamychoice, that dream ended in continuous
glitches and ultimatelya CH341A programmer. This is now the pragmatic
choice where theLenovois the tool thatjust worksand it (hopefully)
continues to do so for the foreseeable future.
PS:Make sure to checkfuture updatesif you’re interested about
the long-term experience with theLenovo X1 Carbon.
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