The Lenovo T450s Is Working Beautifully With Linux

Using It:

The Good:
1. The system is very quick to boot and load any programs.
2. It is very quiet, the only time I hear the fan turn on is when I am watching videos, running benchmarks, or playing games.
3. Screen is beautiful. When I went back to my old system to run benchmarks everything felt very cramped and pixelated. I hope I never have to run a system with less than 1080p ever again.
4. Keyboard backlight and all keyboard hotkeys work currently under Linux.

The Bad*:
1. Webcam driver is currently broken on it. When using skype, xawt or VLC to record video from the webcam it produces a very static-y image with green bars cutting through it. I'm guessing its a bug going from Video4Linux (V4L) 1 to Video4Linux 2. Cheese, which uses V4L2, works perfectly fine.
2. The battery life under Linux is still not up to par with Windows. I didn't explicitly enable semaphores, rc6, LVDS_Downclock or framebuffer compression on this system. Whether or not those are enabled is decided by the driver on a per chip / per generation basis. Michael has said he might be doing a future article that will look at those options again to see whether they are still needed, and I shall decide after that article whether or not to explicitly enable those options.
3. I tried enabling GPU acceleration under Firefox to test it out and see if there was any performance or power efficiency gains to be had. That configuration worked fine for just browsing web pages, but if I would try to watch a video then the video would heavily flicker every half second or so.
4. KDE Screenshot utility currently seems to be broken. It's not automatically saving screenshots and if you attempt to do “Save As” it retakes the screenshot a moment later so that it includes the “Save As” dialog... Gnome-screenshot works perfectly fine from the command line.
5. The battery monitor for KDE seems to have a problem when there's more than 1 battery and they drain independently.

* Before anyone asks: Bug Reports haven't been made yet, but they will be when I get the chance to.

The Ugly:
1. Touchpad palm detection is... basically nonexistent. I tried playing with the synaptics KCM under KDE System Settings and didn't get anywhere with it. It really is infuriating to be typing up a paper when suddenly half of your paper is highlighted and you just erased half of it because your palm brushed the touchpad. Thank god for ctlr-z. I am crossing my fingers libinput and Fedora 22 will help things a bit, but we'll see.