So I upgraded to a 2K HDR screen a while back, used it for a bit, and honestly the colors are a little too vivid, and even with 500 nits I never use the brightness. But the biggest thing: 2560 x 1440 is just stuck in an awkward middle ground. I’m a Linux user, and Linux has always been terrible at fractional scaling. People say Wayland supports it now, but one, my discrete GPU has no Wayland driver, and two, Wayland performance is a joke — the mouse stuttering in particular is absolutely maddening. Word is Wayland mouse handling goes through libinput, which shares a single thread with gnome-shell, so high system load equals stutter. Fucking stupid. In the end I couldn’t stand 2K’s nonsense scaling anymore and chose to “throw money at the problem” — went 4K.

I was using a ThinkPad X250 before this, and I upgraded it bit by bit over time, but I had a few complaints about that laptop: Cooling was terrible. Hook it up to a dock and it hits 90°C in no time, and breaking 100°C was routine. I tried modding it, but it was basically useless. Performance was lacking. With the dock running dual 1080p displays, it just couldn’t handle it—open YouTube and performance explodes. Build quality was so-so. The ThinkPad X250 was a step back from the X230 in terms of build. It’s all fiberglass, even though every media outlet hypes it as carbon fiber. It’s not, and there’s no metal either. Fiberglass, plainly put… is plastic. Overall, the laptop was okay at first, but later it started to annoy me, so I planned to upgrade after two years. This time I looked at the X270, but found nothing new, and it seems the ThinkPad series has given up on the X200 line. So my targets were the ThinkPad X1 Carbon and Yoga.