This is an old revision of the document!
Its a great laptop, and very powerful with an 8 core 8 thread Ryzen7 4700u processor and 16GB 3200mhz RAM
As a result Windows (Meh!) works well, Linux compatibility however needs some work as it one of only a handful of Thinkpads that do not have great Linux support at this time
As of 6th February 2021 there its best to choose a recent Linux with a Kernel version of 5.8 and later, I tried a few but chose Kubuntu 20.10 as it seems to offer an easy route to a usable KDE Desktop, I may distrohop to another in the future as I've never really been a 'fan' of Canonical
As of Late November/Early December I installed Debian an am very, very happy with it
Upgrade to BIOS 1.17 to not have to make the following edits
If the Fn keys don't work on initial boot, there is a work around after booting put it to sleep at SDDM and the wake it up Fn Keys then work or..
This can be down by suspending to ram for 2 seconds during bootup to do this edit crontab using
sudo crontab -e
Then add the following to the bottom of the file
@reboot sudo rtcwake -m mem -s 2
What this does:
@reboot = whan the system boots up sudo = run privileged rtcwake = enter a system sleep state until specified wakeup time -m = use stated suspend mode -mem = ACPI state S3 (Suspend-to-RAM) -s 2 = number of seconds to suspend to RAM for
Plasma audio settings select the advanced tab the select and reselect 'analogue stereo output'
More detail to follow
It looks like the E14 has a real benefit over other (more expensive) models of Thinkpad.
It appears the I/O located on the left hand side of the machine is on a separate (daughter)board to that of the main motherboard, so if the USB power connector physically fails.. You should not need to replace the entire motherboard..
You can see this within the Hardware maintenance guide for the E14 located on the Lenovo support website.