ThinkPads generally have great Linux support because they’re really popular in the community.

One thing though, forget about the fingerprint reader. You can get it to work with some effort, but it’s essentially useless because it’s not integrated like on win/mac.

Mint is a good choice for beginners (IMO MX > Mint). Just remember to use flatpaks for software you want to keep up to date. Also, if you end up disliking cinnamon, it’s probably better to switch distros.

There are a bunch of probes in the linux hardware database. You can check what they are like for your exact model.

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You may need to update the UEFI firmware.

congrats on your foray into linuxland. its possibly one of the better decisions you can make for yourself and mint is a great way to start because its reasoably well polished and the UI is familiar. issues usually arise from extremely old (and likely broken) hardware or from bleeding edge hardware that does not yet have support.

as others have said, things are likely to work pretty well right from the get-go, but, in the event of an issue, you have support! :-)

I use a T460 as my daily in the living room.

Mine has an internal battery as well as a removable, large removable is a beast, literally lasts me all day and this machine is like 2017 or so. Backlit.keyboard. not sure they all have it but mine has a sim card slot and wan card built.l in. So internet is easy on a data only sim without tethering. Those wan cards are cheap too if it doesn’t come with.

BIOS has TPM and all that so its easy to secure. Also handles virtual machines well (supports vtx, vtd, Intel text, or and iommu - hyperthreading etc). Typically lenovos T series always have these. I expect most people having issues probably don’t set the BIOS options correctly. Efi supported as expected. Passes all the requirements for w11 if thats your jam. The machine is solid.

I run fedora 39 with sway/hyprland/KDE options. Installed from ‘fedora anything’ image was a breeze via usb. saying that, the only real hindrance these days is lack of usb3.0. So installing from USB is alright the once, but use network for transfers instead of usb sticks if you can.

Resuming from standby isn’t an issue on fedora or arch but it was on debian. If you have any issues, you can send me a PM. The resume from standby issue on Debian was the only thing I never solved reliably.

Oh has ddr3, but those sticks are cheap so you can throw in dual 8gb sodimms for less than 50quid/Euros. I’m sure it’ll take 32gb (dual 16gbs) but I haven’t bothered. I’m running 1600mhz sticks, but it should support up to 2133mhz sticks… have a 1tB ssd slotted in for under 100.

Mint is lovely, as are all other Linux distros. However, if you want the latest stuff without going off piste and compiling it yourself, then a rolling, bleeding edge distro might appeal to you. You do mention that you have prior Linux experience.

I own a UK based IT company (as you do) with two other partners (I’m MD and not a doctor) and a slack handful of (lovely - obvs) employees. I personally like Arch on my gear. I used to sport Gentoo but my nadgers complained about being overheated too often. I still have a fair few Gentoo VMs lying around the place.

You might like to try a https://manjaro.org/ effort - I prefer the Plasma desktop spin (KDE). That’s Arch with a few more GUIs. Their Konsole is quite something with zsh and a very stylish prompt.

So far I have managed to get Linux to work on everything I have access to which is rather a lot of hardware. Back in the day wifi was a bit wanky and there was ndiswrapper but nowadays I generally find that laptops from HPE and Dell are just as well supported with Linux as Windows, often better.

I finally ditched Windows on my stuff at Windows 7 - that was my wife’s laptop - a GPU update screwed up and that was the final straw. She has been an Arch user for a good seven years and could not give a shit about what is running on her laptop, provided it works and does stuff.