Will this Lenovo Thinkpad (AMD) work well with linux, or should I go intel?

AMD for sure.

I’ve had a T series with a 5850 in it for a while now, and it’s an absolute champ. Definitely one of the best laptops I’ve owned.

There's really no difference between cpu manifacturers. You should instead consider that the fingerprint reader can easily be a pain in the ass to make it work properly

AMD and Intel both have very good linux support. On that note there shouldn't be much of a difference.

In fact, AMD GPU drivers are quite a bit ahead of Intel on Linux. And the AMD laptop has a significantly more powerful iGPU plus it has DDR5 ram. So it should give you noticeably better performance.

More problematic could be the wifi chip, fingerprint reader and maybe the camera.

Wifi nowadays works well on Linux so I don't think that should be much of a problem. Intel Wifi usually has better support though.

Cameras also mostly work though the IR sensor might not work.

Fingerprint support on linux is 50/50 (from linux-hardware, it seems fingerprint on similar models is not working unfortunately). If you know the exact fingerprint reader model on the laptop you can check if it has linux support.

Thinkpads usually have good support on Linux overall so I won't be too worried with either option. I couldn't find the exact models on linux-hardware.org, however I did find similar models:

All AMD models by this name (E14 Gen 6)

All Intel models by this name (E14 Gen 5)

21M3002TGE

21JK0009SP

AMD is no problem. Only nvidea (of the big mainstream hardware manufacturers) does not supply Linux drivers.

In fact AMD will most likely make it easier than Intel if something doesn't work. Intel pretty mutch only thinks about Winows, so if there are driver problems, there are only windows drivers to download on their website (but there shouldn't be an problems in the first place anyway)

Webcam on Intel may not work due to drivers that Intel hasn't written/upstreamed for IPU6 cameras. Looks like it's in the work now... for certain sensors. Intel has taken literal years to get anything out. the Core Ultra 200 series is out but drivers for these webcams which have in use since Tiger lake (almost half a decade ago!!) still don't work.

"Greg KH Recommends Avoiding Alder Lake Laptops" https://www.phoronix.com/news/Greg-KH-No-ADL-Webcam-Laptop

Nor the integrated cameras or the IR camera worked out of the box on my laptop. Some hacks could be done to make it work but it breaks after the system is updated. It never worked when I needed it and image quality was limited to 720p and worse. From what I understand, current methods to get the camera to work use minimal software processing to process the images, instead of the dedicated silicon.

Not all Intel laptops use IPU6. I know some HPs do not.

Haven't had many issues with the Intel AX211. Very rarely, the wifi settings will disappear after my laptop suspends and a reboot is needed.

The battery capacity also doesn't seem very big, I'm not sure how efficient the AMD CPU is but I'd be worried that Intel would deliver less battery life.

GPU performance might also be better on AMD? (haven't checked).

@makingStuffForFun anything AMD should work fine as long as there’s no Nvidia involved

I have a similarly spec'd E14 Gen 6. I run Fedora and am very happy. I didn't need to do anything, everything ran out of the box (even the fingerprint sensor and the little nob).

One thing I didn't see mentioned yet that's in favor of AMD: Intel and its stupid, stupid IPU6 system. I've got a new work laptop now with an Intel Meteor Lake chip and the webcam is hooked up via IPU6. This means that I can't use the built-in webcam until upstream support for the specific sensor arrives in the kernel.

Some sensors are already supported but it shouldn't be this hard to make the internal webcam of your laptop work. I thought these issues were a thing of the past.

If it helps, I'm running PopOS on a Ryzen-powered Lenovo laptop (Yoga 6) with integrated graphics. No issues whatsoever, so far

I have basically the same machine (7730u instead of 7735u) - works great (go into bios and set power saving mode (default is smart cool, which is not that great, I had higher power consumption at idle) and disable psp)

AMD vs Intel - does not really matter - try to find performance/price ratio and pick better one. Also, go on lenovo configurator site, yoou maybe able to find (or spec up) the same laptop for even cheaper (I got mine for about $400)

@makingStuffForFun My E16 G1 which is similar works perfectly

I've had a very good experience with a similarly-speced AMD E16 gen 1.

The only issue I'd warn you about is the Wi-Fi modem might be a Realtek on some models. Mine came with one, and while on recent kernels, it mostly worked well out of the box, it had one issue: something went weird with ACPI when I switched between certain networks, which caused the card to crash and completely disconnect to the system unless I rebooted. I was able to find a fix by changing some options with modprobe.d, which I detail here: https://startrek.website/post/14342770 . Since that, it's been an extremely smooth experience.

To explain why AMD is fine: Linux doesn't care about the brand, it just needs a chip that uses the x86 instruction set. This was Intel's invention and AMD occupies the niche of Intel's competitor. Intel is Coke, AMD is Pepsi, basically.