New thinkpads are trash unfortunately. Lenovo really cheaped out on their build quality. I’ve had to fix multiple lenovo laptops and one of their all-in-ones and the corners they cut made the repairs either impossible or extremely difficult.

One new ideapad had to go back to them twice with motherboard issues.

Replacing the keyboard is impossible, you need to replace the whole front panel of the case becuase the keyboard is plastic rivited in place.

The all-in-one started as a simple ram and storage upgrade, but in order to do that the whole back panel needs to come off. Its snapped on but the LCD panel itself doesn’t have any subframe around it, so when opening the back panel theres a very high chance of you cracking the display.

New thinkpads are trash unfortunately. Lenovo really cheaped out on their build quality. I’ve had to fix multiple lenovo laptops and one of their all-in-ones and the corners they cut made the repairs either impossible or extremely difficult.

One new ideapad had to go back to them twice with motherboard issues.

Replacing the keyboard is impossible, you need to replace the whole front panel of the case becuase the keyboard is plastic rivited in place.

The all-in-one started as a simple ram and storage upgrade, but in order to do that the whole back panel needs to come off. Its snapped on but the LCD panel itself doesn’t have any subframe around it, so when opening the back panel theres a very high chance of you cracking the display.

As others have said, nvidia will work but you’re better off with amd for the GPU. CPU brand doesn’t really matter.

If you’re duel booting, I definitely recommend two separate drives, one for each OS. Use the bios boot selector to boot between the two. It makes things much much easier if they’re not sharing a drive

But we know based on OPs usage requirements, he’s not one of those people doing everything in the browser.

Updates are important regardless of fomo. They’re not only for adding new features, they’re for fixing bugs and improving stability and these changes rarely get backported unless their critical.

The core Debian might be stable, but, for example, plasma 6.3 is much more stable than 5.27

Debian is stable and will work, but there are other options that are basically as stable and have much newer packages - improving desktop stability and user experience

Debian 12.9 was released a few months ago based on kernel 6.1 LTS, the latest kernel is 6.13, with 6.12 being the new LTS.

Debian packages are updated for bug fixes and security updates, but they generally don’t update to new versions.

If you’re running KDE Debian, your version is plasma 5.27, meanwhile 6.3 was just released.

There are a massive amount of quality of life improvements that debain 12 stable will never get. Sure you can backport some, but then it’s not really debain stable is it?

Meanwhile there are plenty of other distros that are almost just as stable, but have newer versions of everything. Not to mention the stability improvements of the newer software (one example is plasma 6.3 is a massive improvement over 5.27)

Like I said, I love Debian, but if you’re doing daily driving of the computer, I think there are better alternatives

Have you looked at tumbleweed? Its a rolling release so its always up to date but opensuse’s testing is fantastic. It’s very stable and on the off chance there’s a regression that impacts usability, it has built in version snapshots. It takes literally 45 seconds to roll back to a previous working version.

I keep seeing people recommending Debian. Its a great OS, especially for server stuff (which I use in multiple VMs in my home lab), but I wouldn’t recommend it on a computer you’re actively using. They take so long to update packages you’re always multiple versions behind. This really makes it difficult to get bug fixes and patches for software that you’re using on a daily basis. The hardware support is never as good as other options.

Or opensuse tumbleweed!

Opensuse Tumbleweed is great, I’ve been daily driving it for ages on 3+ devices. It’s a rolling release and has all the latest packages, but is extremely stable. It has a built in recovery tool called snapper that allows you to roll back to a previous state before an update on the off chance you get a bad one. Ive only had to use it a few times over the years but it’s been great to have.

Really underrated distro imo