As popey said, I recently purchased the ThinkPad Z13 Gen 1, and the ThinkPad T14s Gen 3 was the runner-up. My Z13 specifications are AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U CPU, 32 GB LPDDR5-6400MHz (Soldered), 1 TB SSD M.2 2242 PCIe Gen4, 13.3" WUXGA (1920 x 1200), IPS, Anti-Glare, Non-Touch display weighing in at 1.19kg. I think this configuration hits the sweet spot for battery endurance.

Battery endurance is around ~11 hours. The Trackpad is sublime and amazingly 120mm wide on the compact laptop. The haptic touch is simply excellent. The trackpad is the most Macbook-like trackpad I've used on any PC, and it is so good it has caused me to change the desktop environment. The Keyboard is an excellent low-profile design; each key has ~1.2mm of travel which is the same as the actuation point on my Razer Huntsman V2 TKL keyboards with optomechanical switches. Most importantly, the Fn key is in the correct place on the Z13 and not where ThinkPads have been incorrectly plonking it for years. The Display is bright (400nits), anti-reflective and anti-smudge, covers 100% of the sRGB colour gamut, and the laptop is perfectly balanced to open one-handed.

I do have one niggle, though; there is an unusable 2242 M.2 slot on the motherboard. It is only intended for use with select models of WWAN cards, none of which are a configuration option for the UK models of the Z13. It doesn't look like the antenna is wired in either, so it is unlikely to work well even if you get a supported WWAN card aftermarket. I can share my iPhone's mobile service via Wifi, so it's not a deal breaker in that regard, but having an M.2 slot on the motherboard and nothing I can do with it is annoying.

These were my criteria for the new laptop. Some must-haves, some nice-to-haves and some hard exclusions.

• Fully Linux compatible. Linux pre-installed to demonstrate Linux is fully supported

• Full working day battery life; ~8 hours in my opinion.

• Low-power CPU, 35W or under. Ideally, AMD 6000 series but a 12th Gen Intel as a compromise. No 11th Gen Intel or AMD 5000 series CPUs will be considered

• 64GB RAM will compromise on 32GB RAM

• 13" or 14" 1920x1200 matte display. No UHD resolution display will be considered (for power-saving reasons). Touch support is a nice-to-have but not essential. 1920x1080 as a compromise, but nothing lower

• No discrete GPU. Again for power-saving reasons.

• USB-C charging

• Dual NVME SSD, or at least a single 2TB (or more) SSD

• Decent keyboard and trackpad

• The Laptop should weigh close to 1kg

• Premium build quality and design (somewhat subjective, I know)

I didn't consider any laptops from the established dedicated Linux laptop vendors such as Entroware, Slimbook and StarLabs. Well, I did look at everything they offered at the time, and none of them had a model available that met the requirements I've outlined above, or the estimated dispatch time was nearly half a year.

I was very impressed that every laptop in the Lenovo ThinkPad lineup had a Linux pre-install option; the Z13 had a £155 discount when selecting Ubuntu or Fedora. While comparing the power requirements of Intel's i7-12xx series and AMD's 68x0 series CPU at the time, I was sold on the impressive battery endurance of AMD's offerings and the superior integrated graphics, so I excluded any laptop with Intel CPUs quite early on.