Software-wise, part of it is my fault for imposing Debian Stable on myself, rather than choosing a newer distro. Hardware-wise, though, I do imagine that X220 is quite a bit easier to bust open.
In all fairness, though, besides a LUK2/Btrfs configuration that would have been annoying to do on any platform anyhow, this was probably the easiest Linux install I have ever done*. My previous main portable device was a first-gen Surface Go that (with the special linux-surface kernel) worked okay except for glitches surrounding sleep and wake that lead to lots of reboots. One day, the initramfs got borked and I didn’t use it frequently enough (as I had a work Chromebook I was forced to use and at home I could just use my desktop) to bother to chroot in and fix it. Server someday?
Eventually, I received my work Chromebook, an AMD Stoney Ridge, when I left and it was decommissioned, which I installed Linux on and then proceeded to compile a custom kernel just to get audio working. (I eventually tried to automate this in Gitlab CI for fun, but found more important things to do.)
I then tried an old Lenovo Yoga 710 15-IKB from circa 2016 I had sitting around, but it had a damaged digitizer that was getting to be a laceration hazard; it was literally cheaper to buy an entire working one on eBay than replace the wrong part. It also had a hardware defect where the camera would quit working until you gave the bezel a little pinch in the right spot. Thus, it mostly just sits around as a backup machine in case my Thinkpad were to suddenly explode, and maybe I’ll put it to server duty in the near future.
Even my desktop was just a bit more effort to install, as it has been running Debian Testing since 2022 (my first daily driver Linux system) when Bookworm was still testing and before Debian started including non-free firmware in the installer by default, meaning I had to install several things to get it fully working. Tied with my desktop was a circa-2010 Fujitsu Lifebook that I threw Buster on that also needed Wi-Fi firmware.
I’ll take one yeating of newer distribution kernel in comparison. 😂