BennyCHill [he/him]

There are no drivers available because they are not needed, vast majority of hardware drivers are included in the Linux kernel, sometimes proprietary firmwares are needed but most distros tend to include them.

One of the big exceptions to this rule is the Nvidia driver, more recent cards now have an open source driver, but the 940mx included in the T470p is old and unsupported and wont do you much good on Linux.

i saw on the shop you linked they have a T480 with 8th gen i5 available for slightly more: https://www.pchouse.ro/lenovo-thinkpad-t480-14-fhd-i5-8350u-8gb-ddr4-256gb-ssd-nvme-windows-optional-laptop-refurbished-grad-a.html
This is one of the most popular Thinkpads currently because 8th gen intel made a large leap in performance (so the T480 low power CPU is almost as fast as the T470p high power one) and it also has pretty much perfect Linux support.

Otherwise the A485 would be my secret recommendation although kinda hard to find. its the same exact laptop as the T480 but with an AMD cpu which is pretty much the same speed as the intel one, but its integrated graphics are much faster, in fact almost matching the 940mx performance.

both intel and amd have introduced memory encryption a couple gens. ago although not supported on all devices.

TPM uses parts of your system like hardware configuration, bios version, can even use parts of the OS, to generate a hashcode to decrypt your drive, so if anything gets replaced it wont automatically decrypt. what this allows is to have a much more complex decryption key and allows you to rely on OS security and much simpler passwords to protect your data because your OS (which cannot be replaced without breaking TPM) will protect against brute force attacks with retry delays and limits.

Did you let fedora create the partitions or did you do manual partitioning?

Tiling Shell has been my favorite tiling manager so far, works just like fancyzones on windows, but also makes the widget that pops up on the top of the screen when moving windows have your custom layouts.

Despite snaps, ubuntu is still one of the most stable distros. i had less issues with ubuntu than i had with either fedora or opensuse (leap and tumbleweed).

Its not proprietary but flatpak is “taking the android route” as in providing a “app store” with sandboxed apps and standardized runtimes whose permissions can be limited and expanded at runtime by requesting the user. they already have a system for tipping devs and IIRC also wanna include a way to pay for apps.

The proprietary version of this would be Ubuntus snaps, but since the proper functionality of them is limited to ubuntu as the only distro i doubt they will take off

Pls stop giving billion dollar corporations so much credit.

The difference comes from windows dominant (home pc) market position meaning that almost all software and hardware is specifically made to work with it, with even things that officially support linux being afterthoughts.