Unfortunately, it doesn't look good yet. I made a USB drive with LMDE 7. I disabled secure boot on the laptop. LMDE took a very long time to boot.
WiFi connected without a problem, Bluetooth as well, and the touchpad works flawlessly.
But it takes forever to boot anything. Once the terminal started, I tried to add htop and it failed. It timed out, but it downloaded.
Maybe it's my USB drive? Although it previously had LMDE 6 on it and booted without a hitch on my old Lenovo machine with an i5 3210M.
Now I can't test LMDE 7 on the Lenovo because I need it.
I'll keep you updated on any changes.
EDIT (Dec 8, 2025):
Changing the flash drive helped. The new flash drive has a read speed of >400MB/s, connected to the Thunderbolt port. LMDE boots up instantly, taking up about 1.2GB of RAM.
Wi-Fi works flawlessly; in test speeds, it only uses what the router provides. The touchpad, as I mentioned earlier, is also fine. Bluetooth paired the headphones, but there was no sound. USB ports are fine, the external keyboard works, the additional flash drive is recognized and can be mounted. The second screen is fine. Programs start immediately. Graphics:
glmark - 1492
vulkan - ok
web basemark - 1079
vainfo detected VAProfileH264Main, VAProfileAV1Profile0
CPU:
cpu-x: prime numbers(slow)-60281 - 1 thread
cpu-x: prime numbers(fast)-3628839 - 1 thread
cpu-x: prime numbers(slow)-210615 - 14 threads
cpu-x: prime numbers(slow)-18699731 - 14 threads
stress --cpu 4 - 31539
sysbench 839504
Browser:
50 tabs running YouTube, max resolution - ok
video - ok
That's all for now. I know it's not much detail, but that's all I had time for. When I have more time, I'll provide more data from the LMDE live tests.
Overall, I'm pleased and increasingly convinced of my decision to ditch Windows forever.