I’ve been enjoying my Thinkpad E16 1st gen AMD on Debian 12. You do have to run a newer kernel to get it working. I ran into a bit of Wi-Fi trouble because I accidentally got a Realtek model, but I’ve long since fixed the issue entirely - I’ve posted the solution elsewhere here.
On another note, maybe we should just have a yearly hardware recommendations post pinned on this forum - it feels like we get a question like this every week or so and they sort of clutter the forum, no offense intended to OP.
Edit: Here’s my Linux Hardware probe from when I first got the laptop https://linux-hardware.org/?probe=1e50fb1862
I’ve done it with ffmpeg before - I think the command’s on the Arch wiki. I preserved subtitles as well. I overall remember it being pretty reasonable since I didn’t set it up to re-encode, just pass through original video.