I switched back to my Dell OptiPlex 3050 Micro, running the latest Libreboot. ThinkPads are great, but I like my mechanical keyboard. I also have 2 SSDs in RAID1 and I bodged a 2.5Gbps realtek NIC.

I added these notes, thanks to help from Ron Nazarov:

https://libreboot.org/docs/install/dell3050.html#coffee-lake-cpu-support

Not tested yet but I'll try it when I get the opportunity. If it works, then I'll document it precisely. It'd be nice to retrofit 9th gen 8-core CPUs into this tiny machine. I love this machine, been using it for a while.