Man what a coincidence, I’m considering almost same machines: Inspiron 5515 amd 5700U 32 ram and plan b is T14s G2 amd 5850U 32 ram. Someone here warned that i7 11 gen needs some tweaking to get along with qubes, so i just switched to amd in my search to avoid extra hussle.
So you stick with Lenovo and only issue is brightness? How bad it bothers if it does at all? For me brightness is probably too important. Day/night use with same brightness - can’t even imagine.
My current machine is surface pro 4 i5 8gb. 2 problems: touch screen is not touch anymore:) which is fine with me; and battery with just browsing web no video lasts no more than 2 hours - that really bothers, literaly carrying charger in my pocket. And off course lack of ram, but that was expected.
Did you consider other machines similar to above mentioned? I really want as light as possible, max performance cpu(with device size/weight in check) and 32 ram. There are very few overall, and in addition to that qubes compatibility is a hit or miss… I’m kind of getting stressed out with this adventure. Now I see why first advice I got just to get Librem 14 preinstalled…