Jan booted Ubuntu 16.10 straight into the graphical mode of the Live CD without a problem. The GPU seems to be well supported under Linux (at least much better than the VIA Chromotion chipsets in the hp 510).
In July 2018 I heard from Hans in the Netherlands. He had recently acquired a t520, had upped the flash memory to 64GB and had installed Linux Mint 18.3 MATE edition and was very pleased with the result. On the plus side he commented on the almost instant start-up, on the negative side he felt that Firefox was a little slow rendering web pages - an area for further investigation.
In December 2022 I heard from Roels who had encountered problems with the network when installing Debian 11. Essentially it happily installed a driver but subsequently there was zero traffic on the interface. He found the problem and the solution described on realtechtalk.com.
"Linux seems to think it is fine to use the r8169 driver for an r8168 NIC but this often causes problems including the link not working at all."
The solution is to blacklist the r8169 driver and to install the r8168 driver. Bizarrely the description given in the link above assumes you have a working network interface on your machine.
Roels's approach was:
In July 2023 I heard from Terrence who reports that the problem appears to have gone away with Debian 12 (Bookworm).