ofc I imediatly upgraded it from winxp to gnu/linux
What distro did you put on it?
the last time i used a minimalist distro on an old thinkpad; x windows was so heavy that it noticeably slowed everything down. not so much that it wasn’t still useful, but that was only true if i didn’t use kde or gnome or watch netflix on chrome; it sounds like that hasn’t changed much in 20 years.
Due to no mousepad I would recommend installing a tiling wm like sway (forgot to mention I use a Thinkpad, yes I know about the nipple. But consider the extremely high quality keyboard).
I have rubbed the Thinkpad nipple many times and I occasionally use it, I still prefer the keyboard
I like your boss.
I’m new to Linux; what’s with the ThinkPad hype?
It’s a hype for very old, repairable laptops. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, if you want a repairable laptop go for a Framework
you can’t get a framework for 20€ on ebay tho + old thinkpads (older laptops in general) are just way robuster and have better build quality in general
Old laptops are pure suffering. I’d much rather pay the price for a more recent one
ThinkPads are business machines and those are extremely repairable compared to consumer machines. Even my shitty Dell precision has instructions on how to disassemble it etched onto the mainboard. And since business laptops get dumped after a few years of relatively light use (many are de facto stationary), you can get pretty good machines for very cheap.
ThinkPads are just very popular, because they are consistently pretty good and don’t stand in your way softwarewise, which isn’t always true for Dell or HP machines.
They generally have really great linux support for all of their hardware (touchpads, fingerprint readers, etc.), and provide bios updates via fwdup. They are also just nice laptops.
Yeah back when it was IBM before they sold off to Lenovo. Back when their biggest selling point was their priority was keeping you up & running and getting work done. Nowadays nearly all the products are made with the priority “So, how do we design this so the user will have to pay for it multiple times?”
They’re reliable, good quality, have amazing keyboards, and work well with Linux (some even support Libreboot).
They screwed everything after 2011. The X220 and the T420 are two really good devices.
Idk my T460 is fine on arch. I honestly feel like the ThinkBooks are the nasty ones and even the newer thinkpads are alright.
x230 with x220 keyboard also is pretty nice - but unfortunately no longer suitable as main notebook. As nothing useful came out of lenovo after that, others are even worse, nobody has a decent trackpoint and sensible amount of RAM only exist for macs I ended up with one of those for work few months ago.
Years after using one for work, I still cannot get used to having Ctrl not being the leftmost key.
