Low hanging fruit, but whatever. It is what it is.
I have got so many used ThinkPads. Everyone in my house has one.
Can I have one IBM ThinkPad 701 it’s old and it’s not like you’re using it anyways.
I tried to buy a system 76 pangolin but they don’t ship to Australia (yet?)
Sad
System76 and Framework are mostly North America and Western Europe. Pine64 might sell in Australia.
Framework have been shipping to Australia for ages. I ordered in December 2022 and it drop shipped from Taiwan to rural Australia in about a week. It was faster than ordering parts from pccasegear though that isn’t saying much.
I have been a fan of System76 since I saw some stickers at a conference nearly two decades ago. I think they have good intentions but unfortunately a badge engineering company for most of their existence. The quality hasn’t always been there from their ODMs and foreign RMA bothers me. You can buy a clevo or tong fang from local resellers and cover it in linux stickers.
The used market in Australia is bad for most things unfortunately.
I got unbuntu on my xiaomi notebook with a nice oled screen. It worked almost immediately. Easier install then windows. I chose Ubuntu as my first linux because of lots of support.
As far as I heard, their designs are similar to macbooks, are the keyboards as terrible?
I think its a preference, I prefer the keyboard over mac. But the build quality and hardware is just really good for the price.
Good luck opening more than like 5 browser windows on those old thinkpads
The refurbished thinkpads you find are usually three years old after the companies who lease them buy new ones for the users.
You can do a lot of things with a three year old thinkpad…
here it’s typically early-to-mid 2010s thinkpads being sold, so you’re probably getting a laptop with horrible performance
4th and 6th gen intel isn’t too bad yet (which would be early 2010s), especially for a Linux desktop/laptop. I wouldn’t go older than that just because 4th and 6th gen is so readily available for so cheap, but they certainly aren’t anywhere near e-waste yet. Mid-2010s would be more like 7th-9th gen Intel which is newer than all but one of the computers in my home.
I literally use a laptop with a mobile i7-6700 as a daily web browsing computer (and I tend to keep over a hundred tabs open) and really don’t feel any slowness. I’ve got a desktop with an i5-4590 running 5 different Minecraft servers (a couple of which have over 300 mods running) plus most of my homelab services as well. They’re not for the graveyard yet!
