ofc I imediatly upgraded it from winxp to gnu/linux
Very cool. I love those IBM Thinkpads.
Fuck lenovothe older lenovo models aren’t bad, but the shit they pump out recently is well, shit
I thought Lenovo was two different brands, one consumer (terrible) and one corporate (decent). Is that no longer true?
Lenovo makes consumer crap with their own brand and they have Think -line of products from the big blue and the latter is pretty much comparable to all the other big players (dell, hp, fujitsu…) on desktop/laptop market. Each have their own annoyances and fuckups and in general if you ask opinion from 3 IT professionals on which brand to buy you’ll get 4-6 answers.
Personally if I’m looking for a laptop I’ll go to pre-leased and refurbished thinkpad. I currently have T465 and for wife I got pretty decent Tsomething from the office for peanuts.
I bought out both a T430 and L480 because of their build quality and stability, and just got a little confused as to whether the opinion changed recently or if they merged divisions.
I was recently provisioned a Dell and… well, I’m not buying that one.
I haven’t paid too much attention on what lenovo is doing lately, but at some point they brought L-series thinkpad-branded laptops on the market which was pretty much garbage. At least in here local stores sold first models of L-series as a ‘thinkpad grade laptops for consumer pricing’ and they were just bad on all fronts, as the L-series was just a competition on a*-brands trying to get their share for sub-300€ (or whatever that was at the time) laptops from your equivalent of walmart riding on the brand which they didn’t build.
Gladly that died out pretty soon and Think* brand is still somewhat strong with their T/W/X models as they used to be when IBM ran the business. Of course they had their own issues too, USB-C docks were garbage with everyone when they started to appear and people at the office still curse on thinkpads for various issues with firmware/hardware/whatever, but in my experience it’s been the same road for all the big players. Dell had a pretty decent sales/support going on at 2010(ish), but their hardware had plenty of problems, HP had pretty good pricing for their hardware a bit later, but they had massive issues with firmware and so on.
I’ve been pretty happy with thinkpads I’ve got since R50 brand new (if I recall correctly) and for me they’ve been available on second hand market in here since that. But that’s just a personal experience, I’ve never been in charge to buy hunderds of anything on IT department at work.
Still rings true a little, their quality is far better than their competitors though. I’ve had a lot less issues with the functionality of lenovo laptops over the crap acer or asus or dell produce.
It kinda became muddled around the X1 Carbon when they decided that thin chasis = better, and then started cutting features
I had to do a battery replacement on the L480. They had top-notch support on what part number to order, video guide on how to properly disassemble the case, remove ribbon cables, etc etc etc. I wish all companies had that kind of support.
They had a Chinese back door in the firmware. Don’t know if that’s still the case. https://www.techworm.net/2015/08/lenovo-pcs-and-laptops-seem-to-have-a-bios-level-backdoor.html They’ve had several major (intentional) security flaws over the years. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenovo They had a modified UEFI that allows insecure execution of EXEs. The Lenovo laptops given to US military in Iraq had keyloggers that sent all inputs back to China.
Liberboot ftw
In the case of the soldiers in Iraq, China had installed an independent chip specifically for keylogging. I don’t know if replacing the boot loader would even solve that.
Oh I read it was a backdoored BIOS.
Yeah libreboot would probably not help much then.
Haven’t really used the older models but the x1c line is decent imo. Also t14. Z line is also good but focuses on different crowd.
I’d run XFCE themed with Chicago95 in this everyday.
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, jf you want a repairable laptop go for a Framework
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.
Dell Latitudes were top. I had numerous.
I had 4 Dells in the last 4 years. Two different models, each one required one RMA, and both are absolute garbage. Granted, they’re workstations and not ultrabooks, but those things need thrust reversers so the fans don’t blow them off the desk, they run extremely hot and have countless stupid bugs. For example USB devices sometimes not working after suspension. Or randomly turning on and getting hot for no reason.
And these fuckers have more coil whine than anything I’ve ever experienced.
My old ThinkPad (which had almost the same components as the first Dell) didn’t have any of these problems.
I don’t like Dell.
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
Depends on what you call ‘old’ and what your use case is. My T495 was less than 300€ and it does everything I need from a laptop easily. Bigger drive would be nice, but once the summer is over I rarely need to pull 4K video from sd-cards in temporary storage, so I doubt I’ll bother to upgrade it any time soon.
If you can afford and you want, the only argument I can put forward is less ewaste if you give a second life to the many very decent professional thinkpads that are retired every year. My employer is now going for a 5 year renewal cycle, used to be 3 for a long time. Unfortunately I couldn’t even buy back mine when it expired because it is a lease subcontract. It had an i5 7th gen and 32gb ram, was buttery smooth even running windows and I dreamt of running Linux on these.
I wouldn’t say that, maybe in the case of the x31 or similarly really old laptops, however newer old laptops like the t60p or t500 aren’t that bad and can still handle every office and internet related workload just fine
I don’t have over 1k to drop on a laptop, I spent $150 on a T440p, it does web browsing and other basic tasks very well.
I’ve owned/used HPs, Dells, and several Thnkpads and the thinkpads by far are always the best machines. They are built to last, support is top notch.
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.
2013 t430 is good but i want the classic keyboard so much
The classic keyboard was legendary, I never understood why they ditched it. Nobody hates the new keyboard, but nobody sings its praises like they did the old one either. And they’ve had a decade to fix this by bringing it back.
Idk my T460 is fine on arch. I honestly feel like the ThinkBooks are the nasty ones and even the newer thinkpads are alright.
Funny how the ThinkBooks are more upgrade-able than the ThinkPads - as in, they have SODIMM, as opposed to on-board memory. But the touch-pad and keyboard is atrocious, and so is the build quality, with Ideapad-like structure.
Yeah I almost felt betrayed buying those. Its company money but I have to deal with it.
I personally disagree, I use a 2013 T440p and it’s an amazing device.
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.
Give me the OLD CHASSIS and the OLD KEYBOARD and make every other component new. I’d be in heaven. I would totally love an absolutely up-to-date x220. And I don’t mean a razor-thin one. I mean a thick one that I can hold in my hand comfortably.
The closest thing we have is Framework
Qubes devs have been using the X1 carbon for years
Years after using one for work, I still cannot get used to having Ctrl not being the leftmost key.
I personally prefer the Thinkpad keyboard
I could get used to it just for control, but pressing ctrl-shift without fn is very awkward, especially since it’s a shortcut I have to use a lot. And then there’s the fact that I unlearn it everyday with my keyboard at home.
There’s a setting in the BIOS to switch these over. You may be able to jump in and do it yourself if the work laptop isn’t too locked down
I like your boss.
I also like this guy’s boss.
I like that boss’s wife.
This is from 2004: https://www.trustedreviews.com/reviews/ibm-thinkpad-x31 It will chew amps (electricity). Recycle it as best you can. Grab a modern box instead.
Unless sparks are free where you live, this beast will become a liability very quickly.
I totally get what you’re saying, but I suspect the OP is not going to be using this device full-time. Or even part-time.
Why? It is working just fine. No need to landfill something functional
I wish someone randomly gifted me a thinkpad as well
You can find them for really good prices usually.
I mean, work in a tech field and have good relations with people who manage hardware, you’ll get to keep some that goes to garbage then, you’ll be surprised how much fairly recent hardware is thrown out by companies
makes me think of the good ol’t times when the air was cleaner, roads were safer and our bosses used to pay us in Thinkpads, not this “fiat money” nonsense.
Good boss. What are you using it as? I’m guessing some homelab setup but will be interesting to know
so far using it as cd player and file writer, would’ve used it as a dvd player, but the video playback is not that great
CD and DVD? I’ve been 100% media server since around 2003. I wholly recommend it.
but disk go spinny
I left mine as XP, keep it around for a couple of ancient ham radio apps.
Do they not work on wine?
Libreboot it.
I’m a gnu/linux noob. I recently installed Pop OS on two older laptops. Am loving it so far. Going to work on getting games functioning on one of them next.
Was blown away when the built-in Disks program was able to easily fix a couple of thumb drives I have that were suffering from logical corruption. They were completely unusable in Windows 11. I tried 4 different methods in Windows 11 to fix them, with zero luck. Disks fixed them in 2 clicks. They are nicer thumb drives and were somewhat expensive. I am very happy to have them back.
What distro did you put on it?
Look at the bottom left corner. It looks like Lubuntu to me.
I tried, but I couldn’t make out the icon
don’t know about distro but I can see KDE logo there.
no, that’s in fact lxqt, kde is too heavy for this old machine
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.
debian, due to the good 32bit support
Nice. Seems kind of appropriate, given the age of the machine (besides the 32bit support).
I wonder what distro did you use
Slackware and Debian would be the most popular period-correct options.
Half those laptops are older than Ubuntu.Oh okay
I’d wager something like Mandriva being an option too. Fedora was meh at best at that time. Or even Suse.
Thigh socks not included
don’t worry, I do have some
I assume you also have a Blåhaj :3
no (can’t afford it rn)
Based
Due to no mousepad I would recommend installing a tiling wm like sway.
nah trackpoint is just a better touchpad
I use a Thinkpad, the trackpad is nice but honestly I prefer the keyboard for navigation
My first laptop was a handed down R52.
Thanks to that, I never got good with a touchpad.
Now, it’s either mouse or a trackpoint for me.
IMHO, it has a TrackPoint, there’s no need for a a trackpad. I have a x201 on Linux Mint and literally just disable the trackpad.
maybe I will, how’s the 32bit compatibility in your experience?
Not sure, my Thinkpad uses a 64bit CPU (t440p)
I looked it up and it nowhere said 32bit and I won’t compile it myself
I checked and it should be in the repos, if it’s not use i3.
You can just tickle the ni…trackpoint?
Yeah just rub the clit
I have rubbed the Thinkpad nipple many times and I occasionally use it, I still prefer the keyboard
It will sulk if you don’t touch its thing
These are good at holding all sorts of things like doors.
