I’m thinking of picking up a used ThinkPad on eBay for cheap to serve as my daily driver. I’ll likely run LMDE, and primarily use it for web browsing, office programs, coding, and FreeCAD. Any recommendations on which model would best hit the sweet spot of capability vs price?
I have a T480 that I’m very happy with. With shipping I paid a little under $250. It came with 16GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD (which I replaced with a larger one).
Seems to be the top contender atm.
Yep, I think it’s what I’ll be going with!
T14 Gen 3. Or T480 for hot swap battery.
T480 can be had on eBay for 200-300 bucks and will perform very well in modern applications. I’ve seen a few that are banged up pretty bad for under $200, if you’re cool with a well loved laptop.
As long as the insides work all right, I’m good! I’m into thrifting and visible mending, so something well-loved, but cheap, is right up my alley
Funnily enough, I’ve got a pretty well-loved ThinkPad T480 16 GB 8350U sitting right here. Used to be my main development laptop. Now it’s just an agent for Portainer.
Right on!
X1 Carbon. Buy what businesses buy in bulk. They get it for a reason
It’s what I use for work, and it is quite nice!
I got a nice deal on the x280 and am happy with it, was also looking at the various X1 carbon. Two criteria I had were I wanted USB-C charging (since I have those chargers around and they can handle these laptops) and a single battery (eg. the T470s I have from work is nice but it has two small capacity batteries that each cost the same to replace as the full size single ones in the carbon and x280). One thing to keep in mind is some of the earlier X1 carbon don’t support NVME SSD (I think it started with 5th gen?)
Edit: another thing to consider is soldered RAM. Part of why my x280 was cheap was it’s only 8gb and can’t be upgraded. Since you’re looking at lighter weight things and using FOSS (and perhaps open to tinkering with things like ZRAM) that might be a useful aspect to focus on because there is probably a glut of such machines given how memory inefficient things are lately with every trivial app running a whole browser engine. OTOH, depending how many tabs you tend to have open and how many electron apps you tend to keep floating around, 8gb might start to feel cramped. Especially if you think you might want some VMs around.
I got 4gb on my Thinkpad Linux Mint Cinnamon, most the time it runs good but sometimes it slows to crawl with not much on it.
t430 runs great for me but if you need more (stock) performance maybe the t480?
One-up for a fellow 30s series! Currently rocking a W530 semi-mobile workstation!
oooh w series are cool
Same here T440 runs like a charm. I love my brick!
Also I heard the thinkpad golden age was around pre-2005 when ibm was in charge.
You may get top-notch casing and chassis quality, but all the computing stuff would literally be two decades behind.
Yeah, I bought my first laptop, a Thinkpad T43, in 2005. It had something like 512MB-1GB of RAM, a Pentium M processor, and 156 GB of HDD (not SDD). Very good for the time, but there are Raspberry Pi’s with better specs these days.
The early Lenovo period W series were (imho) very good as well, still have my W500 series which is built like a tank. Survived years of college, years of lugging it around to customers and data centres and having somebody spill a full cup of coffee over it (yes, the drain holes do work!). It only required replacing of the monitor cable once, which was a pretty easy thing to do. Unfortunately the CCFL backlight has lost quite some luminance by now, but guess after 16 years that is to be expected. Can’t get myself to part from it though, so many memories attached to it.
Had quite a few of the X and T series, X200, X201, X220, X230, T430 mainly, x230 would be my pick, you can quad-core mod it with the classic keyboard and use ivyra1n to flash the bios easily. I haven’t bothered with the Full-HD mod because the 720p IPS is fine to me, you can get them from Taobao or similar (Check sources!)
They’re all socketed CPUs, or you could get the chonky T530/W530 instead, or a P series. Old Thinkpads last a long time (although I have a bad habit of testing them :)
EDIT: MY T430 was also a fucking tank, it survived being thrown across a room in San Franciso with a tiny dent on the lid, no damage. They’re easier to Full-HD mod than the X series.
My t430 is still going, but my x201 is in better shape.
Does it get slightly hot? The 16:10 was really nice on the X201!
Depends on what I’m doing. For most of my use cases, not really. For universal paperclips, I worry it’ll melt
Fair lol
For me, the X270 ist the sweet spot: it is small and portable and has a acceptable battery( in fact 2 of them). The display is usable and comes in full HD. 720p is a little bit too low for my tastes. You can upgrade the RAM and put an m.2 ssd inside(although only with 2x PCIe bandwidth). You can also charge it with USB-C. With an i5 it goes for around 200€ in Germany. US prices are usually lower.
More expensive business-class laptops, like the T-series, is I think what RedHat and others give to their employees, thus they are usually better supported than cheaper consumer models.
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I have the x230 and like it, but I’d love to have a t420 for the meme
I don’t see my model (P15) mentioned tht often,and not sure what specifically. But 'm super happy with mine and got it for roughly 500 euros.
Also fan fact the thinkpad has been used on the iss.
X1 for ultra portability.
Otherwise, T14 or T15.
I’ve got a t14 and it works perfectly under fedora 40. My only complaint is that the Left Ctrl key isn’t in the corner.
Swap with fn in BIOS…
There is an option in the UEFI settings to swap the Fn and Ctrl keys.
