Which laptop and distro would you recommend for a Linux newb (someone who has never used Linux)? Preferably hardware with decent battery life and isn’t horribly slow.
Update: Walked away with this Dell Inspiron i5 3520 with Best Buy’s black friday deal: https://www.bestbuy.com/site/sku/6553026.p
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Yeah Thinkpads are obviously a popular suggestion here. I’d check out System76 too (their cheapest stuff may or may not fit your definition of “cheap”).
I’m looking at them system76s right now thanks to you, you bastard! (Just kidding, I’m looking to get basically exactly what they’ve got, little expensive for me but it “exists” so that’s fine lol).
Real question though, are they as great as they look? I’ll immediately be ditching the OS in favor of Fedora, SUSE, straight debian no buntu, or something that likes KDE (if desktop. I actually like gnome on laptops a lot), but otherwise this seems to be pretty damn good. Anything I should know before I buy? And is there anything I should look at as a direct competitor, or is this one pretty much the one in the genre?
I haven’t used any of them, but there are Tuxedo, Slimbook (with official KDE collab) and Starlabs as well. Framework claim good Linux compatibility too.
You could look into getting a second hand Thinkpad on ebay
Any model?
ThinkPad T420 (I’m kidding a bit, bit you can consider it if you find one extremely cheap)
Eh, mine runs fine. Only thing that bothers me is the crap display.
Also the battery life is not great, but you can buy a bigger battery (i didn’t try it). For basic use it’s a great little laptop if you put an SSD in it.
Oh yeah, mine lasts 30 minutes max, but for a home laptop that’s fine.
I got an aftermarket 9 cell battery on Amazon for like $30, mine has 8 hours of battery life at idle now in Mint with the brightness all the way up. Highly recommended. Three SSDs, 16GB of RAM, but otherwise stock T420.
I’m on my second battery, this has been my main personal computer (gaming aside) for over ten years. Maybe it deserves one more extension on life… I’ll think about it!
Consinder buying USB 3.0 ExpressCard expansion
Everything is telling me that this is obviously fake and there’s no way it could exist, but there’s a small part of me saying “there’s someone out there that would do this…” Like a 25 pin serial to USB adapter.
Pretty much any thinkpad is a good go. Age doesn’t really matter either. I’ve got a T23 from 2001 that’s running fresh and good. I’d say maybe 2012 is as far back as you might want to go for regular use though.
What’s the best recent “old” thinkpad you can recommend?
Typically go for the model coming off business leases, with the slim T model or 13" X model being very popular and well built. The X1 series tends to have cooling issues, so I’d avoid them without a lot of research into the specific model. The P series tends to get run harder, so I’d be a bit hesitant there as well. It seems a lot of companies extended to a 4 or even 5 year lifecycle, so normally I’d be saying to start looking for the T14s g1, of which the AMD models started being very good. But you’d probably be looking more towards the T480s and T490s, still, and I think you’ll probably want to stick with Intel for those. But if you find a good deal on a T14s, particular the AMD model, I’d say jump on it.
In recent models, target the 400nit low power IPS screens. Avoid the 500nit privacy guard screen, which basically behaves like a TN panel as far as viewing angles. The 300nit screen has color reproduction and uniformity issues, but I do have one on my work T14s g3, and it’s not horrible. I have the 400nit on my P14s g4, and it is substantially better.
Thinkpads aren’t as upgradable as they used to be, so be mindful of the RAM in particular.
