So, I booted a Fedora USB and backed up her files. When I asked her if she wanted me to install Fedora Workstation on it to continue using it, she said "Yes!" because "She loves this laptop and doesn't want to buy a new one."
Fedora runs beautifully fast on this system with 8GB of RAM and will probably last her a long time.
But due to personal circumstances, my previous employer and I mutually agreed to part ways. I was gifted my work laptop, a Macbook Pro M4. So I will (un)fortunately never get to run the M1 Pro into the ground like I planned to.
The M1s are fantastic. If you have the 16GB model, I have no doubt that you will still be using it in several years. If Mac OS gets sluggish, Linux can be installed on it (I installed Debian Asahi on an M1 Mac Mini).
I feel like I'm only gonna get pushed off this thing from software support being dropped.
Neo is way too bulky/heavy.
My current daily driver is a Dell Precision 7550. It has a nice 15" display, touchpad buttons with a middle-mouse button, USB-C + Thunderbolt. Keyboard is not great, but not terrible. I did have to buy a new battery for it. I don't know what I'm going to do if/when it dies, because neither Dell nor Lenovo make a laptop now that I am interested in owning in 3-4 years.
I’d much rather buy a thing that doesn’t need them. Two decades of laptops, never replaced a single thing or had an issue. Shot, I have not had a single app crash or system crash in 5+ years. Also two decades of driving around the world without a single breakdown.
Of course, the other part of this are people who use computers to do much heavier workloads.
There are a pretty large list of activities where every time you have some significant gain like ~50-300% performance gain, there may be legitimate justification to buy the new hardware.
As a person who plays games as a hobby I’m pretty much buying a new GPU/processor anytime there’s something affordable that will double my frame rate or anytime there’s a game that comes out that I can’t play or won’t play at decent settings.
My old hardware is never wasted, someone else buys it and uses it until it physically degrades too much to be used.
Computers as a hobby or working device are a heck of a lot less expensive and wasteful than a lot of other activities even if you go crazy on consumerism.
Think about the weight of your laptop and how that compares to the weight of just one gallon of gasoline. Surely a week to a month of commuting is worse for the planet than buying a brand new laptop, right? For the record, I don’t actually know for certain whether it is, but that seems like a fair guesstimation.
From a cost standpoint, $100 is damn impressive to have a working functional laptop that gets your work done, but arguably $1000 or $2000 isn’t a whole lot of monkey, either. That kind of money is roughly equivalent to one round trip ticket to Europe, renting a minivan for a week or two, a month of daycare or rent/mortgage, etc.
It’s both a lot of money and not a lot of money at the same time.
That said, I switched to a macbook pro last year and these machines are like from another world. I want to get things done instead of fiddling with the machine and, famous last words I know but, this thing just works.
Yes, it'll be e-waste the moment a small thing breaks, and costs like a years wage in some parts of the world, so it's no competition to the thinkpad.
I hope framework eventually delivers the best of both worlds.
But that's the price to pay to actually own your laptop.
That said, I heard Mac OS quality has been going downhill since a few years ago
It really has. I bought a MacBook Pro in 2011 and used it throughout college. Worked great. I gave it to my friend’s little sister when she started college, and she ended up using it throughout her undergrad. She loved it, zero issues. So, that one MacBook got at least 9 years of use.
Fast forward to 2020, my wife needs a laptop for law school. I figure a MacBook pro would be the simplest, easiest, and most reliable option. It wasn’t. Not only had the cost gone up (I paid ~$1,300 for my MacBook pro, while hers cost ~$2,000 for the same options, but less), but using Microsoft apps like excel, word, and powerpoint was such a hassle sometimes. The apps kept signing her out or didn’t have certain options (like formatting) that were available in the Windows versions. Installing and working with third party apps that some of her professors and classes required was also a hassle, and those apps worked inconsistently. I remember having to give her my laptop a couple of times just so she could get her work done. The battery life was significantly worse compared to my older MacBook. Her MacBook seemed so much slower, couldn’t handle as much, and was overall a crap experience. The simplicity, reliability, and ease of use that used to separate Macs from windows laptops, especially for the average user, just didn't seem to be there anymore. It’s like whatever worked before, they got away from it.
So, anytime I hear someone say, “a MacBook is the best” these days all I think is, “yeah, nah, it’s crap, just like everything else, but slightly more expensive crap.”
I still have 2019 Macbook Airs sitting around, and I consider them completely unusable.
My wife has owned a 2020 M1 Macbook Air since then, and it's still working really well. To the extent that every time we talk about upgrading, we end up agreeing to wait.
I use an MBA and an iPhone, but a cheap tablet or phone would work just as well. I care about network, portability, screen size + quality, and speech to text. Pretty much nothing else matters, CPU / GPU irrelevant as long as it can run a browser. I might build a native non-browser version at some point for better resource management on the client, but it hasn't been an issue so far. I would love a pair of glasses I could render text on with speech to text. It's such a gap in the market, might just build my own bespoke thing if I can source the components for it. An e-ink tablet would also be a great option for working outdoors...
I prefer the keyboard on my T430, but the much better screen, slimmer form factor, and still pretty good keyboard make the X250 one of the best devices I've ever owned.
Weak processor, 16gb ram, but good enough for browsing and running daily tasks, and it's simple enough to connect to more powerful machines when the need arises. And the docking station has HDMI and displayport. Hardware H.264 codec, and also HEVC and VP9, but alas only with the windows driver.
My big rig desktop is now in the basement, sleeping until I need to run LLMs or diffusion or a heavy compile. I also sometimes use it for Steam gaming, connecting to it via moonlight (which works surprisingly well, even over WIFI).
Does anyone have a good suggestion for an aftermarket battery? I have a few Thinkpads and I've tried so many batteries and they all last maybe 2 or 3 hours before needing a recharge. If someone is out there making high density batteries for these old laptops I'd love to pick one up.
A power bank with a usb-c 65w pd will work for most laptops. Many of these will be 100wh/20000mah or 150wh/30000mah, to meet airplane limits.
This is the specific battery I bought: https://www.cdw.com/product/total-micro-battery-lenovo-think...
Works for all my daily tasks, and light development. Feels nice and responsive.
I’m running arch Linux and my custom hyprland-fork, which I’m using for a more retro look and a little bit more mouse-affordances than Hyprland wants to provide.
Couldn’t be happier!
MacBook Air M2 is also great machine btw, if you don't mind the macOS
Asahi Linux if you want to.
All of them definitely not current gen beasts but if I can't make my shit run there, then what the hell am I even doing?
It is practically a Panasonic 'toughbook' and it also has a homing ability, in that you can lend it out to people with a fair expectation that it will come back one day.
At home it might as well be a 'home data centre', with a full LAMP stack, serving web pages to the world, just fine.
I am not sure if it really has things like a CPU and RAM inside it, maybe there is just a team of four cockroaches hyper-threading away.
I am really not sure about the graphics, it can drive 4K external and its own somewhat indestructible screen just fine, albeit not for gaming.
The keyboard works great, albeit simplified Chromebook style, as does the trackpad. The keyboard is practically machine-washable, you can spill tea, coffee, water, ice cream, mild PVA glue solution in it with no long-term consequences.
Purchased refurbished, many aeons ago, I forget the price, but it certainly wasn't three digits, even allowing for inflation.
I am playing up the strengths of this lame Chromebook from yesteryear, however, such a device could be made today, to survive the Zombie Apocalypse just fine. As a ThinkPad I am sure that such a product exists, but you probably need £4000 for it rather than £400.
Although, Dell have refreshed all of their product lines lately, so even this is outdated advice. Looking through their current lineup and I don't see _any_ with real physical touchpad buttons or pointer sticks, unfortunately.
But I don’t pretend that any of these gestures make trackpads usable.
I haven't been able to put in .Xresources entries to make some other keypad event into mouse clicks either.
https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadt/th...
The ThinkPads have them below the spacebar. They are conveniently placed if one uses the little red stick, not so much for the touchpad.
Many people like the x220 best, because it has the old-style keyboard (does the x230 as well?). The x250 has surprisingly similar performance but much better battery life.
Which is better? I don't know, but I bought a x250 back in 2015 and am still using it as my personal laptop. It only sees light duty these days.