My daughter has the same laptop (I bought it for her a long time ago). When she brought it with her when visiting me in Canada from Australia this summer, she asked me to look at it because Win10 wouldn't let her in and she needed her files and pics.

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.

My favorite laptop has consistently been the one that I can buy off the second-hand business surplus market for cheap, and has a plethora of replacement parts available on ebay. Up until the whole PC market got stupid about a year ago, anyway.

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 originally bought my MacBook Air M1 just as a transitional computer because my old, incredibly expensive Intel MacBook Pro had been stolen, and I was waiting for a newer MacBook Pro model. But I grew so fond of the Air that I couldn't bring myself to part with it again. It's lightweight, has incredible performance (more powerful than the most powerful Intel-based Pros), the battery lasts a long time, the keyboard is comfortable, and the design is more curved than the Pro (and the newer Air models), which means it doesn't dig into your wrists.

I’m happy to see more pushback against consumer culture, and I’m happy this system meets the needs of the author.

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.

Reading about so many people daily-driving laptops built around a decade ago, if not more (which includes myself, happy owner of a T480s), and not suffering any major penalty in terms of overall usability and battery life, it really shows that the returns of having more CPU power/smaller lithography have been marginal for a very, very long time (CPUs haven't been an enabler for new use-cases/a major incentive to upgrade a laptop in recent history, AFAICT).

That's not to say there hasn't been progress in this space, but I'm also amused by the many comments along the lines of "my 2020 M1 is so revolutionary that it's all I need in 2026" in every other Apple thread. Probably all we've been needing has been some 14/10nm 8th/10th Gen Core i7 in a decent package? And about package, how come that this era's ThinkPads and pro Dells/HPs get a bigger "love-factor" than their contemporary intel MacBooks?

Now, reading more into it¹, it appears that what Intel was shipping 8th-generation Intel Core i5 8257Us (i.e. a 2017 Coffee Lake chip) in its MacBook Pros for as late as 2020, before switching over to the M series. No wonder they weren't getting much love!

¹: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_Pro_(Intel-based)#Tech...

My favorite and most beloved laptop was the T60 with an IPS display. It was rock-solid, had a docking station, a swappable CD drive and battery, and PDF manuals for disassembly. I wish I could buy something cool now to run a *nix OS, but I cannot find anything good besides the MacBook Pro.

I have several Thinkpads, but my favorite is a T420s.

AFAIK, it was the last of the line that had sculpted keytops, it feels good to type on. It's a damned shame that the newer ones have those chicklet keys.

i7 with 16GB RAM, HDD replaced with SSD. Runs Fedora like a top.

I find the thinkpads extemely cool, and I envy the customization / repair options soo much.

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.

My "desktop" machine is actually an old T450 I bought used over a decade ago, running Linux Mint (Mate).

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).

The author didn't list real mouse buttons as a benefit, and I see from the image it has them. I've been buying refurbished Dell business class laptops for a decade, the last one I bought, a Dell Latitude 7420, doesn't have them, which is turning out to be a big problem. It means that cut-n-paste went way up in hassle and inaccuracy. Why did laptop vendors quit putting in mouse buttons? Does the average Windows user only left click on things? Does any laptop come with mouse buttons these days?

I will raise you with a Dell Chromebook, designed for eight year old kids, totally bulletproof and able to take anything thrown at it, with a seemingly super-long-range battery that outlasts anything.

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.

My old T420 still works and I still always smile when using the keyboard on it. Pure bliss.

Siemens Nixendorf Scenic Mobile 300, 133 MHz Pentium (before we had to number them), 16 MB of RAM, 800×600 passive matrix LCD, released 1997. I caused a major scandal at my high school since nobody on the staff had ever contemplated the scenario whereby a student turned up with a computer of their own. I dual booted Windows NT 4.0 and Linux (2.2 kernel I think).

Oh, the simple things in life!

As I have done more ai coding where I'm just reviewing a PR and giving feedback to a model that runs on a studio in my home, I wonder if eventually something like this as a thin client would be nice. Has anyone done something similar? I think most of the time I wouldn't have enough internet to access my server, I also might not be wanting to code in the first place.

I had a fujitsu lifebook that was 10 years old when I bought it and it lasted another 8 or so after that. I'd maxxed out the ram to 8GB, replaced the missing stylus and bought a new battery. It had a fantastic display that was brighter and had a wider viewing angle than the system76 gazelle I replaced it with. And the swivel hinge connector was soo solid.

I now have a framework 13 that I'd rate slightly higher than that fujitsu (it's lighter and the changeable ports thing is a truly wonderful idea), but it's a bit of a toss-up.

Had Lenovo (X220), followed by two top XPS 13" (lighter), then the first M1 (8gb), M1 Max (64gb!), and M3. Battery, weight, Linux-like, and UX (in that order) made the M1 practical to carry and reconverted my M1 Max into a server for LLM and computation. The M3 sometimes also work as a computing server in tandem. I would love to carry again my XPS 13" with Linux but the battery duration and lifetime makes it unusable for mobility.

When I saw this headline, I thought "I bet it's an old Thinkpad" :)

I have 3 personally, one for work. My T470p is probably the best one, given some tradeoffs (some annoying pressure points on the screen which happened on two replacements and some occasional flakiness with power) I got a cheap T480 when I thought the T470p was a lost cause (thankfully just a screen replacement) and one of the USB-C ports is dead. I can still charge with the other one, but that's annoying. But, the square plug remains to be fantastically reliable.

There is a certain odd interest I have in these, but that died off. Buying capable but older and much cheaper equipment, particularly when I don't have niche needs, has become the best option for me (particularly if I can update the software on it)

Not exactly the same model, but I really like the X280. I've bought a couple of refurbished X280s to give to friends and family whenever they need a working laptop for light office/internet/email use. Really nice laptops, super lightweight and durable, yet incredible affordable.

For anyone still running these older ThinkPads, where do you get new batteries from? I've not yet replaced any of mine but the aftermarket world for these seems rife with super-sketchy knockoffs that I'm certain will not be trustworthy. Any recommendations for known-good manufacturers of batteries for X230-X270 era? I'm in NA but I don't really care where I have to order from, I just want batteries that actually even vaguely resemble OEM reliability.

Edit: Ohh I see someone started a thread on this already: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50340218

Ah no way! I figured it might be an old ThinkPad, but coincidentally it's the exact laptop on the desk next to me at this very moment! In my case running OpenBSD rather than Linux, but still. Oh and I've got i5-5300U vs. the OP's i5-5200U. 8GB as well which as OP says is plenty. Good times :) My only real criticism on this machine is the display, a bit low-res at 1366x768 and just not the nicest to look at, but definitely gets the job done. To be fair I like the look & feel of the X230 better, but those are just really feeling the age even on a more efficient OS and lightweight GUI (i3 ftw).

I'm hard on laptops, but my desktop is running an i7-2600 from 2011:

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/52213/i...

No complaints. It was the peak of Intel consumer products in my opinion. I might upgrade it to 32GiB while I still can. (DDR3 is cheap.)

I have a pile of newer dead Intel machines (laptops and desktops). I don't have anything nice to say about them.

My favorite laptop is a $90 Samsung Chromebook I bought around 7 years ago from Walmart clearance section during Black Friday.

I used it to remotely connect to hpc cluster to monitor my machine learning experiments.

It was unused for a while, then we had a baby. He used it to watch videos, absolutely battered it. This thing is indestructible. He grew older and started practicing IXL on it too.

These days we use it for doing monthly finances, viewing camera feeds and SD card contents. Son is now in kinder, at some point he might start using it for school work.

"I’ve opted for the largest after-market external battery I could find. When doing casual work the laptop will easily survive for north of 10 hours without a charge, stretching to 12 hours if I’m careful."

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.

The T480 is on par with this thing - you have two batteries, one is external and you can upgrade it to a beefcake pack if you desire, it has the 8000 series intel CPU which is fast enough. It has awesome expansion etc. I prefer the AMD T14's these days, but they lack a lot of the features I liked that this person calls out. One bigger internal battery, it's easy to replace if you (when you?) need to, and has USB4 on the later models.

my previous favorites were an X220 and a T480s. The T480s ran for 8 years, started losing bits of rubber from the screen area, to be replaced this year by a framework 13 pro, which will probably be my favorite lap for another 8 years, or maybe more (depending on how you accept the ship of theseus)

Reminds me of my hunt for a X260 years back.

https://www.theprohack.com/2020/09/how-i-got-myself-capable-...

The thing will old laptops from last decade is shitty screen color. I love my t420, but the screen is literally too painful to look at for a long time.

So my favorite one is the thinkpad t14g1, with ips screen, and lightweight

An old x220 (which I have), but a bit more modern and fully OpenBSD supported would be my dream.

I think my favorite still has to be the MacBook Air 11”. Wish they’d make that size again.

I had the same with X230. A lovely laptop that still serves as a home server after 10 years or so from being bought, and it was already used, post-lease machine back when I bought it.

MacBook Air M2 is also great machine btw, if you don't mind the macOS

I look forward to when these 5th-generation Intel chipsets are "jail broken" and the totality of device functionality is accessible with a management engine binary compiled from purely open source code.

I gave my T590/i7/16gb to my son.

I’m keeping my 2013 i5/4gb MacBook Pro. I love the keyboard and display. Just changed the battery. Runs great with endeavourOS!

You should swap it for an M1 MacBook Air. The walmart spec is so cheap used.

Looking on eBay, it looks like I'm spending quite a bit more than $100 to get an old thinkpad of this era.

My favorite laptop is the Framework 16.

>I bought mine second-hand for about £100 in 2018. They’ve only got cheaper since then.

You'll be surprised. Due to surge in popularity within the last few years, in part thanks to youtubers, it's gotten hard finding old ThinkPads at this price, let alone cheaper. They've gone from their function over form and low used cost due to corporate surplus as their main appeal, to being geek-y lifestyle objects, not much different than Apple products for the mainstream. They're great machines but paying ~£150 for 10yo system, not even with great specs, is laughable.

My X41 from 2005 has the same trackpad and “trackpoint” and still runs Debian Bookworm just fine.

I don't have the bravery to write an ode to my favourite laptop, the MacBook 12 inch.

(I didn't click on the link yet.) Is it a ThinkPad?

Why is this the favorite when the years older x230 takes up to 16GB ram ?

I got a Dell Latitude 5520 about five years ago. I chose it because it seemed pretty repairable/upgradeable, with two NVME SSD slots, two RAM slots and an easily replaceable battery. And those features have indeed served me well.

But I have been quite disappointed in the build quality of the laptop itself. The thing is literally falling apart. A lot of paint is chipping off both the keyboard and the body, and there are two sizeable cracks in the side of the laptop which don't currently affect operation but which are getting bigger over time. Lately the touchpad has started to give me issues as well.

I use my laptop a lot but I'm not particularly hard on it - it occasionally moves from my home desk to my sofa, basically never leaves the house. I also have a different laptop for work. In hindsight I think maybe I should have gotten a Thinkpad, but when I was looking around I remember the newer Thinkpads only having one free RAM slot with the other soldered in which turned me off. Also I quite like larger laptops and numpads which limits me somewhat.

Can't wait for someone to build hackerlaptops.org

I still own and use my original X250, which I bought new in 2015. I recently replaced the batteries and swapped out the internal Wi-Fi adapter for a €20 AX210NGW. It's almost laughable how easy both upgrades were. Everything works out of the box with every Linux distro I've tried, including the fingerprint sensor.

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.

Thinkpad. 250 vs t480

My favorite laptop is my Samsung Chromebook Plus (V1), released in early 2017. ARM based. Good battery life. Light. Touch screen. I replaced the battery and keeps running strong. Sure is 32 bit and Google disowned the OS long ago. It will be a sad day the day I let it go.

don't buy it. I invested quite a bit into this rabbit hole, I ended up loving new macbook air much more. I've used this kind of a laptop for a few years

My absolute favorite is neither my M1 (whose screen broke overnight for no reason after 13 months, just outside of warranty) nor the ThinkPads many love but...

My milspec LG Gram with 24 GB of RAM: I know, I know, milspec means nothing etc. But...

A friend of mine literally stepped on it by mistake: no problem. There s an online video about someone throwing one down concrete stairs: keeps working just fine.

It s also lighter than any Mac laptop.

It s old now and may not have the fastest CPU but this laptop can and does take serious beating without breaking a sweat.

Amazing machine

Wait until he discovers Macbook Air

Nipple .