Laptop recommendations

I have got so many used ThinkPads. Everyone in my house has one.

Can I have one
- You get a ThinkPad! And you get a ThinkPad! Everyone gets a ThinkPad! :oprah_wave:
- Step 1: You marry him

Old ThinkPads, the poor man’s Framework.

Rather proto-Framework

I got unbuntu on my xiaomi notebook with a nice oled screen. It worked almost immediately. Easier install then windows. I chose Ubuntu as my first linux because of lots of support.

As far as I heard, their designs are similar to macbooks, are the keyboards as terrible?
- I think its a preference, I prefer the keyboard over mac. But the build quality and hardware is just really good for the price.

Refurbished ThinkPads are available in countries where Framework, System76, and Pine64 do not ship.

Besides, ThinkPads are really well-built machines that perform well for everyday tasks at a fraction of their (or the aforementioned competition's) original price.

I love my two machines, which are from before Lenovo took over completely. Their keyboards, port selection, and repairability are almost unparalleled compared to today's competition.

as cool as they are the last time a good thinkpad came out was over a decade ago, so u are either just buying a normal laptop same quality as all the others or something so old its basically useless. They arent even cheap anymore cuz everyone wants them, its time to face reality refurbished thinkpads are no longer what they were they are no longer a good deal nor particularly good quality, u would probably be better off buying some random gaming laptop most of them are pretty well put together, easy to take apart and upgradable tho thick and heavy.

This simply isn't true. They are still cheap even for decent stuff. I got a T15 Gen 2 when it was 2.5yrs old for about $400 on eBay. You're not going to get an even remotely decent laptop in most cases for that kind of money. And to be clear, I love old Thinkpads. I have them going back to the IBM days.
Modern Thinkpads: -easy to work on -plenty fast for most things -still made of the carbon composite and magnesium chassis we like -hinges are beefy -upgradeable ram -available with GPU -lighter and easier to daily than any of the old chonks -replaceable keyboard, track pad and track point, and fingerprint -dual thunderbolt connection (and docks are stupid cheap.. I find them for $30 sometimes)
Downsides exist but they're not the end of the world: -one drive slot (drives are huge now, who cares) -8gb of RAM is soldered but the rest is not (max 40gb) -internal battery but laptop is faster and has better battery life than my maxed out T580
refurbished thinkpads are no longer what they were they are no longer a good deal nor particularly good quality
Off-lease enterprise laptops are generally the best deals available for a good laptop for not too much cash. When you can get something 3-5 years old for 1/3 the price of a brand new laptop and know it still has quite a bit of life left, its hard to beat.
yea, thinkpads aren't the only laptops that can be bought used
Some gaming laptops are good, but others are just as crappy as normal laptops. New smaller thinkpads are still good enough, if you need a small laptop.
- I have a decent gaming laptop It's a pain in the ass for collage tho I didn't buy it for collage but I also can't really afford to buy something else
  It's too big and the battery life sucks
  Basically the least portable laptop
Thinkpads were never cheap around here. Asus are cheap. The quality is many orders of different.
Depends on what you do. my daily driver is a $20 x200. works great for my needs. But I don't game

Any old laptop without Nvidia will suffice tho, upgrade WiFi card, ram, swap hhd for ssd, install your favourite distro and it'll run like magic, if laptop have dying battery then also buy new one, or resolder elements and reset bms.

https://system76.com/laptops

https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/Linux-Hardware/Linux-Notebooks.tuxedo

Been ThinkPad User for over 10 years. Edge E135 X220 X260

This year was the first Time in about 16years I bought a non used machine and it was a framework. As much as I adore the good ol ThinkPad the recent developments regarding repairability/statement from Lenovo are turning me off more and more. And my framework makes me happy every time I use it ...

So I don't know.

My work laptop is a Dell Precision. It was a "data science" model that came with Ubuntu. Wiped Dell's modified Ubuntu and put vanilla Ubuntu on it and now running Nixos. Works great. There was a weird period when using triple monitors with their dock had an intermittent issue on boot where resolutions and monitors were not being detected. Cause was Nvidia drivers. It eventually got resolved and it was easy enough to rollback the drivers to one that worked.

Cause was Nvidia drivers.
This should be on a t-shirt
The older models were also very repairable and customisable. Most newer ones aren't. This is a problem for some users.

Good luck opening more than like 5 browser windows on those old thinkpads

The refurbished thinkpads you find are usually three years old after the companies who lease them buy new ones for the users.
You can do a lot of things with a three year old thinkpad...
- ah fair enough, my bad, I thought people are always talking about the older style thinkpad
- here it's typically early-to-mid 2010s thinkpads being sold, so you're probably getting a laptop with horrible performance
You can install linux on it, you know? Everyone installs linux on thinkpads, you know?

Opensource chromebooks. Yep.

until you get one with an i5-5300U soldered to the board T~T

I like my system 76!

Lol ok enjoy your lenovobios and being trapped on x86 forever

If you know anything about Lenovo you would know that if ARM laptops started to have high market share they would have like 35 mediocre models on offer in a year.
Some of the think pad lines are still good but their consumer offerings and a couple of the think pad lines are trash.
Thinkpad not always was lenovo's
- My oldest Thinkpad I still own is an X60, and other than the hardware problems, the plastic on the thing is becoming so old it's brittle and breaks every time you try to take the thing apart. I love it and my T60p dearly, but they're past their final days.
- Bullshit mostly. x86 is fine & has been getting a lot more power efficient (if you can get a work day’s worth of power, you have met the benchmark). Wake me up when RISC-V is here.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I finally retired my old laptop for a ThinkPad X13 a few weeks ago and it's been perfect for my use case. Build quality is solid, battery life is alright, it's small and light, and everything worked out of the box with the preinstalled Ubuntu. After testing it all I slapped EndeavourOS in there and have had zero issues. Specs are solid and I got it for like $1200. Even the AMD integrated graphics are punching way above what I expected.

Just curious about what folks are complaining about with the newer Lenovo models.

Fwiw this meme isn't piling on any Lenovo Thinkpad hate you've seen if I understand it correctly (which I may not)
You could buy a nice gaming laptop for that price. I thought the appeal of think pads was that you buy an old one cheap. It's just me I guess but I don't enjoy using them.
- Maybe I could, but I'm not using it for gaming so battery life, portability, and fan noise don't have to be sacrificed for a few more FPS when I wanna play something light on the road.
  The Tim Taylor approach to hardware was great when I was a kid, less so in my 40s looking to do some moderate coding and radio projects on the road away from my massively overbuilt gaming rig I already own. This lil guy checks all those boxes. I was just wondering what specific hate there was on newer models.

Got a T450 for less than a hundred bucks and the build quality's something that no longer exists in this day and age. Almost every piece of hardware in that thing's easily accessible and replaceable. It's gonna be a sad day when it finally dies out and nothing else in the market could compare.

So is shooting a new event in the Olympics? Why haven't we gotten these kind of badass pictures before this year?

in 2021 (and 2016) we had a Russian woman wearing a witcher pendant everyone liked.
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/4xivob/this_russian_shooter_has_a_witcher_medallion_from/
- Oh, great.

None of these have an OLED or DCI-P3 coverage so… pass

It seems there are OLED panels you can just buy and install into framework.
- It looks all theoretical—you could say similar about any laptop at that rate of buying a random panel & popping it in while praying it works. If you don’t have a plan for the original panel, congrats: you created e-waste since the OEM isn’t selling what you need. Maybe they should just offer a tested version since there is obvious demand.

my recommendation: a second-hand, 16 year old acer aspire one that runs windows xp, ms-dos and the 32bit version of puppylinux...if it works it works. (yeah its just my setup)

been working flawlessly on original hardware since 2008

i even play games and make music on that thing

x220 ftw!!

Heck yeah

I got some used chromebooks on Ebay for $40 each (3855u, 4gb ram, 32gb ssd), I would recommend them if you don't have any money to spend on a laptop. It's not going to be running anything super demanding, but its shocking how much it can do.

Some things I have run on it and had a decent experience: Blender, FreeCAD, Portal, TMNF through proton, Celeste, Minecraft Java, MuseScore