I just wanted to make a post in appreciation of the beautiful experience of running Linux on a Thinkpad as a main system. I picked up my X1 Extreme 2nd gen (now known as the P1) in 2019 and never even booted its Windows OS. Pop!_OS went into it immediately and it has only let me down once (grub screw up that was relatively easy to fix). I’m looking at this system that has been in constant use for almost seven years and I just cannot find a reason to upgrade to the P1. It’s just flawless.
Linux on a Thinkpad is the ultimate workhorse IMHO.
When I bought a laptop after self publishing my first book, I went with a thinkpad specifically because they handle linux so well. t480
That’s been a few years now, and it’s still running smooth, no issues at all, even with mint having been upgraded a few times.
my first professional experience with linux came doing tech support for ubunu & red hat on thinkpads.
this was the mid aughts so they were t40’s, t60’s & x60’s and i always marveled at how well they were engineered; you used to be able to swap out the hard drives, keyboards, displays & cases without tools (but it was easier if you had atleast a screw driver around).
it was so easy that it would be one of the first things that we would do to minimize amount of time that the engineers spent getting tech support. if they had even the slight tangentially hardware related compliant like slow wifi; we would almost automatically pull out the harddrive and slap it into another shell and send them on their way.
T60, my dearest, oldest friend.
X1 carbon gen 12 running QubesOS
Sidenote: honestly loving the posting you’re doing here and elsewhere.
i used popos when i had a system76 machine because of the support and always wondered what others get out of it if they don’t have the support. is it preferable to ubuntu or fedora or any other distro for any particular reason?
Interface. Mint if you are coming from Windows. Pop!_OS if you are coming from MacOS. Neither is identical to the inspiration, but they each offer a smoother pathway from their respective inspirations.
T495s here.
Noice. Flawless T480 experience with Arch Linux here. Also one of the last real modular ThinkPads - I swapped the storage, memory and WiFi card. It feels like a piece of hardware from 2026.
I bought a thinkpad specifically to run Linux
Same, but also for TrackPoint. I have the touchpad disabled. I don’t need to move my hand away from keyboard, I can endlessly scroll through pages at varying speeds just by finger pressure, and even cooler, I can scroll sideways just as easily. Oh, and I can also scroll both vertically and horizontally combined, to just easily navigate in the 2D space, pretty cool.
Although I also use the touchscreen a lot. I don’t want a regular laptop anymore. Unfortunately the 360 ThinkPads seem a bit rare when trying to find a used one.Let me check what I could get if I tried to buy it new.
ThinkPad L13. Intel Core Ultra 5 125U, 16GB LPDDR5, 512GB SSD, 1920x1200 IPS, WiFi 6E, plastic body. €1,398.76 with 3% student discount. That seems overpriced, at the very least for my use case.You can also double-tap the clit, although my T480 doesn’t seem to react to that.
Old carbon X1 still going strong. Bought it refurbished six years ago for a couple hundred bucks, still going strong.
Just installed debian on a S440 tonight to replace a HP Pavilion that had just ejected its charge port. Doubt the thinkpad will have the same problem, the HPs flex so much I’m surprised it lasted as long as it did.
The thinkpad install was flawless, even had the wifi drivers in the installer without needing non-free.
Old t430 for mail and whatnot (read degoogling) It’s an absolute pleasure to have a machine that’s just to the point, no extra bs.
I’m on an oldish (only a few years old) Thinkbook and same experience, it just works and was super easy to get going.
