this post was submitted on 06 May 2025
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Hey all - what’s your experience with refurb Lenovo laptops for Linux from companies/shops that specialize in this as a service? I’m looking at LinuxPusher.dk but am also curious about other EU-based shops. It seems like a good, affordable way to get a Linux machine if you’re a novice, like me (some experience with Ubuntu and Kubuntu about 10 years ago).

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

Good deal if you can get them reshipped from Sweden or Finland is inrego.se .

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

For our office we bought multiple ThinkPads from this shop luxnote-hannover.de/ It is from Hanover, Germany.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

I like the prices! And europaweit lieferung - that works for me. :)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

Around a year ago I bought a refurbished thinkcentre from esm-computer.de and installed Linux Mint on it. I didn't have any problems with it so far.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

I bought a T5xx-Thinkpad from nbwn.de (=notebookswieneu.eu) many years ago. It was an extremely good purchase. They ship to the entire EU for free if your order is above 200€. They specialize in selling demonstration laptops, i.e. devices that companies tried out and then returned, so they are essentially new.

However, I highly recommend to wait for the Windows 10 EOL to really hit around winter time, because then thousands if not millions of used and unused laptops that are sorted out for not supporting Windows 11 will flood the market. (Even if you're aiming to buy a laptop so new that it will probably also support Windows 11, the flood of older devices could well bring down the prices for such newer devices also.)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

Thanks for the link - and good tip about the timing!

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 days ago (4 children)

first off, "lenovo" is not the thing to get, it's just a subset of those - thinkpads. and even then, not all of those - just the T and P series. those are the "pro" lines, durable, dependable, expandable, serviceable, and widely used. so when corporations swap out their fleet for new models, they flood the market and hence can be had for cheap. multiple generations of the same model are cross-generation compatible, so they share the same peripherals, like docks, have interchangeable parts, like keyboards, displays, etc.

don't get used ideapads, thinkbooks, thinkpad E/L series, etc. those are either consumer-class models, have substandard features, are incompatible with each other, etc. don't get the yogas and S-suffix models, as you'll have a removed time servicing and/or upgrading those.

the whole point of getting something used, i.e. something that was touched and rubbed and spat all over, is if it's a) in good enough shape and b) you get it for cheap. you took care of of item A when going for thinkpad T-series and you're compromising on item B if you're going through an intermediary.

them dudes you mention are skinning you alive - 500 EUR for a T14 G1 is insane, it should be less than half of that. I also like how they're including none of the tech specs which just ups the ick factor.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 17 hours ago

you're absolutely right about that last point. my fully-spec'd t440p (4910mq, 16GB, 1080p IPS, t450p trackpad, backlit, quectel eg25-g for WWAN, the whole 9 yards) cost me less than $300 to build -- a similar machine from minifree would've cost nearly double that for worse specs. though, it should be noted, that that price gets you more than silicon -- they offer support over IRC, some sort of warranty, and i think other shit too.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

E and L series ThinkPads tend to have upgradable ram. The build isn't as good but the upgradability is something to keep in mind.

As for the specs and the lack of mentioning them, I agree.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

That's super helpful - I didn't realize how big a difference there is between models. Thanks for clarifying. And yeah, by now I get the sense that LinuxPusher.dk is not for me. :)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

what about the X line? particularly the x250 and x260? been thinking on getting one of those for a while because of their compact size

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (3 children)

I'm referring to semi-modern laptops you're most likely to get out of some corporation's dump of obsolete tech, but that's still usable - let's say T480 and onward. you can retrofit those with tons of RAM, cheap storage, they have capable quad-cores, etc. you can get something like a T14 Ryzen 6-core with 32 GB RAM and a 1 TB SSD in the $200 region, if you do everything yourself.

everything before that is proper old tech, with predominantly anemic dual-cores (the ones you mention have single-channel RAM) and as such are a fun tinkering project, similar to the cyber deck projects - costs a lot of money, doesn't do much. on the other side of that fence are power-hungry haswells and friends that can't be wrangled into single-digit Watt/Hour territory however hard you tried.

so if you get one of those for free, or close to it, and you have parts laying around, by all means - this is as close you can get to the bespoke PC build in the laptop world. but ixnay on bying a decade old laptop for work and/or education.

edit:

X260 vs T14, negligible size difference

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

You have to be careful on the 80 series. They are either 7th gen Intel or 8th gen Intel. My sister has an i5-7200u t580. Also 8th gen is weird, I've been having issues with my pavilion trying to get it to run at base clock. I had to uninstall Intel thermald and run "throttled", a GitHub script to run at base clock.

Also it's the last generation of T series that has dual batteries, and a few gens later, they move to soldered ram.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

thank you brother, you might have saved me from a bullet; t480s and t470s are much easier to find on my country than x260s and x250s, also it's easier to get better deals on them.

Was planning to go for one of those because of size exclusively pretty much, i like compact machines and was planning for a tiny laptop. if it isn't bothersome to ask, do you so happen to know a cheap thinkpad around 28 x 22cm?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

skip the T470, T480 with 8xxxu cpu is the lowest you should go; the hardware is practically identical (and interchangeable!) but the CPU is a huge difference. also if you find them for cheap, there's T490 (refresh), T495 (AMD Ryzen), and T14 (newer variants of the T4xx series with Intel and AMD CPUs).

the 12" version would be the X280, again single-channel RAM only. in the 12" space you also have Dell Latitude 7290/7200 (just the latitude series, no inspirons and friends) as well as HP Elitebook 820 (and 830) with 8xxx and newer CPUs. Elitebooks and Latitudes are Thinkpad T-series equivalents with similar build quality and features.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

thank you! your advice will be very valuable! i've had came across those ryzen thinkpads and found quite some nice ones, but didn't knew they would fit me dimensions

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

What's a model you could stuff the most RAM into? I'd like a 4th Proxmox node I could replicate to and take offsite, but I don't need a pile of redundant storage on it. Something I could get 128Gb into would be awesome.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

T480 can take 64 GB (2x 32 GB); no idea if more is possible. I imagine newer models could but I struggle to remember seeing 64 GB SO-DIMMs... P15 can fit four sticks so that should be possible, but them things have beefy CPUs, are rather large, and also have Nvidia graphics so dunno how low-power you can make those.

you're kinda outside of the intersection of cheap and still capable with that spec. do make a write-up if you succeed, that sounds interesting.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago

I bought my P14s Gen 4 refurbished on eBay and have had no trouble. The nice thing about Lenovo is that they have really good documentation and the ThinkPad series are highly serviceable.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

I would be concerned that linuxpusher.dk is advertising for a social media site called socii. The guy behind that showed up in a thread once, and was not pleasant.

Weird to have a connection between those two sites.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I don't know about Lenovo in general, but the two things I like about Thinkpads in particular and why I generally stick to them are their keyboards and the mouse nub / joystick thingy (trackpoint).

~~Their keyboards~~ The keys on their keyboards are still curved to give you proper tactile feedback of where your fingers are relative to the keys (unlike the abominable flat square keyboards on many/most other manufacturers), and the trackpoint is a great way to use a mouse-like pointer without moving your hands from home position on the keyboard. It looks like some current models are doing away with the trackpoint, which I think is a terrible mistake.

I'm not sure if any manufacturers still have either of these features or both on their current laptops, but they're absolutely must have features for me.

Also, I usually buy used/refurbished Thinkpads cheap from ebay.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

Lenovo has become utter crap. At work, I’m replacing our Lenovo’s with the Framework 13

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Lenovo brand new is bad, refurbished, well, you just want to have a bad time. This only applies to the new Chinese owned Lenovo, the IBM ones are fine in all possible states.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago

Well, I don't want to have a bad time, that's for sure...thanks for the warning. I'll be cautious about Lenovo.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago (2 children)

I've had good luck with an X201, W520, and T480 - all thinkpads. Haven't tried any of the lower end lenovo models. I got my W520 new and my other ones off craigslist.

If you're looking to get a preinstalled OS and from a refurb vendor, an interesting option would be buying from libreboot. Debian/KDE by default or you can choose your own distro. Libreboot is a good cause, and sales funds the project. You'll have the most secure bios on the block.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I'd be very careful with setups that promise libre everything.

I don't know this particular brand, but it is quite common for projects like this to not include security and stability updates with the sole justification that "it's proprietary".

Your laptop's motherboard came with a fatal security issue, or is a time bomb waiting to implode on itself? Too bad, can't receive updates from HP, Lenovo, Dell or whatever because they are proprietary...

Just something to keep in mind.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

they only offer the one laptop, a T480. Not an HP, Dell, etc. Ongoing fixes to the UEFI and BIOS code are irrelevant as this has libreboot instead. That's like saying you're missing out on windows updates if you run linux.

And anyway the T480 is at end of life:

This product is no longer being actively supported by development (End of Development Support) and no further software updates will be provided.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

Fair enough, I just wanted to point that out because i see a lot of people falling for the "it has nothing proprietary" mindset.

But there's nothing wrong with that device that I can point to, other than it being older hardware with all the limitations that might entail.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago

Libreboot looks very, very interesting - thanks for the tip!

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