this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2024
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ofc I imediatly upgraded it from winxp to gnu/linux

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

This is from 2004: https://www.trustedreviews.com/reviews/ibm-thinkpad-x31 It will chew amps (electricity). Recycle it as best you can. Grab a modern box instead.

Unless sparks are free where you live, this beast will become a liability very quickly.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago

I totally get what you're saying, but I suspect the OP is not going to be using this device full-time. Or even part-time.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago (4 children)

Nice. I use older lappies to remote control my i7 machine. They can be fairly good dumb terminals.

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[–] [email protected] 79 points 6 months ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Is he doing lines and smoking or just smoking very crooked joints?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago
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[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Good boss. What are you using it as? I'm guessing some homelab setup but will be interesting to know

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago (5 children)

so far using it as cd player and file writer, would've used it as a dvd player, but the video playback is not that great

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago (3 children)

don't worry, I do have some

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 6 months ago (3 children)

I wish someone randomly gifted me a thinkpad as well

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Very cool. I love those IBM Thinkpads. ~~Fuck lenovo~~

[–] [email protected] 17 points 6 months ago (3 children)

the older lenovo models aren't bad, but the shit they pump out recently is well, shit

[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (5 children)

They had a Chinese back door in the firmware. Don’t know if that’s still the case. https://www.techworm.net/2015/08/lenovo-pcs-and-laptops-seem-to-have-a-bios-level-backdoor.html They’ve had several major (intentional) security flaws over the years. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenovo They had a modified UEFI that allows insecure execution of EXEs. The Lenovo laptops given to US military in Iraq had keyloggers that sent all inputs back to China.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Haven't really used the older models but the x1c line is decent imo. Also t14. Z line is also good but focuses on different crowd.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (2 children)

I thought Lenovo was two different brands, one consumer (terrible) and one corporate (decent). Is that no longer true?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Lenovo makes consumer crap with their own brand and they have Think -line of products from the big blue and the latter is pretty much comparable to all the other big players (dell, hp, fujitsu...) on desktop/laptop market. Each have their own annoyances and fuckups and in general if you ask opinion from 3 IT professionals on which brand to buy you'll get 4-6 answers.

Personally if I'm looking for a laptop I'll go to pre-leased and refurbished thinkpad. I currently have T465 and for wife I got pretty decent Tsomething from the office for peanuts.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I bought out both a T430 and L480 because of their build quality and stability, and just got a little confused as to whether the opinion changed recently or if they merged divisions.

I was recently provisioned a Dell and... well, I'm not buying that one.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

I haven't paid too much attention on what lenovo is doing lately, but at some point they brought L-series thinkpad-branded laptops on the market which was pretty much garbage. At least in here local stores sold first models of L-series as a 'thinkpad grade laptops for consumer pricing' and they were just bad on all fronts, as the L-series was just a competition on a*-brands trying to get their share for sub-300€ (or whatever that was at the time) laptops from your equivalent of walmart riding on the brand which they didn't build.

Gladly that died out pretty soon and Think* brand is still somewhat strong with their T/W/X models as they used to be when IBM ran the business. Of course they had their own issues too, USB-C docks were garbage with everyone when they started to appear and people at the office still curse on thinkpads for various issues with firmware/hardware/whatever, but in my experience it's been the same road for all the big players. Dell had a pretty decent sales/support going on at 2010(ish), but their hardware had plenty of problems, HP had pretty good pricing for their hardware a bit later, but they had massive issues with firmware and so on.

I've been pretty happy with thinkpads I've got since R50 brand new (if I recall correctly) and for me they've been available on second hand market in here since that. But that's just a personal experience, I've never been in charge to buy hunderds of anything on IT department at work.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Still rings true a little, their quality is far better than their competitors though. I've had a lot less issues with the functionality of lenovo laptops over the crap acer or asus or dell produce.

It kinda became muddled around the X1 Carbon when they decided that thin chasis = better, and then started cutting features

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

I had to do a battery replacement on the L480. They had top-notch support on what part number to order, video guide on how to properly disassemble the case, remove ribbon cables, etc etc etc. I wish all companies had that kind of support.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 6 months ago (5 children)

I'm new to Linux; what's with the ThinkPad hype?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago

I've owned/used HPs, Dells, and several Thnkpads and the thinkpads by far are always the best machines. They are built to last, support is top notch.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 6 months ago (6 children)

They're reliable, good quality, have amazing keyboards, and work well with Linux (some even support Libreboot).

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[–] [email protected] 71 points 6 months ago (2 children)

They generally have really great linux support for all of their hardware (touchpads, fingerprint readers, etc.), and provide bios updates via fwdup. They are also just nice laptops.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Laptop/Lenovo

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (3 children)

It's a hype for very old, repairable laptops. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me, if you want a repairable laptop go for a Framework

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago (3 children)

ThinkPads are business machines and those are extremely repairable compared to consumer machines. Even my shitty Dell precision has instructions on how to disassemble it etched onto the mainboard. And since business laptops get dumped after a few years of relatively light use (many are de facto stationary), you can get pretty good machines for very cheap.

ThinkPads are just very popular, because they are consistently pretty good and don't stand in your way softwarewise, which isn't always true for Dell or HP machines.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 6 months ago (1 children)

you can't get a framework for 20€ on ebay tho + old thinkpads (older laptops in general) are just way robuster and have better build quality in general

[–] [email protected] -5 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Old laptops are pure suffering. I'd much rather pay the price for a more recent one

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

Depends on what you call 'old' and what your use case is. My T495 was less than 300€ and it does everything I need from a laptop easily. Bigger drive would be nice, but once the summer is over I rarely need to pull 4K video from sd-cards in temporary storage, so I doubt I'll bother to upgrade it any time soon.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

If you can afford and you want, the only argument I can put forward is less ewaste if you give a second life to the many very decent professional thinkpads that are retired every year. My employer is now going for a 5 year renewal cycle, used to be 3 for a long time. Unfortunately I couldn't even buy back mine when it expired because it is a lease subcontract. It had an i5 7th gen and 32gb ram, was buttery smooth even running windows and I dreamt of running Linux on these.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

I wouldn't say that, maybe in the case of the x31 or similarly really old laptops, however newer old laptops like the t60p or t500 aren't that bad and can still handle every office and internet related workload just fine

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