26 ms·

Lenovo ThinkPad T460 – A Good Linux Laptop for Development

319 points by karussell 10y ago

steveklabnik 10y ago
I develop on a T460S. I dual boot Windows 10 and Debian Stretch, though Bash on Ubuntu on Windows has kept me mostly in Windows lately. I prefer this ThinkPad to the previous generation; it's back to having actual mouse buttons. My only complaint is the lack of graphical oomph; gaming isn't really a thing this machine does, though it's okay at it. Then again, if that's what I was going for, I probably should have bought something else.
middleclick 10y ago
I have the T450s, and it's a great laptop for sure. But as someone who has owned laptops from the previous IBM ThinkPad series, there is a noticeably deterioration in quality ever since Lenovo took over. Is it only my laptop or have others noticed this as well?
- mgv11 10y ago
  I have also T450 and have had older ThinkPad's as well. And yes the quality is tad worse than it used to, but for me still better than others I've used.
karussell 10y ago
After I made a few comments here on HN about the T460, I felt I should condense all the stuff into a short blog post. Feel free to add your experience or alternate developer machines, with pros and cons. What I missed at Dell and Apple is the possibility to configure your hardware a bit so that it better fits your needs. This was better for Dell when I purchased the Dell Latitude 7 years ago. I did not choose an MBP because I feel safer with Linux in the long run. I heared that the security updates stop two years afterwards and the software upgrades makes the 'old' hardware a lot slower. In the end every OS somehow sucks, but Linux sucks least.
- tonyedgecombe 10y ago
  I've got a T460 and have been pleased with it although I am running Windows on it at the moment. However it has just developed a fault on the screen (bright spot in the middle).
- mverwijs 10y ago
  synclient PalmDetect=1 That should fix the palmdetection problem. If not, also do: synclient PalmMinZ=0
herbst 10y ago
Ive went with a T420 recently, mostly because of the keyboard. But also because $400 for laptop + battery + Samsung SSD + 16GB hyperX Ram sounded so cheap i could not resist. And honestly even after a 2015 MBP it feels perfect for all my needs. In fact due to the superior RAM and SSD it feels often way faster than the MBP for 5 times that price felt. Plus it has way better battery life. Seriously Thinkpads are the best dev laptops ever.
- rincebrain 10y ago
  What about the T-series keyboards changed recently that bothers you? If it's actually the touchpad changes, they reverted them on the xx50 and up (or made them optional, I forget which). (Typing this from a T430 I'm using while my W550s is being repaired, and I can't recall any drastic keyboard changes that had me in an uproar in the last while.)
  - herbst 10y ago
    I have not tested a t430 but the t450 feeled a lot more "mushy" or rubberdome like. The t420 has a solid click (without the "click" :/) which is something i really like. From what ive read it got worse after the t420. So it was a easy choice for me.
  - chx 10y ago
    Not recently but simply the amount of keys have dropped from T420 to T430. The Home - End - PgUp - PgDn keys are the same place on my T420s (which is upgraded to a quality full HD screen) as any 101 key keyboard in the last 35+ years. Insert - Delete isn't but that's kinda OK because Insert is rarely needed anyways. Taking away the 7th row is the cardinal sin of the T430+ keyboards. Also switching to keyboard backlight from ThinkLight is a moronic decision, there are more things to light than just the keyboard.
- innocentoldguy 10y ago
  Have their trackpads improved at all during the last five years?
ekianjo 10y ago
Did they make a 460s version of the 460 this time around?
- karussell 10y ago
  They have 'workhorse' 460p (less mobile but stronger CPUs IMO) and a more expensive 'ultra book' 460s, plus the X1 Carbon. For the Carbon there seems to be a recent version released (in the US): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13286150 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13286150 (maybe they plan to substitude the 460s?)
  - rincebrain 10y ago
    Another poster upstream commented the T470 is being announced this upcoming week, so I would imagine that the X1c that was announced is from the same logical "generation", and we might see a T470s/p as well.
  - sz4kerto 10y ago
    460p is not cheaper, it's the 'pro' version with more powerful GPU.
    - karussell 10y ago
      Corrected this. I think they are more powerful but less mobile?
- Xylakant 10y ago
  There's a T460s that is lighter and slimmer than the standard T460. No swappable batteries though. The RAM options and screen options are slightly weird - the HDPI Screen is only available for the students edition, but can be swapped after purchase and parts of the RAM are soldered, so the machine maxes out at 20GB. Still, it's a nice workhorse and easily portable.
cornedor 10y ago
This week at CES the T470 will be announced. So if you're thinking about buying one you might want to wait for that
- karussell 10y ago
  For Linux I highly recommend a further waiting of 6-9 months (e.g. (x)ubuntu 17.04.1)
  - ktta 10y ago
    But it's not LTS. All the major software stuff will be well supported for 16.04 till 18.04. If you look around, you'll mostly find 14.04/16.04 in supported OSes. Even for OSS software, not just commercial stuff.
    - jusssi 10y ago
      I think the parent means that it may take some time until the hardware support gets to Linux kernel. I bought a Broadwell laptop right when the first ones came out, and had a lot of trouble with the integrated graphics (Intel, who supposedly do a good job with their Linux drivers compared to anyone else). It took about an year for Ubuntu to package a kernel that didn't either have annoying blinking glitches or hard lock-ups regularly. Obviously, I've been using the mainline kernels all that time, but even with them it took a couple of months. So yes, caution and patience with bleeding edge hardware is advisable.
- JoshTriplett 10y ago
  Having purchased a ThinkPad immediately after its CES announcement before, I'd strongly recommend against it, for several reasons. If something goes wrong, you'll have a long wait for service, due to unavailability of parts or replacement systems. I had to wait literally months for "next business day" service. (Under normal circumstances, they really do show up on the next business day.) Wait a few months, let any teething issues shake themselves out, and then get one. If you can't wait that long and need a new laptop now, grab an established model.
- 10y ago
TobbenTM 10y ago
And one of the most awesome things about Thinkpads not mentioned; you can get every (most?) replacement part directly from Lenovo. You can actually look up the part number in the service manual, order it, and replace it yourself. For nerds like us, this is sooo nice sometimes, when you just wanna get it fixed quickly, from the comfort of your own home.
- wfunction 10y ago
  How much do parts cost though? Are they reasonably priced?
  - dom0 10y ago
    Usually they are. A new keyboard is like 40-50 € for most models, for example. But don't expect to get a sparkling new system board for 200 €. New rubber feet are like 10 € (but it's the whole set for all rubber feet of the system). For the X20x there are still some parts available new from distributors. Which is like 6-7 years of parts supply.
    - rhblake 10y ago
      New ThinkPad keyboards can easily be found on eBay, too, for a bit less. Even ones for models that are many generations old. Very convenient.
- PetitPrince 10y ago
  The fact that there are easily accessible service manuals (that tell you how to fix the computer) or sometimes videos (that show you how to fix the computer) is also a nice plus.
- lflux 10y ago
  Good to hear that Lenovo has continued to do this after the split from IBM - I ordered a new front bezel for my X40 when it cracked and the amount of parts available was staggering.
- karussell 10y ago
2bluesc 10y ago
I've owned Thinkpads in the past and almost bought the T460 last month, then I discovered the Dell XPS / Precision line and fell in love. I picked up a manufacturer refurbished XPS 15 on eBay and wound up swapping in a Dell Precision E3-1505M motherboard I stumbled across. The line has Intel quad core CPUs, minimal bezel (my 15" is almost the same size as the 14" System 76 Galago Ultra Pro it's replacing), reasonably slim for a quad core, 84Wh battery, 10+ hours of low power dev (baseline power is about 5.25W on my 8GB + 1080p + Xeon E3-1505M machine) in (Arch) Linux? YES. Oh yeah, and for nerd points the Dell Precision M5510 has the option for Intel Xeon and Ubuntu stock for people doing CPU intensive Linux work (in my case Linux embedded system builds that grind for tens of minutes to two hours). To add icing on the cake, you can easily get parts (batteries, motherboards, etc) on eBay if you ever need to fix it yourself which is a sharp contrast to the non-existent System76 Galago Ultra Pro I picked up a few years ago after I ditched my last Thinkpad. I keep looking at the Thinkpads, but they seem a generation behind.
- karussell 10y ago
  With discovered you mean you bought one? What about the noise and battery time under normal and high work load?
  - meddlepal 10y ago
    I used to have a Dell Precision M4800 and honestly you don't buy them for battery life. They're desktop workstation replacements that you haul off to meetings occasionally. I got about 2-3 hours of battery time on that thing when running usual work-related workloads on it... (IDE, VM's etc.). I don't remember the noise, but I'm not very sensitive to noisy laptops so I may have never noticed. I miss that laptop. The build quality was through the roof and it was solid as a brick.
    - kayoone 10y ago
      The new Precisions are a lot less Desktop workstation replacements and more power efficient. I wonder if they still offer the same kind of performance though.
tuananh 10y ago
despite so many problems that OP stated, he's still recommending it!
- karussell 10y ago
  Please let me know which part of the post was misleading. All major problems, I was able to fix. And the other stuff I can easily live with.
  - mlvljr 10y ago
    "liar" :) <sent from my X131e>
- aiur3la 10y ago
  Different people have different needs. This laptop despite its minor flaws was in the end the best option for his particular needs ...or as a HN user said a while back: tuananh 42 days ago | parent [-] | on: Why the MacBook Pro Is Limited to 16GB of RAM all of this largely depends on personal preference. to me, i value battery so much more. :)
  - tuananh 10y ago
    maybe it's just me. it seems when people recommends stuff that has many flaws like this, it seems they set the standard pretty low and i find it hard to take the recommendation.
okasaki 10y ago
I could buy 3 equivalent laptops (finding IPS might be a problem) for the price. Is the Thinkpad brand really worth that much?
- rincebrain 10y ago
  It depends on what you want. You can buy reasonably cheap laptops with similar specs, either by buying >2 generations back (this T430 was $300), or by buying new models that are made of cheap plastic. In my experience, all laptops eventually suffer damage, the more durable ones just take longer and tend to be more minor faults each time. So if you can afford your laptop suddenly failing and switching to another machine (possibly by swapping the drive out, presuming that didn't fail, or restoring from backups/cloud storage), great, you have a robust setup. But many people don't have such a robust configuration, nor do they bring a backup laptop when e.g. traveling. So for individuals and businesses that have configurations of Highly Replicated Data (where it doesn't matter if you lose an individual laptop), it might be worth it to buy lots of cheap laptops. For cases where the amount of time/value of data lost to failed laptops is worth far more than the cost difference of the more durable laptops, it's probably worth it to get the ones with the rollcages and carbon fiber-infused chassis and [...].
- nickjj 10y ago
  You can get a 13" 1920x1080 IPS panel on a Chromebook for about $350. With ~5 minutes of labor (swapping in an SSD) you can install Linux natively on it with GalliumOS. Full details can be found here: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/transform-a-toshiba-chromebook-cb35-into-a-linux-development-environment-with-galliumos https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/transform-a-toshiba-chromeboo... Been using it for a few months now for development and it's been great.
aiur3la 10y ago
I am sure it is a great laptop, but it also looks like a X1 with larger bezels. Why would you want that instead of X1?
- karussell 10y ago
  The X1 has strange RAM config options and was way more expensive I think.
- wscott 10y ago
  The X1 has soldered on memory. And non-user-serviceable batteries and hard drives. (My 1st gen X1 carbon used a very non-standard hard drive.) The T460 has hot-swapable batteries, real memory slots, and standard SATA disks. (but I wish is was a NVMe disk) I picked a 460 over a 460s because it seems a lot more servicable in the future and I can easily replace worn out batteries.
- Xylakant 10y ago
  The X1 does not offer docking stations nor does it offer the port range that a T460s offers (full ethernet, card reader, etc). The T460s is a few mm thicker than the X1 and about 200g heavier, but it shares a lot of hardware with and can use the same dock as the X260, T460 and T460p which is interesting if you're a business customer that wants to support a range of options from ultra-portable to powerful. If you're a single freelance person or consumer, the X1 may be the more appealing choice.
  - willtim 10y ago
    The X1 does offer the OneLink+ docking station and soon will offer a TB3 docking station.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
giis 10y ago
My experience with Lenovo: Personal Machine: (Ubuntu/CentOS with 1 or 2 VM running sometimes) For me: AMD Quad Core - A10 7300 , with 8GB DDR3 RAM and 1TB HDD (acer aspire e15) is perfect Linux development machine, it costs less than $500 . Unless you are running 3 or more VM or stuffs like high-end data processing using 16GB RAM for development is worthless. Work machine: (Windows / Fedora-19 with 3VBox vm running most of the time) We (team of 7 members) received new Lenovo thinkpad in 2012, with 256SSD, 16GB ram, and i7 processor. Within 18months 3 or 4 of my friends faced hardware related-issues (suddenly stopped booting etc). Luckily mine survived until I left the company in 2015.
mentat2737 10y ago
I bought a T420s a few months ago. I am selling my much newer MacBook Pro retina now, as the Thinkpad is so much more functional, the keyboard is amazing the feeling of the machine itself is fantastic. I am thinking to buy a X260 brand new because I need a newer CPU and better battery life, but for sure I'll only buy Thinkpads or Latitudes (I have one at work, amazing machine) from now on.
- Hasknewbie 10y ago
  I have a X260. Don't. The keyboard is a smooth smudgefest with so-so tactile feedback (this particular point will depend on which manufacturer supplied the keyboard that ends up in your unit). The keys and trackpoint leave marks on the display when it is closed. The display bezel leaves marks on the palmrest. This is really poor engineering on basic stuff. When I pick up the laptop by the lower left corner (hey, it's an ultraportable, why would I ever do that, right?), it immediately crashes with a garbled screen. After looking that up I found out that the HDD/SSD is under the left palmrest, and picking it up there may flex and alter the SATA connection, causing the crash. This seems to affect a random sample of users. So much for Thinkpad's vaunted "sturdy rollcage". But here's the real kicker: when I found this info on Lenovo's own forum, it was for the X230! This defect has been known for 3 generations of X-series Thinkpads, and yet they have never bothered fixing it. Ever since they decided to move to 16:9 with horrible Low-Fi resolution (for a line of laptops meant to be for serious, professional users), I feel like Lenovo's Thinkpad group have be led with the vision and drive of a Roomba: mostly face-plants, and every actual improvement is to catch up to the competition (notable exception: hot-swapable battery). I only stick to Thinkpads because of the trackpoint and Linux compatibility, I suspect I'm not the only one.
  - Havoc 10y ago
    Weird - we've got an office full of x240s & x260s and they all seem fine from what I can tell. Never had a hardware related issue in ~2 years of use. Well except that one bluescreen a couple months back - that could be hw I guess. The screen res pisses me off though. :/
aiur3la 10y ago
> ... I find the boot time compelling enough (~23sec until login, plus 2sec to open the browser) that I do not need this. I think something is slowing down your boot, I get faster boot on a 2008 thinkpad running the same OS. OT: systemd was supposed to improve boot performance but it has actually become much worse. Upstart on a weak chromebook boots in under 2 sec, why shouldn't your current generation thinkpad with a fast SSD match that?
- karussell 10y ago
  Would be nice to have a faster one, yes :) ... some recommendations? Just fyi: I measure boot time from the time I press the power button. The BIOS logo appears a staggering 8sec or something although the BIOS fast boot is enabled. (Maybe the sync with NSA or something ;))
  - aiur3la 10y ago
    I haven't tested any of these myself, but this page contains some great suggestions: https://askubuntu.com/questions/10290/how-do-i-improve-boot-speed https://askubuntu.com/questions/10290/how-do-i-improve-boot-... The initial boot delay is VERY annoying. I wish libreboot was supported on my laptop, then I could ditch lenovos ancient BIOS (and the NSA ping) once and for all: https://libreboot.org/docs/hcl/#supported_laptops_x86intel https://libreboot.org/docs/hcl/#supported_laptops_x86intel
  - JoshTriplett 10y ago
    8 seconds for the BIOS sounds ridiculous; that should take less than a second. Check that you've booted and shut down successfully on the prior boot; with those, the boot should take much less time. (On an improper shutdown, the BIOS may do some extra work that takes longer.) Also check that you don't have some option enabled to make it wait around a while for a keyboard key. For the Linux portion of your boot, try running "systemd-analyze plot > /tmp/boot.svg" and looking at that. (Also note that "kernel" includes any time spent waiting in the initramfs for you to type your disk encryption passphrase.)
    - 10y ago
dajonker 10y ago
I have a X240 (12.5" version of the T440) for about 2.5 years now, and while indeed being super quiet when it's new, today the fan is almost always on, even if it's only on the lowest speed. Probably need to open it up and give it a good cleaning, and/or replace the thermal paste between the CPU and cooler.
- aiur3la 10y ago
  I did that with 2009 thinkpad and it got much worse. I guess the cheap paste I used was worse than the 6 year old paste lenovo had used :( What _did_ help was to take out the fan, clean it and then oil it carefully (too much oil or doing so without cleaning it first will only make things worse). You can also buy replacement fans, although original fans are quite expensive.
  - favadi 10y ago
    Thermal paste shouldn't be matter much.
endgame 10y ago
Lenovo are on my personal shitlist after superfish and abusing the windows platform binary table. When my current laptop dies (a thinkpad T440p that I'm reasonably happy with), I may have to suck up the performance hit and go to minifree for a machine I can actually trust.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- yuhong 10y ago
  Ah, "consumer" vs "business" computers. I wonder whether this distinction even makes sense. I think the biggest reason it still exists at this point is Best Buy and similar retail outlets, right?
  - user5994461 10y ago
    The consumer space at Best Buy is focusing on whatever shit can be made and sold for < $500 dollars. And they are incredible at making stuff cheaper (whatever they may need to drop and break to reach that price). Business require better built laptops than that, they've got money to pay and they want to have decent services and support. As a special characteristics, they also never bother to have a GPU (save money and power but missing for some consumer folks).
- sz4kerto 10y ago
  They seem to have signed up for the MS Signature program, so you might now get pure Win10 without bloat.
  - kbart 10y ago
    I'm not sure Win10 is any better than Superfish..
    - yuhong 10y ago
      Superfish MITMed SSL communications in a way that created serious security problems.
EdwinHoksberg 10y ago
I bought a T460p a few months ago and am not very happy with it. The problem I have is that linux(I am running debian) has quite a few problems with the Skylake architecture, especially the graphics driver. I tried everything I can think of, installing the intel driver manually and installing the newest kernel(4.9.0) but I still have some troubles with the graphics glitches. So I when I'll be buying a new laptop I will definitely avoid the Skylake arch, every other version I tried worked a lot better.
- karussell 10y ago
  That was the problem I mentioned regarding the scaling of the video. In VLC this was easy to fix -> see article. For in-browser videos like youtube all was fine without a config.
  - EdwinHoksberg 10y ago
    The main problem I have is graphics artifacts in applications that use webkit, for example Vivaldi and Code. Here(https://gfycat.com/MemorableIndolentDuckling https://gfycat.com/MemorableIndolentDuckling) is a screengrab I made of the tearing, it mainly happens when I move the mouse over certain objects. Everything works fine in firefox so its pretty weird.
- petecox 10y ago
  Intel do a quarterly release that fetches pre-built packages but it's only for Ubuntu/Fedora. On my NUC, when new, I ran debian testing and had to pull in packages from debian experimental for Intel driver support. So I'd suggest maybe switching to downstream Ubuntu might involve less trauma? https://01.org/linuxgraphics/downloads/intel-graphics-update-tool-linux-os-v2.0.3 https://01.org/linuxgraphics/downloads/intel-graphics-update...
  - Symmetry 10y ago
    I can confirm that Ubuntu 16.04 works great on a T460p. The only issues I had were with the high resolution screen I chose and that was solved by finding the Gnome scaling options and also launching Chrome with '--force-device-scale-factor=1.4'. EDIT: Oh, and swapping out the hard drive isn't super easy any more. It's a matter of watching a Youtube video then everything goes smoothly, rather than look at the bottom of the laptop and everything goes smoothly.
bbtn 10y ago
I have Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon. At first, I thought I am buying an almost IBM quality laptop. Craftmanship is not good, it looks cheap, screen is flickering and there is a constant 20 kHz hiss from cpu fan. Battery does not long last as it was promised (they had ads: battery life longer than macbook air's). Touchpad is not very responsive. And finally: another new type of usb-size adapter port, I have not seen anywhere else.
- djsumdog 10y ago
  I should finish my post on the 1st Gen X1 carbon I got used. I was able to run FreeBSD on it, but after a while it just started crashing randomly and I got an error when trying to update the bios. I did buy it used so it could have just been a problem inherited from its previous owners. It worked well for the short time it did work. I got another one when I switched teams at work, but the last guy had taken it with him on a boat and it got wet. The touchpad didn't work and the lower left screen was discoloured. I didn't use it very much.
- yaantc 10y ago
  Very different experience with a X1 3rd generation (Broadwell). Battery life is 10h+, touchpad is butter smooth (to my surprise, better under Linux than with the original Windows 8.1), fans are stopped most of the time and the laptop is very silent. All this with Debian stable (more recently testing), so a pretty conservative set-up. For battery life (and maybe fan noise?), have you installed "laptop-mode" or its successor "tlp" (the laptop project)? Both will tune the system automatically for AC or battery power, and it does make a huge difference for battery life. If you don't use either, you should really try them: the 5 mn installation time will be a good investment ;) Main issue on my side: I bought it just after it was announced, and Linux support was so-so (functional, but annoying glitches and stability problems). Next time, I'll wait for the new models to be out and will buy the last gen one on the cheap --- there's so little changes anyway nowadays. But now all this is gone, and Linux support is top notch. Quality ok but not as good as I had imagined: there's now a bit of flex in one corner. Not a problem in practice, I just expected more sturdiness from a TP.
aceperry 10y ago
I love these linux on laptop articles. I've used linux since Redhat 5.0 and have almost always had to configure things to get everything to work. Nowadays, I don't really have the time to dick around, I used Gentoo for a long time, so I rely on Ubuntu to make it a simple plug and play install. Even with most of today's laptops, ubuntu seems to play well compared to the bad old days. I find I can throw Ubuntu on any laptop and get working as soon as I put in a few customizations and tweaks. Really, in my mind, linux has come a long way. But it's great to see how easy it is to get linux up and going on most laptops today.
- karussell 10y ago
  Have the same experience but I'm pretty sure many people do not know this so I wrote a quick and hopefully honest blog post about this :)
- emerongi 10y ago
  I used to use Arch Linux and moved to Fedora for the same reasons (don't want to fiddle with everything all the time). I was really surprised to see that it had HiDPI support by default. In Arch, it required some real gymnastics to make it work OK. Basically, everything works, I can get like 80% of the customization I had on Arch, haven't had any BS for the few months I've used it (besides newest Spotify version crashing with Wayland, but a downgrade solved that). It's pretty nice.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
eltoozero 10y ago
The x201 is a 12" ThinkPad model with i5 2.5 ghz, unfortunately only DDR2 but jam in an SSD and it's a crazy bargain for ~$100 on eBay. Coreboot support too if that's your kind of thing. Stay away from the tablet x201, forget that noise.
- yuhong 10y ago
  Core i5 would not be DDR2.
  - dom0 10y ago
    Correct, all three-figure models are at least DDR3. The X20x support up to 8 GB (2x 4 GB). Edit: And no, they really don't support more. The memory controller only supports 2 Gb chips, so with two ranks per channel you only get 2x 4 GB. (Intel i7-600, i5-500 series processor datasheet, section 2.1.1).
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - yuhong 10y ago
      The datasheets are often outdated. See http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20100923006778/en/Samsung-Mass-Producing-40nm-class-8GB-DDR3-Module http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20100923006778/en/Sams... for an example.
      - dom0 10y ago
        Yes, such things are often outdated, but the availability of different memory chips does not change existing hardware. The MC really doesn't support it, there is no way to change anything about that... I believe there were other chips at the time that supported more than 8 GB (i7-9xxM perhaps), but these are a different die (Clarksdale quad cores, ie. high end mobile chips that are selected desktop chips).
        10y ago
Zamicol 10y ago
I have a T420 and finally just updated to a Dell E5470 (8V22N). All of Lenovo's offerings seem overpriced as with the industry as a whole.
mathieuruellan 10y ago
And 3 years warranty on site, not optional (alreay included in the price).
mightymaike 10y ago
T440S user here: The thing broke already 3 times in two years. The quality of Thinkpads is rapidly declining. I'm going to move away from Thinkpads after being satisfied for about 15 years. Also the moves Lenovo recently did is a blocker.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
INTPenis 10y ago
My 2 cents about thinkpad, I have an x230 and am very happy with it. 3. Same resolution but smaller monitor and smaller overall size makes for easier traveling imo. 7. I have the exact same issue with hitting the touch pad when typing, but I've learned to go slower and avoid it. 8. I first ordered the x230 by accident with the larger battery and was amazed at the working time of 12-15 hours but it was also quite bulky. So I re-ordered with my missing keyboard backlight and with the slimmer battery and I'm quite happy with the slimmer form-factor while still having a good 6 hours of work time. 11. It's clearly not a media machine, it even lacks shortcut keys for pause/play media.
alanl 10y ago
I believe redhat staff use thinkpads (t-series and x-series)), meaning support for Linux is pretty good out of the box, and you can find a fix/ workaround for most issues on a fedora forum.
mathieuruellan 10y ago
I bought a TP s540 3 years ago, and a few days after the end of the warranty, the motherboard died. Lenovo was ok to replace it for free. 3 months after, the motherboard died again and this time, no free replacement. The s540 was really cheaper, but without 3y warranty, without full mil-specs. If you want reliability, choose T/X series. 3Y warranty on site is already included, a proof they trust these products. If you add the optional warranty on cheaper products, the price is higher than equivalent on T series.
Insanity 10y ago
I have a Lenovo laptop at home that is quite old now (A dual-core machine that I used throughout university). I am not sure which one it is, but I have been running Ubuntu on it for quite some time now, and it is actually the only of my devices that has always worked perfectly with a vanilla ubuntu installation. Recently running 16.04 on it as well, once again an update without any issues. Whilst on my other machines (An HP laptop and custom destkop) I always had _some_ problems with Ubuntu or other flavours of Linux. The HP laptop had the movie player problem mentioned here in the post, and had some issues with running Skype webcam/voice-chat. The desktop had an issue of freezing up randomly, and some audio issues at first. Currently Ubuntu is running on all these machines, but the old Lenovo laptop was the only one that in all these years worked without any issues.
wvh 10y ago
I've been using a CTO T440s with Intel WiFi option the last few years, running Debian and Arch Linux. I switched the HD for a SSD when I bought the machine. Initially I was somewhat disappointed because early reviewers seem to have gotten a better panel for the IPS display option then the later models had. The keyboard is good but not great: it has been replaced within warranty because some keys came off – the tiny plastic clips on the key caps had broken off. Lenovo serviced the machine for free within 2 days, even in Northern Europe, which is way better service than the people around me with Apple hardware have ever gotten. Apart from that the laptop has been absolutely stable and silent most of the time. I'd rate it better than average, just below the old IBM Thinkpads (e.g. T42) and Macbook Pros mostly because I wish they'd make the keyboard and trackpad feel a bit more solid like the one on a Macbook Pro. I'd step on a T42, not so much on the T440s. While it's not perfect, I'd consider buying it again, especially as a Linux user.
Labo333 10y ago
I think the best possible laptop for development that is not too expensive is simply a macbook pro unibody 2012, with a SSD and 16GB RAM. I still costs about 1000$ and you have to buy a SSD and RAM though they are reusable. Connectivity : It's the last macbook pro to have both a ethernet port and a DVD slot. And you have one of the new thunderbolt ports and a firewire port. The i5 processor is still good. The only drawback is the screen (and the GPU). But for development it doesn't matter, and for my part, I watch movies on it without any problem. With SSD and RAM you have a computer that is as fast as the latest macbook pro. It is solid and quite beautiful like all Apple portable computers. The battery is not very powerful (about 5 hours web browsing with chrome), but you can easily get external batteries (like the ThinkPad). It is easy to install linux on it with the new boot system, though I like macOS because it is still Unix and has a lot of convenient apps and more softwares (and I can still install most of linux apps with macports or compile them myself).
vegardx 10y ago
It would be so much easier to love my Thinkpad T460s if it wasn't for the touchpad. Coming to Thinkpad and Linux after many years as a Mac-user this was almost a deal breaker for me. The palm detection in synaptic driver is laughable. People installing Linux on the new Macbook Pros are going to have a blast with that gigantic touchpad. And I don't even think it's just a driver problem, as the touchpad can register a finger hovering over it, or not register it at all, if the finger is somewhat dry. I've spent countless hours trying to fine tune the thresholds, but it's just complete and utter shit. I would have returned it and gotten a Macbook Pro if it wasn't for the fact that the new Macbook seems more geared towards light weight users with the smaller battery, memory and crazy expensive upgrades. I've had to re-position my cursor three times while writing this, because my palm moves it around. It's rarely a problem when coding, because I don't stop to think for shorter periods, like I do when typing. A quick fix is to set the syndaemon to lock the touchpad when typing, but you can't have that treshhold too high either or it gets in the way. Oh, and don't get me started on the speakers. There is no way in hell that Lenovo spent any time to tune the acoustics. Listening to people talk almost always gives resonance in the case. I know it's a laptop, but in the current state they are more or less useless. On the other hand, what I do love about it: - Super light weight, very noticeable when coming from a Macbook. - Amazing battery life, I can easily do a full days work on a single charge. - Recharges very quickly, which I think is a result of having two batteries. - Really good keyboard. Probably the reason I'm keeping it. - Debian Stretch was a breeze to switch to. Everything just worked (except for touchapd and docking station!) But I honestly expected a little more from a laptop that costs $3000.
- walkingolof 10y ago
  Learn to use the trackpoint instead and disable the touchpad.
  - vegardx 10y ago
    That's what everyone seems to be saying, but that is more of a workaround than solution, if you ask me.
  - ynniv 10y ago
rerx 10y ago
If only Lenovo consistently offered bright screens with good color reproduction.
- amiga-workbench 10y ago
  Have you ever used a T420 before? The panel on that thing is so hilariously poor you have to wonder how it got past QA.
wiz21c 10y ago
I've seen shops on the internet selling "linux specific" PC's. Has anyone ever tried these ? See https://system76.com/ https://system76.com/ for example.
- Tistel 10y ago
  I bought a laptop from them 7-8 years ago because I felt paying for an OS then putting Gnu/Linux onto it was a waste of money (the Dell XPS is just as expensive as the Windows one, so I think I got this wrong). It worked really great, but, was ugly as sin. The body seemed 10 years out of date even back then (there were more modern looking laptops in the 90s). I think the Dell XPS linux is the only nice looking linux laptop that I am aware of. Given Apples dropping the ball for UNIX devs, I hope this space gets better.
nonsince 10y ago
Currently writing this from Arch Linux on the ThinkPad T450s (I think it's the version directly before the one in this article). Cannot recommend it enough, easily the best laptop keyboard I've ever used and the touchpad feels nice under my fingers. Not as nice to the touch as the mac's one, but it's the closest I've seen and on the bright side it's the perfect size to not get in the way (as opposed to Apple's massive parking lot at the bottom of the laptop) and it has regular buttons as well as supporting pushing on the trackpad itself, so overall I'd say it's a toss-up there. The main problem I have is that pgup/pgdown are right next to the arrow keys, which makes them extremely easy to hit by accident. Luckily, I don't use them often.
TheCowboy 10y ago
I bought a used W520, as it was one of the last Thinkpads with full/normal keyboard. I just can't get work down as quickly using modern island-style keyboards. I recommend it especially if you are still using an older Thinkpad. It's fast, supports up to 32gb of memory, 3 hard drives (regular, micro SATA, ultrabay), and has a good video card. I also find the touchpad with its mouse thumb buttons to be easier on my wrists than the trackpoint or other laptop trackpads. As a W (workstation) version it is heavy and requires a heavier charger. The T520 could solve this problem and also be a cheaper option. Hopefully Lenovo's "Retro Thinkpad" project is brought to reality.
- walkingolof 10y ago
  I got the P50, it got a full keyboard, 64 GB memory and a "desktop class" HQ CPU, 2 M2. disk slots and 1 SATA slot.
- esaym 10y ago
  I got a 520 with quad core i7. I had to swap the motherboard with integrated nvidia for the normal non nvidia motherboard to get dual monitor support under linux. But other than that, I got quad core and 16gb of ram. I think this will last me until 2020 or so. (or at least I hope so) Can't stand lenovo's latest offerings with offset keyboards with a number pad. Though looks like this 460 has a normal enough keyboard. That might be an option, just has a smaller screen :/
- driverdan 10y ago
  Have you considered using an external mech keyboard? There are a decent number of small ones: Pok3r, Planck, HHKB Pro 2, others.
  - TheCowboy 10y ago
    This is just for mobile computing and being able to work in different places. I do have a mechanical for my desktop and like it, but I don't like being anchored to the same spot everyday.
mangecoeur 10y ago
As an ex-linux user and current mac user, I'm still frustrated by linux laptop hardware support. Ethernet ports that need to be re-plugged, suspend-to-disk not working... lots of glitches things that were already annoying 6-7 years ago but now are hard to justify compared with the polish you can expect from other systems. I could never go back from my macbook because I need everything to just work - no glitchy touchpads, dodgy networking, haphazard sleep (and that's before we get into the quality of the available hardware). I want to actually do things with my computer, not spend my time fixing glitches.
- jclardy 10y ago
  Similar story here. Used linux in my HS/early college years, but switched to Mac when the swapped to intel. Recently looked at the possibilities of using linux again, but haven't really found any hardware that "just works." There is that one dell ubuntu dev laptop, but that is a pretty expensive gamble at $1800. The best luck I've had for now is installing ubuntu on a crappy cheap Samsung Chromebook. Runs really well and everything seems to work fine, but the hardware is junk (The screen is atrocious coming from retina IPS displays.) Fun to play around with though, plus the battery life is incredible for it's $180 price tag.
  - brightball 10y ago
    I've got a Dell dev laptop on order now. Hope to give a full report on how well it work soon. Dell has a 30 day return policy for what it's worth though.
    - chucksmash 10y ago
      I've owned and used both the Dell Precision M3800 and now the Precision 5510 running Ubuntu. They've generally worked well for me. The M3800 with UHD screen and discrete graphics generally sounded like a jet taking off when the fan was going. The 5510 is practically silent in my experience and works more reliably to boot (e.g. I have a lot less trouble with the new Intel WiFi card than I did with the M3800's Broadcom card). Your mileage may vary of course.
ronjouch 10y ago
Happy T560 (same laptop, with a 15'6" screen) owner here. Fully agree with the post conclusion: "powerful, has a very long lasting battery, it is silent under normal work and you can get your stuff done quickly and get solid Linux support. The Linux support is so good that I’m wondering why they do not ship it commercially to attract people like me." EDIT1: To dig further: compared to half a dozen linux "tweaks" with my former Dell XPS laptop, I have zero with this Thinkpad. Everything works as expected, no hardware-related config whatsoever. This is using Arch Linux, which ships a recent kernel. EDIT2: I bought the larger T560 version because I like the simplicity of doing everything on the same machine, but I'm more often using it at home than on the go, so the mobility / screen size trade-off is easy for me, and it's still relatively light (it's relatively thin, unlike W series).
softinio 10y ago
T460s is the better quality one but last I looked didn't have the latest i7 processors which is a shame. Always loved thinkpads and if I was to buy a developer laptop today would probably be a thinkpad with Linux on it.
ryanar 10y ago
I bought a ThinkPad X200 off of ebay for $400. SSD, 8gb ram, put Arch on it with zero issues, 8 hour battery, I love it.
therealmarv 10y ago
Still frustrating when you compare Apples to Oranges. You carry extra weight of Linux here: Weight as a Macbook Pro 15" but CPU performance (passmark) of a good Macbook Air 11" 2013 http://www.cpu-monkey.com/de/compare_cpu-intel_core_i5_6200u-590-vs-intel_core_i7_4650u-436 http://www.cpu-monkey.com/de/compare_cpu-intel_core_i5_6200u... & display SRGB coverage 61.55% according to Notebookcheck (Macbook Air 55,2%). No real improvements on Lenovo's side. For that money (if battery is a requirement) better buy a 13" Macbook Air (it's also 500-600 grams lighter).
- Xylakant 10y ago
  You're comparing the entry-level Thinkpad CPU with the Top-Level Macbook CPU - not surprising that the 3 year old top level CPU compares well with the entry level of this year. It's not like the faster CPUs for the Thinkpad will be any heavier. The author also deliberately chose the "regular" T460 model instead of the lighter, more integrated (and thus less serviceable) T460s. The T460s is at least comparable in weight and power. The screen is a bit of a toss-up: I like the macbook screen since it's sturdy and doesn't scratch, but I also like the Thinkpad screen since it's not glossy.
  - therealmarv 10y ago
    Also comparing that by intention: A new Macbook Air 13" with top level i7 CPU (early 2015) is in the same price region or even cheaper and outperforms his setup slightly. But it also does not meet his requirements with 16GB of RAM.
    - Xylakant 10y ago
      So yes, you can get lighter laptops that can't handle 16GB RAM and have a lower-res screen (and a worse onboard graphics) card for a comparable price. But you specifically were comparing weight and power - and that's not entirely an apple - to - apple comparison you're doing here.
- pessimizer 10y ago
  People really evaluate computers by the ratio of weight to CPU throughput?
keldaris 10y ago
I'm still using an ancient Thinkpad T400 I bought when they first came out (2007, I think?), and I still love it. Despite heavy use, everything works perfectly and the case could probably last for decades. Doing normal dev work on Arch Linux (everything from low level C++ to Python/Julia, but no web stuff) is pleasant despite the dated CPU. Every time I look at reviews of "modern" laptops or try a friend's machine (Apple, Dell, HP, mostly), I get a little sad over how the market has regressed in the past decade. Thus, the only upgrade I'm considering is getting a few T420/X220 machines to last me another decade or so. My dream would be a T60 case with modern hardware and there's a number of retro Thinkpad projects out there, but it's probably not going to happen. Not sure what I'm going to do when a T420 is finally too dated to be productive on, but thankfully that's a very long way off.
- sevensor 10y ago
  For personal use I'm still very productive with an x120e (under Arch naturally). I love the trackpoint device, and I miss it with my work-issued Dell Precision 5500. That being said, the latter works great under Arch as well, and my only annoyance is the weird screen flicker.
- sarcher 10y ago
  I also still have a T400 chugging along with Arch. It got put in storage for a few years until I dug it out while recycling some other junk and realized it still had considerable life in it. I just set someone up with a T420 with a few upgrades and it's a fantastic value. Hardest part was finding a source for the rubber HD rails needed to swap a 7mm tall SSD in place of the original 9.5mm platter drive. It was technically a downgrade from a newer thinkpad laptop that they had, but the T420 is just a better machine from fit/finish/touchpad/upgrade/repair perspectives. If anyone has advice on swapping the screen on a T420 please point me towards it - the T420 screen is, for me, the only negative.
  - keldaris 10y ago
    > If anyone has advice on swapping the screen on a T420 please point me towards it - the T420 screen is, for me, the only negative. There's a lot of people swapping them (one example [1]), but I don't know if there's a consensus on which are the best options, and there's quite a few. I think the T420 and the X220 are by far the best options for reasonably modern but not yet ruined Thinkpads, but for both of them the screens are definitely the weak points. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/3hjlbu/so_i_did_the_t420_fhd_ips_mod_and_its_glorious/ https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/3hjlbu/so_i_did_t...
pkamb 10y ago
Didn't even add a bullet point for the TrackPoint! It used to be that ThinkPads had great keyboards too, pity about the chiclets.
hendry 10y ago
You guys might be interested in an Archlinux centric T460 series I made on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLiKgVPlhUNuxgKwoVH4MMUy5MLqjAE2ux https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLiKgVPlhUNuxgKwoVH4MM... Suspend and networking work smoothly out of the box with systemd. The touchpad is OK using xf86-input-libinput, surprisingly the Trackpoint hardware is so bad in this model I've stopped using it.
flavor8 10y ago
I bought a Dell Inspiron 13 7000 earlier this year. i7, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD, touch screen, convertible. Ubuntu works flawlessly on it with the exception of not auto-rotating the screen when you fold it (you can set up a hotkey to do that, so not a big deal.)
VvR-Ox 10y ago
I have a Macbook Pro 2014 (new; i5-4 / 8GB / SSD) and a Thinkpad X220 (refurbished; i5-2 / 16GB / SSD). Clearly the chicklet keyboard of the MBP is the best of this kind, I ever used. The oldschool keyboard of the TP (it is the last without this chicklets) is the best keyboard I ever typed on. The touchpad of the TP is disgusting. I deactivated it minutes after first boot and haven't enabled it again. The Touchpad of the MBP is the best touchpad I ever used. The multitouch gestures work flawlessly, I never hit it while typing and it is big enough to use two hands (preferred for some actions). So it's a comparrison of apples and pears ;-) The Mac is better for grapical stuff and everything visual. It's OS & Hardware are optimized for that. It's Design is overrated as it is pretty but doesn't provide more aesthetic value to me than the good old TP, but this is very subjective and many may disagree with me in this point. The TP is better for Linux / Dev / Coding. The keyboard has enough keys to comfortably control everything without a mouse. If you need a pointer, use the red knub. Once learned you can nearly "beam" the pointer to where it shall be. Don't want to miss one of them, I love both <3
exabrial 10y ago
With Apple's hardware in the shitter, I'm hoping we see a rise of Linux-specific notebooks for developers! The _only_ reason I've stayed with OSX is because it's the _only_ mainstream and commercially supported desktop UNIX. crossing my fingers for 2017... 10g ethernet, sd reader, USB3, USB-C, Thunderbolt, and a fricken headphone jack would be spectacular! It doesn't have to be super thin, just a manageable weight and functional form!
DyslexicAtheist 10y ago
I personally quite like these guys: https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/ https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/
acd 10y ago
I can recommend switching Xorg Intel to the Xorg Modeset driver if you are using Linux with Intel based graphics. The stability of the modeset driver is much better than the Intel Xorg driver. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/intel_graphics https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/intel_graphics https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-modesetting https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-mode...
rixrax 10y ago
Say what you will, but Apple does make the best PC hardware. I used to run Linux (Mint) off of the 2013 MacBook Air. Now running Ubuntu on 2014 13" MBP. If you want a great Linux laptop, go to Ebay and get a used 13" or 15" inch MBP or Air and put a Linux on it. About everything will be better than with plasticy alternatives with inferior trackpads and mouse buttons. Some sort of matrix of what Apple HW will work with Linux is found from here: https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Apple https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Apple (but do your own research too)
- 2bluesc 10y ago
  > Say what you will, but Apple does make the best PC hardware. Maybe a 4+ years ago, but this is less true today. You must not have used recent Thinkpads or prosumer/business Dell laptops. It would probably blow your mind to learn they some even have the same touchpad hardware controllers. Sure, OS X has better software touchpad support, but the hardware is often identical. Furthermore, the serviceability of RAM, SSD and battery on an Apple is typically non-existent while trivial on things like the Dell Precision line. And from my experience, most people who run Linux tend to tinker with things as opposed to buy a blackbox and never open it. > Some sort of matrix of what Apple HW will work with Linux is found from here: https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Apple https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Apple (but do your own research too) That is handy, thanks for sharing! I wrestled with Linux on a 2012 rMBP before when HiDPI support was rough, and this would have saved me some time. :)
  - criddell 10y ago
    I think Apple still does a better job with the chassis. My ThinkPad is all plastic and flexes a lot. My MacBook seems much sturdier.
dfc 10y ago
Did lenovo get rid of the ThinkLight? (The keyboard illumination from above)
- fencepost 10y ago
  I don't have a newer one to check right now, but on the Tx30 series they had both the ThinkLight and the newly-introduced backlit keyboard, with lighting cycling from off - keyboard dim - keyboard bright - ThinkLight. ThinkWiki is unclear on its presence - The T460s is listed as a model with it, but the Tx50 models seem absent.
seanwilson 10y ago
Hmm, I find it hard to get over how old fashioned ThinkPad keyboards look.
gonzo 10y ago
Ran Macs for the last decade. Started experimenting with an x230 + FreeBSD -HEAD (i3wm) about a year ago. It took a while to get setup, but everything works, including resume. Just started using Ubuntu 16.04 on a X1 Carbon 4th gen. Pretty flawless install, except it won't correctly boot an encrypted LVM.
vladimir-y 10y ago
T470 serie is coming
sytelus 10y ago
I'm using Lenovo P50 for Linux development with duel boot to Windows. The trick to get duel boot right is to have two SSDs and install each OS on its own SSD. P50 supports two SSDs + 1 spinning drive. Besides this, its very likely only laptop with 64GB option and 4K display with descret NVidia GPU with 4GB memory so you can even do local deep learning!
- ianamartin 10y ago
  Thank you for this. I think this is very likely to be my next hardware purchase. Didn't know such a thing existed yet.
  - fencepost 10y ago
    I'll note that the T460p can also take an M.2 2242 format SSD in the WWAN slot. It's short (42mm not the normal 60+) and Transcend appears to be the main manufacturer for SSDs in the 2242 format. Up to 512GB, and of course since it's the WWAN slot you lose the ability to have a cell radio in there. Reportedly a little fiddling in the BIOS to get it booting from the M.2, but I'd expect that to be the normal question of setting the boot order.
  - mahyarm 10y ago
    There are a lot of laptops like that in the PC market, more skewed towards gamers. I like Dave 2D's youtube reviews (no affiliation) of laptops: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLsDn59fxdQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLsDn59fxdQ He has a whole bunch more on his channel about others similar to that lenovo.
    - sytelus 10y ago
      I've looked in to most major brands (Dell, Lenovo, HP, Razor) and can't find any offering with 64GB RAM + discret 4GB CUDA card + 4K resolution + 2 SSD + 1 spinning drive + Linux support. If you know any other options, I would be happy to know.
- andrepd 10y ago
ianamartin 10y ago
I wish there were some specific rules on the internet for discussing hardware. Things just always have a way of breaking down into practically religious points of view. I'm going to toss a couple of things out there: 1. If you are saying that literally nothing works, everything is awful, and that computer X is just complete garbage, then a few things pop into my head: a) I start wondering if maybe you are just bad at computers, b) I suspect that you are probably talking about a computer your work bought for you that isn't your preferred OS, and c) I decide that you really aren't contributing anything useful to the conversation. 2. By the same token, when I see people writing that everything works flawlessly I think a couple of things as well: a) you probably aren't doing anything that interesting with it, b) you are talking about a machine you are personally invested in rather than one bought for you by your work, and c) you really aren't adding anything useful to the conversation. Here's the bottom line, from my point of view--as well as my point of view: I spent my own money on and use two mac laptops, a windows laptop, and a Linux desktop. From work, I have a mac laptop and a windows laptop, and a windows desktop. All of these computers have benefits and drawbacks. The baseline of shit that just needs to work actually works on all of them, most of the time. Weird things go wrong from time to time. I find the Linux desktop to be more fiddly than the other machines at times, but not so much that it pisses me off more than apt-get makes me happy. The windows machines are harder to get set up properly than the macs for working with dynamic languages, but they are the best choice for working on the Microsoft dev stack. Duh. The macs have some real problems as well for certain parts of statistical work. Homebrew + anaconda + Xcode-select just doesn't get the job done far too often. And deving on mac + deploying to Debian or Ubuntu can be a bunch of not-fun. Not a one of these machines is perfect or flawless in any way, but any one of them would be acceptable for a daily driver work box. To the people who are speaking about specific issues on specific machines, I greatly appreciate that. To the top and bottom 10% who are saying everything/nothing works, you really aren't helping much here, and I find your opinions suspiciously biased.

319 points by karussell 10y ago

I develop on a T460S. I dual boot Windows 10 and Debian Stretch, though Bash on Ubuntu on Windows has kept me mostly in Windows lately. I prefer this ThinkPad to the previous generation; it's back to having actual mouse buttons. My only complaint is the lack of graphical oomph; gaming isn't really a thing this machine does, though it's okay at it. Then again, if that's what I was going for, I probably should have bought something else.

middleclick 10y ago

I have the T450s, and it's a great laptop for sure. But as someone who has owned laptops from the previous IBM ThinkPad series, there is a noticeably deterioration in quality ever since Lenovo took over. Is it only my laptop or have others noticed this as well?

mgv11 10y ago
I have also T450 and have had older ThinkPad's as well. And yes the quality is tad worse than it used to, but for me still better than others I've used.

karussell 10y ago

After I made a few comments here on HN about the T460, I felt I should condense all the stuff into a short blog post. Feel free to add your experience or alternate developer machines, with pros and cons. What I missed at Dell and Apple is the possibility to configure your hardware a bit so that it better fits your needs. This was better for Dell when I purchased the Dell Latitude 7 years ago. I did not choose an MBP because I feel safer with Linux in the long run. I heared that the security updates stop two years afterwards and the software upgrades makes the 'old' hardware a lot slower. In the end every OS somehow sucks, but Linux sucks least.

tonyedgecombe 10y ago
I've got a T460 and have been pleased with it although I am running Windows on it at the moment. However it has just developed a fault on the screen (bright spot in the middle).
mverwijs 10y ago
synclient PalmDetect=1 That should fix the palmdetection problem. If not, also do: synclient PalmMinZ=0

herbst 10y ago

Ive went with a T420 recently, mostly because of the keyboard. But also because $400 for laptop + battery + Samsung SSD + 16GB hyperX Ram sounded so cheap i could not resist. And honestly even after a 2015 MBP it feels perfect for all my needs. In fact due to the superior RAM and SSD it feels often way faster than the MBP for 5 times that price felt. Plus it has way better battery life. Seriously Thinkpads are the best dev laptops ever.

rincebrain 10y ago
What about the T-series keyboards changed recently that bothers you? If it's actually the touchpad changes, they reverted them on the xx50 and up (or made them optional, I forget which). (Typing this from a T430 I'm using while my W550s is being repaired, and I can't recall any drastic keyboard changes that had me in an uproar in the last while.)
- herbst 10y ago
  I have not tested a t430 but the t450 feeled a lot more "mushy" or rubberdome like. The t420 has a solid click (without the "click" :/) which is something i really like. From what ive read it got worse after the t420. So it was a easy choice for me.
- chx 10y ago
  Not recently but simply the amount of keys have dropped from T420 to T430. The Home - End - PgUp - PgDn keys are the same place on my T420s (which is upgraded to a quality full HD screen) as any 101 key keyboard in the last 35+ years. Insert - Delete isn't but that's kinda OK because Insert is rarely needed anyways. Taking away the 7th row is the cardinal sin of the T430+ keyboards. Also switching to keyboard backlight from ThinkLight is a moronic decision, there are more things to light than just the keyboard.
innocentoldguy 10y ago
Have their trackpads improved at all during the last five years?

ekianjo 10y ago

Did they make a 460s version of the 460 this time around?

karussell 10y ago
They have 'workhorse' 460p (less mobile but stronger CPUs IMO) and a more expensive 'ultra book' 460s, plus the X1 Carbon. For the Carbon there seems to be a recent version released (in the US): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13286150 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13286150 (maybe they plan to substitude the 460s?)
- rincebrain 10y ago
  Another poster upstream commented the T470 is being announced this upcoming week, so I would imagine that the X1c that was announced is from the same logical "generation", and we might see a T470s/p as well.
- sz4kerto 10y ago
  460p is not cheaper, it's the 'pro' version with more powerful GPU.
  - karussell 10y ago
    Corrected this. I think they are more powerful but less mobile?
Xylakant 10y ago
There's a T460s that is lighter and slimmer than the standard T460. No swappable batteries though. The RAM options and screen options are slightly weird - the HDPI Screen is only available for the students edition, but can be swapped after purchase and parts of the RAM are soldered, so the machine maxes out at 20GB. Still, it's a nice workhorse and easily portable.

cornedor 10y ago

This week at CES the T470 will be announced. So if you're thinking about buying one you might want to wait for that

karussell 10y ago
For Linux I highly recommend a further waiting of 6-9 months (e.g. (x)ubuntu 17.04.1)
- ktta 10y ago
  But it's not LTS. All the major software stuff will be well supported for 16.04 till 18.04. If you look around, you'll mostly find 14.04/16.04 in supported OSes. Even for OSS software, not just commercial stuff.
  - jusssi 10y ago
    I think the parent means that it may take some time until the hardware support gets to Linux kernel. I bought a Broadwell laptop right when the first ones came out, and had a lot of trouble with the integrated graphics (Intel, who supposedly do a good job with their Linux drivers compared to anyone else). It took about an year for Ubuntu to package a kernel that didn't either have annoying blinking glitches or hard lock-ups regularly. Obviously, I've been using the mainline kernels all that time, but even with them it took a couple of months. So yes, caution and patience with bleeding edge hardware is advisable.
JoshTriplett 10y ago
Having purchased a ThinkPad immediately after its CES announcement before, I'd strongly recommend against it, for several reasons. If something goes wrong, you'll have a long wait for service, due to unavailability of parts or replacement systems. I had to wait literally months for "next business day" service. (Under normal circumstances, they really do show up on the next business day.) Wait a few months, let any teething issues shake themselves out, and then get one. If you can't wait that long and need a new laptop now, grab an established model.
10y ago

TobbenTM 10y ago

And one of the most awesome things about Thinkpads not mentioned; you can get every (most?) replacement part directly from Lenovo. You can actually look up the part number in the service manual, order it, and replace it yourself. For nerds like us, this is sooo nice sometimes, when you just wanna get it fixed quickly, from the comfort of your own home.

wfunction 10y ago
How much do parts cost though? Are they reasonably priced?
- dom0 10y ago
  Usually they are. A new keyboard is like 40-50 € for most models, for example. But don't expect to get a sparkling new system board for 200 €. New rubber feet are like 10 € (but it's the whole set for all rubber feet of the system). For the X20x there are still some parts available new from distributors. Which is like 6-7 years of parts supply.
  - rhblake 10y ago
    New ThinkPad keyboards can easily be found on eBay, too, for a bit less. Even ones for models that are many generations old. Very convenient.
PetitPrince 10y ago
The fact that there are easily accessible service manuals (that tell you how to fix the computer) or sometimes videos (that show you how to fix the computer) is also a nice plus.
lflux 10y ago
Good to hear that Lenovo has continued to do this after the split from IBM - I ordered a new front bezel for my X40 when it cracked and the amount of parts available was staggering.
karussell 10y ago

2bluesc 10y ago

I've owned Thinkpads in the past and almost bought the T460 last month, then I discovered the Dell XPS / Precision line and fell in love. I picked up a manufacturer refurbished XPS 15 on eBay and wound up swapping in a Dell Precision E3-1505M motherboard I stumbled across. The line has Intel quad core CPUs, minimal bezel (my 15" is almost the same size as the 14" System 76 Galago Ultra Pro it's replacing), reasonably slim for a quad core, 84Wh battery, 10+ hours of low power dev (baseline power is about 5.25W on my 8GB + 1080p + Xeon E3-1505M machine) in (Arch) Linux? YES. Oh yeah, and for nerd points the Dell Precision M5510 has the option for Intel Xeon and Ubuntu stock for people doing CPU intensive Linux work (in my case Linux embedded system builds that grind for tens of minutes to two hours). To add icing on the cake, you can easily get parts (batteries, motherboards, etc) on eBay if you ever need to fix it yourself which is a sharp contrast to the non-existent System76 Galago Ultra Pro I picked up a few years ago after I ditched my last Thinkpad. I keep looking at the Thinkpads, but they seem a generation behind.

karussell 10y ago
With discovered you mean you bought one? What about the noise and battery time under normal and high work load?
- meddlepal 10y ago
  I used to have a Dell Precision M4800 and honestly you don't buy them for battery life. They're desktop workstation replacements that you haul off to meetings occasionally. I got about 2-3 hours of battery time on that thing when running usual work-related workloads on it... (IDE, VM's etc.). I don't remember the noise, but I'm not very sensitive to noisy laptops so I may have never noticed. I miss that laptop. The build quality was through the roof and it was solid as a brick.
  - kayoone 10y ago
    The new Precisions are a lot less Desktop workstation replacements and more power efficient. I wonder if they still offer the same kind of performance though.

tuananh 10y ago

despite so many problems that OP stated, he's still recommending it!

karussell 10y ago
Please let me know which part of the post was misleading. All major problems, I was able to fix. And the other stuff I can easily live with.
- mlvljr 10y ago
  "liar" :) <sent from my X131e>
aiur3la 10y ago
Different people have different needs. This laptop despite its minor flaws was in the end the best option for his particular needs ...or as a HN user said a while back: tuananh 42 days ago | parent [-] | on: Why the MacBook Pro Is Limited to 16GB of RAM all of this largely depends on personal preference. to me, i value battery so much more. :)
- tuananh 10y ago
  maybe it's just me. it seems when people recommends stuff that has many flaws like this, it seems they set the standard pretty low and i find it hard to take the recommendation.

okasaki 10y ago

I could buy 3 equivalent laptops (finding IPS might be a problem) for the price. Is the Thinkpad brand really worth that much?

rincebrain 10y ago
It depends on what you want. You can buy reasonably cheap laptops with similar specs, either by buying >2 generations back (this T430 was $300), or by buying new models that are made of cheap plastic. In my experience, all laptops eventually suffer damage, the more durable ones just take longer and tend to be more minor faults each time. So if you can afford your laptop suddenly failing and switching to another machine (possibly by swapping the drive out, presuming that didn't fail, or restoring from backups/cloud storage), great, you have a robust setup. But many people don't have such a robust configuration, nor do they bring a backup laptop when e.g. traveling. So for individuals and businesses that have configurations of Highly Replicated Data (where it doesn't matter if you lose an individual laptop), it might be worth it to buy lots of cheap laptops. For cases where the amount of time/value of data lost to failed laptops is worth far more than the cost difference of the more durable laptops, it's probably worth it to get the ones with the rollcages and carbon fiber-infused chassis and [...].
nickjj 10y ago
You can get a 13" 1920x1080 IPS panel on a Chromebook for about $350. With ~5 minutes of labor (swapping in an SSD) you can install Linux natively on it with GalliumOS. Full details can be found here: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/transform-a-toshiba-chromebook-cb35-into-a-linux-development-environment-with-galliumos https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/transform-a-toshiba-chromeboo... Been using it for a few months now for development and it's been great.

aiur3la 10y ago

I am sure it is a great laptop, but it also looks like a X1 with larger bezels. Why would you want that instead of X1?

karussell 10y ago
The X1 has strange RAM config options and was way more expensive I think.
wscott 10y ago
The X1 has soldered on memory. And non-user-serviceable batteries and hard drives. (My 1st gen X1 carbon used a very non-standard hard drive.) The T460 has hot-swapable batteries, real memory slots, and standard SATA disks. (but I wish is was a NVMe disk) I picked a 460 over a 460s because it seems a lot more servicable in the future and I can easily replace worn out batteries.
Xylakant 10y ago
The X1 does not offer docking stations nor does it offer the port range that a T460s offers (full ethernet, card reader, etc). The T460s is a few mm thicker than the X1 and about 200g heavier, but it shares a lot of hardware with and can use the same dock as the X260, T460 and T460p which is interesting if you're a business customer that wants to support a range of options from ultra-portable to powerful. If you're a single freelance person or consumer, the X1 may be the more appealing choice.
- willtim 10y ago
  The X1 does offer the OneLink+ docking station and soon will offer a TB3 docking station.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]

giis 10y ago

My experience with Lenovo: Personal Machine: (Ubuntu/CentOS with 1 or 2 VM running sometimes) For me: AMD Quad Core - A10 7300 , with 8GB DDR3 RAM and 1TB HDD (acer aspire e15) is perfect Linux development machine, it costs less than $500 . Unless you are running 3 or more VM or stuffs like high-end data processing using 16GB RAM for development is worthless. Work machine: (Windows / Fedora-19 with 3VBox vm running most of the time) We (team of 7 members) received new Lenovo thinkpad in 2012, with 256SSD, 16GB ram, and i7 processor. Within 18months 3 or 4 of my friends faced hardware related-issues (suddenly stopped booting etc). Luckily mine survived until I left the company in 2015.

mentat2737 10y ago

I bought a T420s a few months ago. I am selling my much newer MacBook Pro retina now, as the Thinkpad is so much more functional, the keyboard is amazing the feeling of the machine itself is fantastic. I am thinking to buy a X260 brand new because I need a newer CPU and better battery life, but for sure I'll only buy Thinkpads or Latitudes (I have one at work, amazing machine) from now on.

Hasknewbie 10y ago
I have a X260. Don't. The keyboard is a smooth smudgefest with so-so tactile feedback (this particular point will depend on which manufacturer supplied the keyboard that ends up in your unit). The keys and trackpoint leave marks on the display when it is closed. The display bezel leaves marks on the palmrest. This is really poor engineering on basic stuff. When I pick up the laptop by the lower left corner (hey, it's an ultraportable, why would I ever do that, right?), it immediately crashes with a garbled screen. After looking that up I found out that the HDD/SSD is under the left palmrest, and picking it up there may flex and alter the SATA connection, causing the crash. This seems to affect a random sample of users. So much for Thinkpad's vaunted "sturdy rollcage". But here's the real kicker: when I found this info on Lenovo's own forum, it was for the X230! This defect has been known for 3 generations of X-series Thinkpads, and yet they have never bothered fixing it. Ever since they decided to move to 16:9 with horrible Low-Fi resolution (for a line of laptops meant to be for serious, professional users), I feel like Lenovo's Thinkpad group have be led with the vision and drive of a Roomba: mostly face-plants, and every actual improvement is to catch up to the competition (notable exception: hot-swapable battery). I only stick to Thinkpads because of the trackpoint and Linux compatibility, I suspect I'm not the only one.
- Havoc 10y ago
  Weird - we've got an office full of x240s & x260s and they all seem fine from what I can tell. Never had a hardware related issue in ~2 years of use. Well except that one bluescreen a couple months back - that could be hw I guess. The screen res pisses me off though. :/

aiur3la 10y ago

> ... I find the boot time compelling enough (~23sec until login, plus 2sec to open the browser) that I do not need this. I think something is slowing down your boot, I get faster boot on a 2008 thinkpad running the same OS. OT: systemd was supposed to improve boot performance but it has actually become much worse. Upstart on a weak chromebook boots in under 2 sec, why shouldn't your current generation thinkpad with a fast SSD match that?

karussell 10y ago
Would be nice to have a faster one, yes :) ... some recommendations? Just fyi: I measure boot time from the time I press the power button. The BIOS logo appears a staggering 8sec or something although the BIOS fast boot is enabled. (Maybe the sync with NSA or something ;))
- aiur3la 10y ago
  I haven't tested any of these myself, but this page contains some great suggestions: https://askubuntu.com/questions/10290/how-do-i-improve-boot-speed https://askubuntu.com/questions/10290/how-do-i-improve-boot-... The initial boot delay is VERY annoying. I wish libreboot was supported on my laptop, then I could ditch lenovos ancient BIOS (and the NSA ping) once and for all: https://libreboot.org/docs/hcl/#supported_laptops_x86intel https://libreboot.org/docs/hcl/#supported_laptops_x86intel
- JoshTriplett 10y ago
  8 seconds for the BIOS sounds ridiculous; that should take less than a second. Check that you've booted and shut down successfully on the prior boot; with those, the boot should take much less time. (On an improper shutdown, the BIOS may do some extra work that takes longer.) Also check that you don't have some option enabled to make it wait around a while for a keyboard key. For the Linux portion of your boot, try running "systemd-analyze plot > /tmp/boot.svg" and looking at that. (Also note that "kernel" includes any time spent waiting in the initramfs for you to type your disk encryption passphrase.)
  - 10y ago

dajonker 10y ago

I have a X240 (12.5" version of the T440) for about 2.5 years now, and while indeed being super quiet when it's new, today the fan is almost always on, even if it's only on the lowest speed. Probably need to open it up and give it a good cleaning, and/or replace the thermal paste between the CPU and cooler.

aiur3la 10y ago
I did that with 2009 thinkpad and it got much worse. I guess the cheap paste I used was worse than the 6 year old paste lenovo had used :( What _did_ help was to take out the fan, clean it and then oil it carefully (too much oil or doing so without cleaning it first will only make things worse). You can also buy replacement fans, although original fans are quite expensive.
- favadi 10y ago
  Thermal paste shouldn't be matter much.

endgame 10y ago

Lenovo are on my personal shitlist after superfish and abusing the windows platform binary table. When my current laptop dies (a thinkpad T440p that I'm reasonably happy with), I may have to suck up the performance hit and go to minifree for a machine I can actually trust.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
yuhong 10y ago
Ah, "consumer" vs "business" computers. I wonder whether this distinction even makes sense. I think the biggest reason it still exists at this point is Best Buy and similar retail outlets, right?
- user5994461 10y ago
  The consumer space at Best Buy is focusing on whatever shit can be made and sold for < $500 dollars. And they are incredible at making stuff cheaper (whatever they may need to drop and break to reach that price). Business require better built laptops than that, they've got money to pay and they want to have decent services and support. As a special characteristics, they also never bother to have a GPU (save money and power but missing for some consumer folks).
sz4kerto 10y ago
They seem to have signed up for the MS Signature program, so you might now get pure Win10 without bloat.
- kbart 10y ago
  I'm not sure Win10 is any better than Superfish..
  - yuhong 10y ago
    Superfish MITMed SSL communications in a way that created serious security problems.

EdwinHoksberg 10y ago

I bought a T460p a few months ago and am not very happy with it. The problem I have is that linux(I am running debian) has quite a few problems with the Skylake architecture, especially the graphics driver. I tried everything I can think of, installing the intel driver manually and installing the newest kernel(4.9.0) but I still have some troubles with the graphics glitches. So I when I'll be buying a new laptop I will definitely avoid the Skylake arch, every other version I tried worked a lot better.

karussell 10y ago
That was the problem I mentioned regarding the scaling of the video. In VLC this was easy to fix -> see article. For in-browser videos like youtube all was fine without a config.
- EdwinHoksberg 10y ago
  The main problem I have is graphics artifacts in applications that use webkit, for example Vivaldi and Code. Here(https://gfycat.com/MemorableIndolentDuckling https://gfycat.com/MemorableIndolentDuckling) is a screengrab I made of the tearing, it mainly happens when I move the mouse over certain objects. Everything works fine in firefox so its pretty weird.
petecox 10y ago
Intel do a quarterly release that fetches pre-built packages but it's only for Ubuntu/Fedora. On my NUC, when new, I ran debian testing and had to pull in packages from debian experimental for Intel driver support. So I'd suggest maybe switching to downstream Ubuntu might involve less trauma? https://01.org/linuxgraphics/downloads/intel-graphics-update-tool-linux-os-v2.0.3 https://01.org/linuxgraphics/downloads/intel-graphics-update...
- Symmetry 10y ago
  I can confirm that Ubuntu 16.04 works great on a T460p. The only issues I had were with the high resolution screen I chose and that was solved by finding the Gnome scaling options and also launching Chrome with '--force-device-scale-factor=1.4'. EDIT: Oh, and swapping out the hard drive isn't super easy any more. It's a matter of watching a Youtube video then everything goes smoothly, rather than look at the bottom of the laptop and everything goes smoothly.

bbtn 10y ago

I have Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon. At first, I thought I am buying an almost IBM quality laptop. Craftmanship is not good, it looks cheap, screen is flickering and there is a constant 20 kHz hiss from cpu fan. Battery does not long last as it was promised (they had ads: battery life longer than macbook air's). Touchpad is not very responsive. And finally: another new type of usb-size adapter port, I have not seen anywhere else.

djsumdog 10y ago
I should finish my post on the 1st Gen X1 carbon I got used. I was able to run FreeBSD on it, but after a while it just started crashing randomly and I got an error when trying to update the bios. I did buy it used so it could have just been a problem inherited from its previous owners. It worked well for the short time it did work. I got another one when I switched teams at work, but the last guy had taken it with him on a boat and it got wet. The touchpad didn't work and the lower left screen was discoloured. I didn't use it very much.
yaantc 10y ago
Very different experience with a X1 3rd generation (Broadwell). Battery life is 10h+, touchpad is butter smooth (to my surprise, better under Linux than with the original Windows 8.1), fans are stopped most of the time and the laptop is very silent. All this with Debian stable (more recently testing), so a pretty conservative set-up. For battery life (and maybe fan noise?), have you installed "laptop-mode" or its successor "tlp" (the laptop project)? Both will tune the system automatically for AC or battery power, and it does make a huge difference for battery life. If you don't use either, you should really try them: the 5 mn installation time will be a good investment ;) Main issue on my side: I bought it just after it was announced, and Linux support was so-so (functional, but annoying glitches and stability problems). Next time, I'll wait for the new models to be out and will buy the last gen one on the cheap --- there's so little changes anyway nowadays. But now all this is gone, and Linux support is top notch. Quality ok but not as good as I had imagined: there's now a bit of flex in one corner. Not a problem in practice, I just expected more sturdiness from a TP.

aceperry 10y ago

I love these linux on laptop articles. I've used linux since Redhat 5.0 and have almost always had to configure things to get everything to work. Nowadays, I don't really have the time to dick around, I used Gentoo for a long time, so I rely on Ubuntu to make it a simple plug and play install. Even with most of today's laptops, ubuntu seems to play well compared to the bad old days. I find I can throw Ubuntu on any laptop and get working as soon as I put in a few customizations and tweaks. Really, in my mind, linux has come a long way. But it's great to see how easy it is to get linux up and going on most laptops today.

karussell 10y ago
Have the same experience but I'm pretty sure many people do not know this so I wrote a quick and hopefully honest blog post about this :)
emerongi 10y ago
I used to use Arch Linux and moved to Fedora for the same reasons (don't want to fiddle with everything all the time). I was really surprised to see that it had HiDPI support by default. In Arch, it required some real gymnastics to make it work OK. Basically, everything works, I can get like 80% of the customization I had on Arch, haven't had any BS for the few months I've used it (besides newest Spotify version crashing with Wayland, but a downgrade solved that). It's pretty nice.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

eltoozero 10y ago

The x201 is a 12" ThinkPad model with i5 2.5 ghz, unfortunately only DDR2 but jam in an SSD and it's a crazy bargain for ~$100 on eBay. Coreboot support too if that's your kind of thing. Stay away from the tablet x201, forget that noise.

yuhong 10y ago
Core i5 would not be DDR2.
- dom0 10y ago
  Correct, all three-figure models are at least DDR3. The X20x support up to 8 GB (2x 4 GB). Edit: And no, they really don't support more. The memory controller only supports 2 Gb chips, so with two ranks per channel you only get 2x 4 GB. (Intel i7-600, i5-500 series processor datasheet, section 2.1.1).
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - yuhong 10y ago
    The datasheets are often outdated. See http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20100923006778/en/Samsung-Mass-Producing-40nm-class-8GB-DDR3-Module http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20100923006778/en/Sams... for an example.
    - dom0 10y ago
      Yes, such things are often outdated, but the availability of different memory chips does not change existing hardware. The MC really doesn't support it, there is no way to change anything about that... I believe there were other chips at the time that supported more than 8 GB (i7-9xxM perhaps), but these are a different die (Clarksdale quad cores, ie. high end mobile chips that are selected desktop chips).
      - 10y ago

Zamicol 10y ago

I have a T420 and finally just updated to a Dell E5470 (8V22N). All of Lenovo's offerings seem overpriced as with the industry as a whole.

mathieuruellan 10y ago

And 3 years warranty on site, not optional (alreay included in the price).

mightymaike 10y ago

T440S user here: The thing broke already 3 times in two years. The quality of Thinkpads is rapidly declining. I'm going to move away from Thinkpads after being satisfied for about 15 years. Also the moves Lenovo recently did is a blocker.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

INTPenis 10y ago

My 2 cents about thinkpad, I have an x230 and am very happy with it. 3. Same resolution but smaller monitor and smaller overall size makes for easier traveling imo. 7. I have the exact same issue with hitting the touch pad when typing, but I've learned to go slower and avoid it. 8. I first ordered the x230 by accident with the larger battery and was amazed at the working time of 12-15 hours but it was also quite bulky. So I re-ordered with my missing keyboard backlight and with the slimmer battery and I'm quite happy with the slimmer form-factor while still having a good 6 hours of work time. 11. It's clearly not a media machine, it even lacks shortcut keys for pause/play media.

alanl 10y ago

I believe redhat staff use thinkpads (t-series and x-series)), meaning support for Linux is pretty good out of the box, and you can find a fix/ workaround for most issues on a fedora forum.

mathieuruellan 10y ago

I bought a TP s540 3 years ago, and a few days after the end of the warranty, the motherboard died. Lenovo was ok to replace it for free. 3 months after, the motherboard died again and this time, no free replacement. The s540 was really cheaper, but without 3y warranty, without full mil-specs. If you want reliability, choose T/X series. 3Y warranty on site is already included, a proof they trust these products. If you add the optional warranty on cheaper products, the price is higher than equivalent on T series.

Insanity 10y ago

I have a Lenovo laptop at home that is quite old now (A dual-core machine that I used throughout university). I am not sure which one it is, but I have been running Ubuntu on it for quite some time now, and it is actually the only of my devices that has always worked perfectly with a vanilla ubuntu installation. Recently running 16.04 on it as well, once again an update without any issues. Whilst on my other machines (An HP laptop and custom destkop) I always had _some_ problems with Ubuntu or other flavours of Linux. The HP laptop had the movie player problem mentioned here in the post, and had some issues with running Skype webcam/voice-chat. The desktop had an issue of freezing up randomly, and some audio issues at first. Currently Ubuntu is running on all these machines, but the old Lenovo laptop was the only one that in all these years worked without any issues.

wvh 10y ago

I've been using a CTO T440s with Intel WiFi option the last few years, running Debian and Arch Linux. I switched the HD for a SSD when I bought the machine. Initially I was somewhat disappointed because early reviewers seem to have gotten a better panel for the IPS display option then the later models had. The keyboard is good but not great: it has been replaced within warranty because some keys came off – the tiny plastic clips on the key caps had broken off. Lenovo serviced the machine for free within 2 days, even in Northern Europe, which is way better service than the people around me with Apple hardware have ever gotten. Apart from that the laptop has been absolutely stable and silent most of the time. I'd rate it better than average, just below the old IBM Thinkpads (e.g. T42) and Macbook Pros mostly because I wish they'd make the keyboard and trackpad feel a bit more solid like the one on a Macbook Pro. I'd step on a T42, not so much on the T440s. While it's not perfect, I'd consider buying it again, especially as a Linux user.

Labo333 10y ago

I think the best possible laptop for development that is not too expensive is simply a macbook pro unibody 2012, with a SSD and 16GB RAM. I still costs about 1000$ and you have to buy a SSD and RAM though they are reusable. Connectivity : It's the last macbook pro to have both a ethernet port and a DVD slot. And you have one of the new thunderbolt ports and a firewire port. The i5 processor is still good. The only drawback is the screen (and the GPU). But for development it doesn't matter, and for my part, I watch movies on it without any problem. With SSD and RAM you have a computer that is as fast as the latest macbook pro. It is solid and quite beautiful like all Apple portable computers. The battery is not very powerful (about 5 hours web browsing with chrome), but you can easily get external batteries (like the ThinkPad). It is easy to install linux on it with the new boot system, though I like macOS because it is still Unix and has a lot of convenient apps and more softwares (and I can still install most of linux apps with macports or compile them myself).

vegardx 10y ago

It would be so much easier to love my Thinkpad T460s if it wasn't for the touchpad. Coming to Thinkpad and Linux after many years as a Mac-user this was almost a deal breaker for me. The palm detection in synaptic driver is laughable. People installing Linux on the new Macbook Pros are going to have a blast with that gigantic touchpad. And I don't even think it's just a driver problem, as the touchpad can register a finger hovering over it, or not register it at all, if the finger is somewhat dry. I've spent countless hours trying to fine tune the thresholds, but it's just complete and utter shit. I would have returned it and gotten a Macbook Pro if it wasn't for the fact that the new Macbook seems more geared towards light weight users with the smaller battery, memory and crazy expensive upgrades. I've had to re-position my cursor three times while writing this, because my palm moves it around. It's rarely a problem when coding, because I don't stop to think for shorter periods, like I do when typing. A quick fix is to set the syndaemon to lock the touchpad when typing, but you can't have that treshhold too high either or it gets in the way. Oh, and don't get me started on the speakers. There is no way in hell that Lenovo spent any time to tune the acoustics. Listening to people talk almost always gives resonance in the case. I know it's a laptop, but in the current state they are more or less useless. On the other hand, what I do love about it: - Super light weight, very noticeable when coming from a Macbook. - Amazing battery life, I can easily do a full days work on a single charge. - Recharges very quickly, which I think is a result of having two batteries. - Really good keyboard. Probably the reason I'm keeping it. - Debian Stretch was a breeze to switch to. Everything just worked (except for touchapd and docking station!) But I honestly expected a little more from a laptop that costs $3000.

walkingolof 10y ago
Learn to use the trackpoint instead and disable the touchpad.
- vegardx 10y ago
  That's what everyone seems to be saying, but that is more of a workaround than solution, if you ask me.
- ynniv 10y ago

rerx 10y ago

If only Lenovo consistently offered bright screens with good color reproduction.

amiga-workbench 10y ago
Have you ever used a T420 before? The panel on that thing is so hilariously poor you have to wonder how it got past QA.

wiz21c 10y ago

I've seen shops on the internet selling "linux specific" PC's. Has anyone ever tried these ? See https://system76.com/ https://system76.com/ for example.

Tistel 10y ago
I bought a laptop from them 7-8 years ago because I felt paying for an OS then putting Gnu/Linux onto it was a waste of money (the Dell XPS is just as expensive as the Windows one, so I think I got this wrong). It worked really great, but, was ugly as sin. The body seemed 10 years out of date even back then (there were more modern looking laptops in the 90s). I think the Dell XPS linux is the only nice looking linux laptop that I am aware of. Given Apples dropping the ball for UNIX devs, I hope this space gets better.

nonsince 10y ago

Currently writing this from Arch Linux on the ThinkPad T450s (I think it's the version directly before the one in this article). Cannot recommend it enough, easily the best laptop keyboard I've ever used and the touchpad feels nice under my fingers. Not as nice to the touch as the mac's one, but it's the closest I've seen and on the bright side it's the perfect size to not get in the way (as opposed to Apple's massive parking lot at the bottom of the laptop) and it has regular buttons as well as supporting pushing on the trackpad itself, so overall I'd say it's a toss-up there. The main problem I have is that pgup/pgdown are right next to the arrow keys, which makes them extremely easy to hit by accident. Luckily, I don't use them often.

TheCowboy 10y ago

I bought a used W520, as it was one of the last Thinkpads with full/normal keyboard. I just can't get work down as quickly using modern island-style keyboards. I recommend it especially if you are still using an older Thinkpad. It's fast, supports up to 32gb of memory, 3 hard drives (regular, micro SATA, ultrabay), and has a good video card. I also find the touchpad with its mouse thumb buttons to be easier on my wrists than the trackpoint or other laptop trackpads. As a W (workstation) version it is heavy and requires a heavier charger. The T520 could solve this problem and also be a cheaper option. Hopefully Lenovo's "Retro Thinkpad" project is brought to reality.

walkingolof 10y ago
I got the P50, it got a full keyboard, 64 GB memory and a "desktop class" HQ CPU, 2 M2. disk slots and 1 SATA slot.
esaym 10y ago
I got a 520 with quad core i7. I had to swap the motherboard with integrated nvidia for the normal non nvidia motherboard to get dual monitor support under linux. But other than that, I got quad core and 16gb of ram. I think this will last me until 2020 or so. (or at least I hope so) Can't stand lenovo's latest offerings with offset keyboards with a number pad. Though looks like this 460 has a normal enough keyboard. That might be an option, just has a smaller screen :/
driverdan 10y ago
Have you considered using an external mech keyboard? There are a decent number of small ones: Pok3r, Planck, HHKB Pro 2, others.
- TheCowboy 10y ago
  This is just for mobile computing and being able to work in different places. I do have a mechanical for my desktop and like it, but I don't like being anchored to the same spot everyday.

mangecoeur 10y ago

As an ex-linux user and current mac user, I'm still frustrated by linux laptop hardware support. Ethernet ports that need to be re-plugged, suspend-to-disk not working... lots of glitches things that were already annoying 6-7 years ago but now are hard to justify compared with the polish you can expect from other systems. I could never go back from my macbook because I need everything to just work - no glitchy touchpads, dodgy networking, haphazard sleep (and that's before we get into the quality of the available hardware). I want to actually do things with my computer, not spend my time fixing glitches.

jclardy 10y ago
Similar story here. Used linux in my HS/early college years, but switched to Mac when the swapped to intel. Recently looked at the possibilities of using linux again, but haven't really found any hardware that "just works." There is that one dell ubuntu dev laptop, but that is a pretty expensive gamble at $1800. The best luck I've had for now is installing ubuntu on a crappy cheap Samsung Chromebook. Runs really well and everything seems to work fine, but the hardware is junk (The screen is atrocious coming from retina IPS displays.) Fun to play around with though, plus the battery life is incredible for it's $180 price tag.
- brightball 10y ago
  I've got a Dell dev laptop on order now. Hope to give a full report on how well it work soon. Dell has a 30 day return policy for what it's worth though.
  - chucksmash 10y ago
    I've owned and used both the Dell Precision M3800 and now the Precision 5510 running Ubuntu. They've generally worked well for me. The M3800 with UHD screen and discrete graphics generally sounded like a jet taking off when the fan was going. The 5510 is practically silent in my experience and works more reliably to boot (e.g. I have a lot less trouble with the new Intel WiFi card than I did with the M3800's Broadcom card). Your mileage may vary of course.

ronjouch 10y ago

Happy T560 (same laptop, with a 15'6" screen) owner here. Fully agree with the post conclusion: "powerful, has a very long lasting battery, it is silent under normal work and you can get your stuff done quickly and get solid Linux support. The Linux support is so good that I’m wondering why they do not ship it commercially to attract people like me." EDIT1: To dig further: compared to half a dozen linux "tweaks" with my former Dell XPS laptop, I have zero with this Thinkpad. Everything works as expected, no hardware-related config whatsoever. This is using Arch Linux, which ships a recent kernel. EDIT2: I bought the larger T560 version because I like the simplicity of doing everything on the same machine, but I'm more often using it at home than on the go, so the mobility / screen size trade-off is easy for me, and it's still relatively light (it's relatively thin, unlike W series).

softinio 10y ago

T460s is the better quality one but last I looked didn't have the latest i7 processors which is a shame. Always loved thinkpads and if I was to buy a developer laptop today would probably be a thinkpad with Linux on it.

ryanar 10y ago

I bought a ThinkPad X200 off of ebay for $400. SSD, 8gb ram, put Arch on it with zero issues, 8 hour battery, I love it.

therealmarv 10y ago

Still frustrating when you compare Apples to Oranges. You carry extra weight of Linux here: Weight as a Macbook Pro 15" but CPU performance (passmark) of a good Macbook Air 11" 2013 http://www.cpu-monkey.com/de/compare_cpu-intel_core_i5_6200u-590-vs-intel_core_i7_4650u-436 http://www.cpu-monkey.com/de/compare_cpu-intel_core_i5_6200u... & display SRGB coverage 61.55% according to Notebookcheck (Macbook Air 55,2%). No real improvements on Lenovo's side. For that money (if battery is a requirement) better buy a 13" Macbook Air (it's also 500-600 grams lighter).

Xylakant 10y ago
You're comparing the entry-level Thinkpad CPU with the Top-Level Macbook CPU - not surprising that the 3 year old top level CPU compares well with the entry level of this year. It's not like the faster CPUs for the Thinkpad will be any heavier. The author also deliberately chose the "regular" T460 model instead of the lighter, more integrated (and thus less serviceable) T460s. The T460s is at least comparable in weight and power. The screen is a bit of a toss-up: I like the macbook screen since it's sturdy and doesn't scratch, but I also like the Thinkpad screen since it's not glossy.
- therealmarv 10y ago
  Also comparing that by intention: A new Macbook Air 13" with top level i7 CPU (early 2015) is in the same price region or even cheaper and outperforms his setup slightly. But it also does not meet his requirements with 16GB of RAM.
  - Xylakant 10y ago
    So yes, you can get lighter laptops that can't handle 16GB RAM and have a lower-res screen (and a worse onboard graphics) card for a comparable price. But you specifically were comparing weight and power - and that's not entirely an apple - to - apple comparison you're doing here.
pessimizer 10y ago
People really evaluate computers by the ratio of weight to CPU throughput?

keldaris 10y ago

I'm still using an ancient Thinkpad T400 I bought when they first came out (2007, I think?), and I still love it. Despite heavy use, everything works perfectly and the case could probably last for decades. Doing normal dev work on Arch Linux (everything from low level C++ to Python/Julia, but no web stuff) is pleasant despite the dated CPU. Every time I look at reviews of "modern" laptops or try a friend's machine (Apple, Dell, HP, mostly), I get a little sad over how the market has regressed in the past decade. Thus, the only upgrade I'm considering is getting a few T420/X220 machines to last me another decade or so. My dream would be a T60 case with modern hardware and there's a number of retro Thinkpad projects out there, but it's probably not going to happen. Not sure what I'm going to do when a T420 is finally too dated to be productive on, but thankfully that's a very long way off.

sevensor 10y ago
For personal use I'm still very productive with an x120e (under Arch naturally). I love the trackpoint device, and I miss it with my work-issued Dell Precision 5500. That being said, the latter works great under Arch as well, and my only annoyance is the weird screen flicker.
sarcher 10y ago
I also still have a T400 chugging along with Arch. It got put in storage for a few years until I dug it out while recycling some other junk and realized it still had considerable life in it. I just set someone up with a T420 with a few upgrades and it's a fantastic value. Hardest part was finding a source for the rubber HD rails needed to swap a 7mm tall SSD in place of the original 9.5mm platter drive. It was technically a downgrade from a newer thinkpad laptop that they had, but the T420 is just a better machine from fit/finish/touchpad/upgrade/repair perspectives. If anyone has advice on swapping the screen on a T420 please point me towards it - the T420 screen is, for me, the only negative.
- keldaris 10y ago
  > If anyone has advice on swapping the screen on a T420 please point me towards it - the T420 screen is, for me, the only negative. There's a lot of people swapping them (one example [1]), but I don't know if there's a consensus on which are the best options, and there's quite a few. I think the T420 and the X220 are by far the best options for reasonably modern but not yet ruined Thinkpads, but for both of them the screens are definitely the weak points. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/3hjlbu/so_i_did_the_t420_fhd_ips_mod_and_its_glorious/ https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/3hjlbu/so_i_did_t...

pkamb 10y ago

Didn't even add a bullet point for the TrackPoint! It used to be that ThinkPads had great keyboards too, pity about the chiclets.

hendry 10y ago

You guys might be interested in an Archlinux centric T460 series I made on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLiKgVPlhUNuxgKwoVH4MMUy5MLqjAE2ux https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLiKgVPlhUNuxgKwoVH4MM... Suspend and networking work smoothly out of the box with systemd. The touchpad is OK using xf86-input-libinput, surprisingly the Trackpoint hardware is so bad in this model I've stopped using it.

flavor8 10y ago

I bought a Dell Inspiron 13 7000 earlier this year. i7, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD, touch screen, convertible. Ubuntu works flawlessly on it with the exception of not auto-rotating the screen when you fold it (you can set up a hotkey to do that, so not a big deal.)

VvR-Ox 10y ago

I have a Macbook Pro 2014 (new; i5-4 / 8GB / SSD) and a Thinkpad X220 (refurbished; i5-2 / 16GB / SSD). Clearly the chicklet keyboard of the MBP is the best of this kind, I ever used. The oldschool keyboard of the TP (it is the last without this chicklets) is the best keyboard I ever typed on. The touchpad of the TP is disgusting. I deactivated it minutes after first boot and haven't enabled it again. The Touchpad of the MBP is the best touchpad I ever used. The multitouch gestures work flawlessly, I never hit it while typing and it is big enough to use two hands (preferred for some actions). So it's a comparrison of apples and pears ;-) The Mac is better for grapical stuff and everything visual. It's OS & Hardware are optimized for that. It's Design is overrated as it is pretty but doesn't provide more aesthetic value to me than the good old TP, but this is very subjective and many may disagree with me in this point. The TP is better for Linux / Dev / Coding. The keyboard has enough keys to comfortably control everything without a mouse. If you need a pointer, use the red knub. Once learned you can nearly "beam" the pointer to where it shall be. Don't want to miss one of them, I love both <3

exabrial 10y ago

With Apple's hardware in the shitter, I'm hoping we see a rise of Linux-specific notebooks for developers! The _only_ reason I've stayed with OSX is because it's the _only_ mainstream and commercially supported desktop UNIX. crossing my fingers for 2017... 10g ethernet, sd reader, USB3, USB-C, Thunderbolt, and a fricken headphone jack would be spectacular! It doesn't have to be super thin, just a manageable weight and functional form!

DyslexicAtheist 10y ago

I personally quite like these guys: https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/ https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/

acd 10y ago

I can recommend switching Xorg Intel to the Xorg Modeset driver if you are using Linux with Intel based graphics. The stability of the modeset driver is much better than the Intel Xorg driver. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/intel_graphics https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/intel_graphics https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-modesetting https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-mode...

rixrax 10y ago

Say what you will, but Apple does make the best PC hardware. I used to run Linux (Mint) off of the 2013 MacBook Air. Now running Ubuntu on 2014 13" MBP. If you want a great Linux laptop, go to Ebay and get a used 13" or 15" inch MBP or Air and put a Linux on it. About everything will be better than with plasticy alternatives with inferior trackpads and mouse buttons. Some sort of matrix of what Apple HW will work with Linux is found from here: https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Apple https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Apple (but do your own research too)

2bluesc 10y ago
> Say what you will, but Apple does make the best PC hardware. Maybe a 4+ years ago, but this is less true today. You must not have used recent Thinkpads or prosumer/business Dell laptops. It would probably blow your mind to learn they some even have the same touchpad hardware controllers. Sure, OS X has better software touchpad support, but the hardware is often identical. Furthermore, the serviceability of RAM, SSD and battery on an Apple is typically non-existent while trivial on things like the Dell Precision line. And from my experience, most people who run Linux tend to tinker with things as opposed to buy a blackbox and never open it. > Some sort of matrix of what Apple HW will work with Linux is found from here: https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Apple https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Apple (but do your own research too) That is handy, thanks for sharing! I wrestled with Linux on a 2012 rMBP before when HiDPI support was rough, and this would have saved me some time. :)
- criddell 10y ago
  I think Apple still does a better job with the chassis. My ThinkPad is all plastic and flexes a lot. My MacBook seems much sturdier.

dfc 10y ago

Did lenovo get rid of the ThinkLight? (The keyboard illumination from above)

fencepost 10y ago
I don't have a newer one to check right now, but on the Tx30 series they had both the ThinkLight and the newly-introduced backlit keyboard, with lighting cycling from off - keyboard dim - keyboard bright - ThinkLight. ThinkWiki is unclear on its presence - The T460s is listed as a model with it, but the Tx50 models seem absent.

seanwilson 10y ago

Hmm, I find it hard to get over how old fashioned ThinkPad keyboards look.

gonzo 10y ago

Ran Macs for the last decade. Started experimenting with an x230 + FreeBSD -HEAD (i3wm) about a year ago. It took a while to get setup, but everything works, including resume. Just started using Ubuntu 16.04 on a X1 Carbon 4th gen. Pretty flawless install, except it won't correctly boot an encrypted LVM.

vladimir-y 10y ago

T470 serie is coming

sytelus 10y ago

I'm using Lenovo P50 for Linux development with duel boot to Windows. The trick to get duel boot right is to have two SSDs and install each OS on its own SSD. P50 supports two SSDs + 1 spinning drive. Besides this, its very likely only laptop with 64GB option and 4K display with descret NVidia GPU with 4GB memory so you can even do local deep learning!

ianamartin 10y ago
Thank you for this. I think this is very likely to be my next hardware purchase. Didn't know such a thing existed yet.
- fencepost 10y ago
  I'll note that the T460p can also take an M.2 2242 format SSD in the WWAN slot. It's short (42mm not the normal 60+) and Transcend appears to be the main manufacturer for SSDs in the 2242 format. Up to 512GB, and of course since it's the WWAN slot you lose the ability to have a cell radio in there. Reportedly a little fiddling in the BIOS to get it booting from the M.2, but I'd expect that to be the normal question of setting the boot order.
- mahyarm 10y ago
  There are a lot of laptops like that in the PC market, more skewed towards gamers. I like Dave 2D's youtube reviews (no affiliation) of laptops: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLsDn59fxdQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLsDn59fxdQ He has a whole bunch more on his channel about others similar to that lenovo.
  - sytelus 10y ago
    I've looked in to most major brands (Dell, Lenovo, HP, Razor) and can't find any offering with 64GB RAM + discret 4GB CUDA card + 4K resolution + 2 SSD + 1 spinning drive + Linux support. If you know any other options, I would be happy to know.
andrepd 10y ago

ianamartin 10y ago

I wish there were some specific rules on the internet for discussing hardware. Things just always have a way of breaking down into practically religious points of view. I'm going to toss a couple of things out there: 1. If you are saying that literally nothing works, everything is awful, and that computer X is just complete garbage, then a few things pop into my head: a) I start wondering if maybe you are just bad at computers, b) I suspect that you are probably talking about a computer your work bought for you that isn't your preferred OS, and c) I decide that you really aren't contributing anything useful to the conversation. 2. By the same token, when I see people writing that everything works flawlessly I think a couple of things as well: a) you probably aren't doing anything that interesting with it, b) you are talking about a machine you are personally invested in rather than one bought for you by your work, and c) you really aren't adding anything useful to the conversation. Here's the bottom line, from my point of view--as well as my point of view: I spent my own money on and use two mac laptops, a windows laptop, and a Linux desktop. From work, I have a mac laptop and a windows laptop, and a windows desktop. All of these computers have benefits and drawbacks. The baseline of shit that just needs to work actually works on all of them, most of the time. Weird things go wrong from time to time. I find the Linux desktop to be more fiddly than the other machines at times, but not so much that it pisses me off more than apt-get makes me happy. The windows machines are harder to get set up properly than the macs for working with dynamic languages, but they are the best choice for working on the Microsoft dev stack. Duh. The macs have some real problems as well for certain parts of statistical work. Homebrew + anaconda + Xcode-select just doesn't get the job done far too often. And deving on mac + deploying to Debian or Ubuntu can be a bunch of not-fun. Not a one of these machines is perfect or flawless in any way, but any one of them would be acceptable for a daily driver work box. To the people who are speaking about specific issues on specific machines, I greatly appreciate that. To the top and bottom 10% who are saying everything/nothing works, you really aren't helping much here, and I find your opinions suspiciously biased.