Low hanging fruit, but whatever. It is what it is.

  • @NOPper@lemmy.world
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    08 months ago

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

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

    • @DogWater@lemmy.world
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      08 months ago

      Fwiw this meme isn’t piling on any Lenovo Thinkpad hate you’ve seen if I understand it correctly (which I may not)

    • @MutilationWave@lemmy.world
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      08 months ago

      You could buy a nice gaming laptop for that price. I thought the appeal of think pads was that you buy an old one cheap. It’s just me I guess but I don’t enjoy using them.

      • @NOPper@lemmy.world
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        08 months ago

        Maybe I could, but I’m not using it for gaming so battery life, portability, and fan noise don’t have to be sacrificed for a few more FPS when I wanna play something light on the road.

        The Tim Taylor approach to hardware was great when I was a kid, less so in my 40s looking to do some moderate coding and radio projects on the road away from my massively overbuilt gaming rig I already own. This lil guy checks all those boxes. I was just wondering what specific hate there was on newer models.

    • @pimeys@lemmy.nauk.io
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      08 months ago

      The refurbished thinkpads you find are usually three years old after the companies who lease them buy new ones for the users.

      You can do a lot of things with a three year old thinkpad…

      • Vuraniute
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        08 months ago

        here it’s typically early-to-mid 2010s thinkpads being sold, so you’re probably getting a laptop with horrible performance

        • @Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
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          08 months ago

          4th and 6th gen intel isn’t too bad yet (which would be early 2010s), especially for a Linux desktop/laptop. I wouldn’t go older than that just because 4th and 6th gen is so readily available for so cheap, but they certainly aren’t anywhere near e-waste yet. Mid-2010s would be more like 7th-9th gen Intel which is newer than all but one of the computers in my home.

          I literally use a laptop with a mobile i7-6700 as a daily web browsing computer (and I tend to keep over a hundred tabs open) and really don’t feel any slowness. I’ve got a desktop with an i5-4590 running 5 different Minecraft servers (a couple of which have over 300 mods running) plus most of my homelab services as well. They’re not for the graveyard yet!

          • Vuraniute
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            08 months ago

            well, the i5-5300u definitely is, at least for my use cases. it took so long to compile a diesel-actix rust project that the battery died before it finished (it was at 100%), and it can’t even run fucking Minecraft. even a raspberry pi can run Minecraft!

            • @Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
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              08 months ago

              it took so long to compile a diesel-actix rust project that the battery died before it finished

              Wait why are you compiling on battery?

              and it can’t even run fucking Minecraft.

              In what way? My wife plays minecraft with several hundred mods on a (desktop) i5-4560 and I have 5 Minecraft servers running on a desktop i5-4590, and I’ve played plenty of Minecraft on my laptop with a i7-6700u (vanilla, lightly modded, heavily modded, etc.) so I’m confused by what you mean by “can’t run Minecraft”

              • Vuraniute
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                8 months ago

                Wait why are you compiling on battery?

                power strip died and i hadn’t realised.

                In what way? My wife plays minecraft with several hundred mods on a (desktop) i5-4560

                different cpu. I’m talking about the i5-5300U specifically. Not some other i5 of the era. Also, this doesn’t really matter but you’re addressing 4th and 6th gen, while the i5-5300U is, obviously, 5th gen.

                • @Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
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                  08 months ago

                  Yes it is a different CPU, of almost the exact same age and architecture. I don’t have a 5300u otherwise I’d be able to compare directly. I’m pointing to similar processors (remember this was about the time that Intel stagnated. They didn’t improve much from Haswell (4th gen) until about Coffee Lake, and kept continuously refreshing Skylake (6th gen) for years. By memory 5th gen was just rebadged Haswell as well) I do have that I have relevant experience with.

                  On the Minecraft front I don’t think it’s the processor, I suspect you either have a configuration issue, or a thermal budget limitation. I had a Ryzen laptop that was really good, except it did not have the thermal capacity to maintain a workload, and would throttle itself all the way down to 600Mhz if I was doing something CPU and GPU intensive for a long time (such as running a bunch of VMs and trying to browse the web while using an external monitor)

    • @uis@lemm.ee
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      08 months ago

      You can install linux on it, you know? Everyone installs linux on thinkpads, you know?

  • @sloppy_diffuser@sh.itjust.works
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    08 months ago

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

    • @lud@lemm.ee
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      08 months ago

      What’s wrong with x86 all of a sudden?

      ARM is still pretty damn experimental compared to x86.

      • @toastal@lemmy.ml
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        8 months ago

        Bullshit mostly. x86 is fine & has been getting a lot more power efficient (if you can get a work day’s worth of power, you have met the benchmark). Wake me up when RISC-V is here.

    • @tempest@lemmy.ca
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      08 months ago

      If you know anything about Lenovo you would know that if ARM laptops started to have high market share they would have like 35 mediocre models on offer in a year.

      Some of the think pad lines are still good but their consumer offerings and a couple of the think pad lines are trash.

  • @somenonewho@feddit.org
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    08 months ago

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

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

    So I don’t know.

  • @linkhidalgogato@lemmy.ml
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    08 months ago

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

    • @Persen@lemmy.world
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      08 months ago

      Some gaming laptops are good, but others are just as crappy as normal laptops. Is there even an alternative for a small laptop?

      • @EvolvedTurtle@lemmy.world
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        08 months ago

        I have a decent gaming laptop It’s a pain in the ass for collage tho I didn’t buy it for collage but I also can’t really afford to buy something else

        It’s too big and the battery life sucks

        Basically the least portable laptop

        • @Persen@lemmy.world
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          07 months ago

          Laptops can be compared to cars, you can buy an economical car (with higher range an lower costs, but less power) or a sporscar/muscle car (terrible economy, loud, but higher performance)

    • @devfuuu@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Thinkpads were never cheap around here. Asus are cheap. The quality is many orders of different.

    • monsterpiece42
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      08 months ago

      This simply isn’t true. They are still cheap even for decent stuff. I got a T15 Gen 2 when it was 2.5yrs old for about $400 on eBay. You’re not going to get an even remotely decent laptop in most cases for that kind of money. And to be clear, I love old Thinkpads. I have them going back to the IBM days.

      Modern Thinkpads: -easy to work on -plenty fast for most things -still made of the carbon composite and magnesium chassis we like -hinges are beefy -upgradeable ram -available with GPU -lighter and easier to daily than any of the old chonks -replaceable keyboard, track pad and track point, and fingerprint -dual thunderbolt connection (and docks are stupid cheap… I find them for $30 sometimes)

      Downsides exist but they’re not the end of the world: -one drive slot (drives are huge now, who cares) -8gb of RAM is soldered but the rest is not (max 40gb) -internal battery but laptop is faster and has better battery life than my maxed out T580

    • @Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
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      08 months ago

      refurbished thinkpads are no longer what they were they are no longer a good deal nor particularly good quality

      Off-lease enterprise laptops are generally the best deals available for a good laptop for not too much cash. When you can get something 3-5 years old for 1/3 the price of a brand new laptop and know it still has quite a bit of life left, its hard to beat.

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

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

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

  • bruhduh
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    8 months ago

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

  • @Someonelol@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    08 months ago

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

  • JokeDeity
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    08 months ago

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